.]

[Footnote 6-51: For the extensive charges and
countercharges concerning the controversy between
Colonel LeGette and his predecessor in the 51st,
see files of Hist Div, HQMC.]

[Footnote 6-52: Memo, CO, 51st Defense Bn, FMF, for
CMC, 20 Jul 44, sub: Combat Efficiency, Fifty-First
Defense Battalion, Serial 1085.]

The marines experienced far fewer racial problems than either the Army
or Navy during the war, but the difficulties that occurred were
nonetheless important in the development of postwar racial policy. The
basic cause of race problems was the rigid concentration of (p. 172)
often undertrained and undereducated men, who were subjected to racial
slurs and insensitive treatment by some white officials and given
little chance to serve in preferred military specialties or to advance
in the labor or defense units or steward details to which they were
invariably consigned. But this basic cause was ignored by Marine Corps
planners when they discussed the postwar use of Negroes. They
preferred to draw other lessons from the corps' wartime experience.
The employment of black marines in small, self-contained units
performing traditional laboring tasks was justified precisely because
the average black draftee was less well-educated and experienced in
the use of the modern equipment. Furthermore, the correctness of this
procedure seemed to be demonstrated by the fact that the corps had
been relatively free of the flare-ups that plagued the other services.
Many officials would no doubt have preferred to eliminate race
problems by eliminating Negroes from the corps altogether. Failing
this, they were determined that regular black marines continue to
serve in those assignments performed by black marines during the war:
in service units, stewards billets, and a few antiaircraft artillery
units, the postwar successors to defense battalions.[6-53]

[Footnote 6-53: Shaw and Donnelly, _Blacks in the
Marine Corps_, pp 47-49; Interv, James Westfall
with Col Curtis W. LeGette (USMC, Ret.), 8 Feb 72,
copy in CMH.]

[Illustration: GENERAL THOMAS.]

The development of a postwar racial policy to carry out the Navy
Department's nondiscrimination order in the Marine Corps fell to the
Division of Plans and Policies and