quotas and diverse racial units better served those who
wanted to keep a segregated Army.

CHAPTER 8 (p. 206)

Segregation's Consequences

The Army staff had to overcome tremendous obstacles in order to carry
out even a modest number of the Gillem Board's recommendations. In
addition to prejudices the Army shared with much of American society
and the institutional inertia that often frustrates change in so large
an organization, the staff faced the problem of making efficient
soldiers out of a large group of men who were for the most part
seriously deficient in education, training, and motivation. To the
extent that it overcame these difficulties, the Army's postwar racial
policy must be judged successful and, considered in the context of the
times, progressive.

Nevertheless, the Gillem Board policy was doomed from the start.
Segregation was at the heart of the race problem. Justified as a means
of preventing racial trouble, segregation only intensified it by
concentrating the less able and poorly motivated. Segregation
increased the problems of all commanders concerned and undermined the
prestige of black officers. It exacerbated the feelings of the
nation's largest minority toward the Army and multiplied demands for
change. In the end Circular 124 was abandoned because the Army found
it impossible to fight another war under a policy of racial quotas and
units. But if the quota had not defeated the policy, other problems
attendant on segregation would probably have been sufficient to the
task.

_Discipline and Morale Among Black Troops_

By any measure of discipline and morale, black soldiers as a group
posed a serious problem to the Army in the postwar period. The
standard military indexes--serious incidents statistics, venereal
disease rates, and number of courts-martial--revealed black soldiers
in trouble out of all proportion to their percentage of the Army's
population. When these personal infractions and crimes were added to
the riots and serious racial incidents that continued to occur in the
Army all over the world after the war, the dimensions of the problem
became clear.

In 1945, when Negroes accounted for 8.5 percent of the Army's average
strength, black prisoners entering rehabilitation centers,
disciplinary barracks, and federal institutions were 17.3 percent of
the Army total. In 1946, when the average black strength had risen