d
upbringing, shortsightedness, preoccupation with other matters, and
simple reluctance to change. The old ways were comfortable, and the
new untried, frightening in their implications and demanding special
effort. Nowhere was there enthusiasm for the positive measures needed
to implement the Gillem Board's recommendations leading to
integration. This unwillingness to act positively was particularly
noticeable in the Organization and Training Division, in the Army
Ground Forces, and even to some extent in the Personnel and
Administration Division itself.

The situation might have improved had the Gillem Board been able or
willing to spell out intermediate goals. For the ultimate objective of
using black soldiers like white soldiers as individuals was
inconceivable and meaningless or radical and frightening to many in
the Army. Interim goals might have provided impetus for gradual change
and precluded the virtual inertia that gripped the Army staff. But at
best Circular 124 served as a stopgap measure, allowing the Army to
postpone for a few more years any substantial change in race policy.
This postponement cost the service untold time and effort devising and
defending a system increasingly under attack from the black community
and, significantly, from that community's growing allies in the
administration.

CHAPTER 9 (p. 234)

The Postwar Navy

That Army concerns and problems dominated the discussions of race
relations in the armed forces in the postwar years is understandable
since the Army had the largest number of Negroes and the most widely
publicized segregation policy of all the services. At the same time
the Army bore, unfairly, the brunt of public criticism for all the
services' race problems. The Navy, committed to a policy of
integration, but with relatively few Negroes in its integrated general
service or in the ranks of the segregated Marine Corps and the new Air
Force, its racial policy still fluid, merely attracted less attention
and so escaped many of the charges hurled at the Army by civil rights
advocates both in and out of the federal government. But however
different or unformed their racial policies, all the services for the
most part segregated Negroes in practice and all were open to charges
of discrimination.

Although the services developed different racial policies out of their
separate circumstances, all three were reacting