continuing objections to what
many saw as the Gillem Board's far too progressive proposals, the Air
Force adopted the Army's postwar racial policy as its own. Yet after
less than two years as an independent service the Air Force in late
1948 stood on the threshold of integration.

This sudden change in attitude was not so much the result of
humanitarian promptings by service officials, although some of them
forcibly demanded equal treatment and opportunity. Nor was it a
response to civil rights activists, although Negroes in and outside
the Air Force continued to exert pressure for change. Rather,
integration was forced upon the service when the inefficiency of its
racial practices could no longer be ignored. The inefficiency of
segregated troops was less noticeable in the Army, where a vast number
of Negroes could serve in a variety of expandable black units, and in
the smaller Navy, where only a few Negroes had specialist ratings and
most black sailors were in the separate Steward's Branch. But the
inefficiency of separatism was plainly evident in the Air Force.

Like the Army, the Air Force had its share of service units to absorb
the marginal black airman, but postwar budget restrictions had made
the enlargement of service units difficult to justify. At the same
time, the Gillem Board policy as well as outside pressures had made it
necessary to include a black air unit in the service's limited number
of postwar air wings. However socially desirable two air forces might
seem to most officials, and however easy it had been to defend them as
a wartime necessity, it quickly became apparent that segregation was,
organizationally at least, a waste of the Air Force's few black pilots
and specialists and its relatively large supply of unskilled black
recruits. Thus, the inclination to integrate was mostly pragmatic;
notably absent were the idealistic overtones sounded by the Navy's
Special Programs Unit during the war. Considering the magnitude of the
Air Force problem, it was probably just as well that efficiency rather
than idealism became the keynote of change. On a percentage basis the
Air Force had almost as many Negroes as the Army and, no doubt, a
comparable level of prejudice among its commanders and men. At the
same time, the Air Force was a new service, its organization still
fluid and its policies subject to rapid modification. In such
circumstances a straightforward appeal to efficiency had a chance to
succeed