knowledge, the black press asked: Will any black combat units be left? Will any of those left be allowed to fight? In fact, would black units ever get overseas?
Actually, the Army had a clear-cut plan for the overseas employment of both black service and combat units. In May 1942 the War Department directed the Army Air Forces, Ground Forces, and Service Forces to make sure that black troops were ordered overseas in numbers not less than their percentage in each of these commands. Theater commanders would be informed of orders moving black troops to their commands, but they would not be asked to agree to their shipment beforehand. Since troop shipments to the British Isles were the chief concern at that time, the order added that "there will be no positive restrictions on the use of colored troops in the British Isles, but shipment of colored units to the British Isles will be limited, initially, to those in the service categories."51
The problem here was not the Army's policy but the fact that certain foreign governments and even some commanders in American territories wanted to exclude Negroes. Some countries objected to black soldiers because they feared race riots and miscegenation. Others with large black populations of their own felt that black soldiers with their higher rates of pay might create unrest. Still other countries had national exclusion laws. In the case of Alaska and Trinidad, Secretary Stimson ordered, "Don't yield." Speaking of Iceland, Greenland, and Labrador, he commented, "Pretty cold for blacks." To the request of Panamanian officials that a black signal construction unit be withdrawn from their country he replied, "Tell them [the black unit] they must complete their work—it is ridiculous to raise such objections when the Panama Canal itself was built with black labor." As for Chile and Venezuela's exclusion of Negroes he ruled that "As we are the petitioners here we probably must comply."52 Stimson's rulings led to a new War Department policy: henceforth black soldiers would be assigned without regard to color except that they would not be sent to extreme northern areas or to any country against its will when the United States had requested the right to station troops in that country.53
Ultimately, theater commanders decided which troops would be committed to action and which units would be needed overseas; their decisions were usually respected by the War Department where few believed that Washington should dictate such matters. Unwilling to add racial problems to their administrative burdens, some commanders had been known to cancel their request for troops rather than accept black units. Consequently, very few Negroes were sent overseas in the early years of the war.
Black soldiers were often the victims of gross discrimination that transcended their difficulties with the Army's administration. For instance, black soldiers, particularly those from more integrated regions of the country, resented local ordinances governing transportation and recreation facilities that put them at a great disadvantage in the important matters of leave and amusement. Infractions of local rules were inevitable and led to heightened racial tension and recurring violence.54 At times black soldiers themselves, reflecting the low morale and lack of discipline in their units, instigated the violence. Whoever the culprits, the Army's files are replete with cases of discrimination charged, investigations launched, and exonerations issued or reforms ordered.55 An incredible amount of time and effort went into handling these cases during the darkest days of the war—cases growing out of a policy created in the name of military efficiency.
Nor was the violence limited to the United States. Racial friction also developed in Great Britain where some American troops, resenting their black countrymen's social acceptance by the British, tried to export Jim Crow by forcing the segregation of recreational facilities. Appreciating the treatment they were receiving from the British, the black soldiers fought back, and the clashes grew at times to riot proportions. General Davis considered discrimination and prejudice the cause of trouble, but he placed the immediate blame on local commanders. Many commanders, convinced that they had little jurisdiction over racial disputes in the civilian community or simply refusing to accept responsibility, delegated the task of keeping order to their noncommissioned officers and military police.56 These men, rarely experienced in handling racial disturbances and often prejudiced against black soldiers, usually managed to exacerbate the situation.
In an atmosphere charged with rumors and counterrumors, personal incidents involving two men might quickly blow up into riots involving hundreds. In the summer of 1943 the Army began to reap what Ulysses Lee called the "harvest of disorder." Race riots occurred at military reservations in Mississippi, Georgia, California, Texas, and Kentucky. At other stations, the Advisory Committee on Negro Troop Policies somberly warned, there were indications of unrest ready to erupt into violence.57 By the middle of the war, violence over racial issues at home and abroad had become a source of constant concern for the War Department.
Internal Reform: Amending Racial Practices
Concern over troop morale and discipline and the attendant problem of racial violence did not lead to a substantial revision of the Army's racial policy. On the contrary, the Army staff continued to insist that segregation was a national issue and that the Army's task was to defend the country, not alter its social customs. Until the nation changed its racial practices or until Congress ordered such changes for the armed forces, racially separated units would remain.58 In 1941 the Army had insisted that debate on the subject was closed,59 and, in fact, except for discussion of the Chamberlain Plan there was no serious thought of revising racial policy in the Army staff until after the war.
Had the debate been reopened in 1943, the traditionalists on the Army staff would have found new support for their views in a series of surveys made of white and black soldiers in 1942 and 1943. These surveys supported the theory that the Army, a national institution composed of individual citizens with pronounced views on race, would meet massive disobedience and internal disorder as well as national resistance to any substantial change in policy. One extensive survey, covering 13,000 soldiers in ninety-two units, revealed that 88 percent of the whites and 38 percent of the Negroes preferred segregated units. Among the whites, 85 percent preferred separate service clubs and 81 percent preferred separate post exchanges. Almost half of the Negroes thought separate service clubs and post exchanges were a good idea.60 These attitudes merely reflected widely held national views as suggested in a 1943 survey of five key cities by the Office of War Information.61 The survey showed that 90 percent of the whites and 25 percent of the blacks questioned supported segregation.
Some Army officials considered justification by statistics alone a risky business. Reviewing the support for segregation revealed in the surveys, for example, the Special Services Division commented: "Many of the Negroes and some of the whites who favor separation in the Army indicate by their comments that they are opposed to segregation in principle. They favor separation in the Army to avoid trouble or unpleasantness." Its report added that the longer a Negro remained in the Army, the less likely he was to support segregation.62 Nor did it follow from the overwhelming support for segregation that a policy of integration would result in massive resistance. As critics later pointed out, the same surveys revealed that almost half the respondents expressed a strong preference for civilian life, but the Army did not infer that serious disorders would result if these men were forced to remain in uniform.63
By 1943 Negroes within and without the War Department had just about exhausted arguments for a policy change. After two years of trying, Judge Hastie came to believe that change was possible only in response to "strong and manifest public opinion." He concluded that he would be far more useful as a private citizen who could express his views freely and publicly than he was as a War Department employee, bound to conform to official policy. Quitting the department, Hastie joined the increasingly vocal black organizations in a sustained attack on the Army's segregation policy, an attack that was also being translated into political action by the major civil rights organizations. In 1943, a full year before the national elections, representatives of twenty-five civil rights groups met and formulated the demands they would make of the presidential candidates: full integration (some groups tempered this demand by calling for integrated units of volunteers); abolition of racial quotas; abolition of segregation in recreational and other Army facilities; abolition of blood plasma segregation;
