UNITED STATES ARMY IN WORLD WAR II
Special Studies
THE EMPLOYMENT OF NEGRO TROOPS
by Ulysses Lee
CENTER OF MILITARY HISTORY UNITED STATES ARMY WASHINGTON, D. C., 2000 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66-60003 First Printed 1966-CMH Pub 11-4
For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office Washington, D.C. 20402
UNITED STATES ARMY IN WORLD WAR II
Stetson Conn, General Editor
Advisory Committee (As of 15 June 1965)
Fred C. Cole |
Lt. Gen. August Schomburg Industrial College of the Armed Forces |
James A. Field, Jr. Swarthmore College |
Maj. Gen. David W. Gray U.S. Continental Army Command |
Ernest R. May Harvard University |
Brig. Gen. Jaroslav T. Folda U.S. Army War College |
Earl Pomeroy University of Oregon |
Brig. Gen. Elias C. Townsend U.S. Army Command and General Staff College |
Charles P. Roland Tulane University |
Lt. Col. Thomas E. Griess United States Military Academy |
Theodore Ropp |
Office of the Chief of Military History
Brig. Gen. Hal C. Pattison, Chief of Military History
Chief Historian | Stetson Conn |
Chief, Histories Division | Col. Paul P. Hinkley |
Chief, Editorial and Graphics Division | Col. Joseph S. Coulter |
Editor-in-Chief | Joseph R. Friedman |
Foreword
The principal problem in the employment of Negro Americans as soldiers in World War II was that the civilian backgrounds of Negroes made them generally less well prepared than white Americans to become soldiers or leaders of men. This problem was greatly complicated by contemporary attitudes and practices in American society that tended further to inhibit the most efficient use of Negroes in military service. Despite these handicaps Negro soldiers played a larger role in the most recent great war than in any previous American conflict. While the bulk of the more than half a million of them who were overseas by early 1945 were serving in supply and construction units, many were directly engaged with the enemy on the ground and in the air. If proportionately fewer Negroes became combat troops than the Army had contemplated in its prewar mobilization plans, this was true for white soldiers as well. Global war generated a need for service troops far greater than anyone visualized before Pearl Harbor, as well as a need to use all able-bodied Americans regardless of color or other distinction in military or civilian support of the war effort.
The integration of whites and Negroes in the armed forces of the United States in the early 1950's and the continued rapid advance of Negroes in the American economic and social order have substantially altered the circumstances governing their use as soldiers a quarter century ago. Nevertheless another full mobilization of American manpower for national defense would again bring to the fore many of the problems described in this volume. Dr. Lee's work embodies a record of service of which Americans generally can be proud, and for which the country is grateful.
Washington, D. C.
18 June 1965
HAL C. PATTISON
Brigadier General, U. S. A.
Chief of Military History
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The Author
Ulysses Lee, now Professor of English at Morgan State College, Baltimore, was a member of the Office of the Chief of Military History from 1946 to 1952, concluding a decade of active Army officer service in ranks from first lieutenant to major. In World War II he served as an Education Officer and Editorial Analyst in the field and in the headquarters of Army Service Forces; for seven years thereafter he was the military history specialist on Negroes in the Army and prepared this volume.
A graduate of Howard University, Dr. Lee taught at Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, and attended the University of Chicago as a Rosenwald Fellow between 1936 and his entry into military service in 1942. He received his doctorate in the history of culture from the University of Chicago in 1953, and from then until going to Morgan in 1956 he taught at Lincoln University, Missouri. Co-editor of The Negro Caravan, an anthology of writings by American Negroes published in 1941, he was author-editor of the Army Service Forces manual, Leadership and the Negro Soldier, published in 1944, and has been the author of many reviews and articles published before and since. Dr. Lee has also been associate editor of The Midwest Journal of the College Language Association and a member of the editorial board of The Journal of Negro History.
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Preface
Recognizing that the story of Negro participation in military service during World War II was of national interest as well as of great value for future military planning, the Assistant Secretary of War in February 1944 recommended preparation of a book on this subject. The opportunity to undertake it came two years later with the assignment to the Army's Historical Division of the author, then a captain and a man highly qualified by training and experience to write such a work. After careful examination of the sources and reflection Captain Lee concluded that it would be impracticable to write a comprehensive and balanced history about Negro soldiers in a single volume. His plan, formally approved in August 1946, was to focus his own work on the development of Army policies in the use of Negroes in military service and on the problems associated with the execution of these policies at home and abroad, leaving to the authors of other volumes in the Army's World War II series, then taking shape, the responsibility for covering activities of Negroes in particular topical areas.
This definition of the author's objective is needed in order to understand why he has described his work "in no sense a history of Negro troops in World War II." Writing some years ago, he explained: "The purpose of the present volume is to bring together the significant experience of the Army in dealing with an important national question: the full use of the human resources represented by that 10 percent of national population that is Negro. It does not attempt to follow, in narrative form, the participation of Negro troops in the many branches, commands, and units of the Army . . . . A fully descriptive title for the present volume, in the nineteenth century manner, would read: `The U.S. Army and Its Use of Negro Troops in World War II: Problems in the Development and Application of Policy with Some Attention to the Results, Public and Military.' " Thus, in accordance with his objective, the author gives considerably more attention to the employment of Negroes as combat soldiers than to their use as service troops overseas. Even though a large majority of the Negroes sent overseas saw duty in service rather than in combat units, their employment in service forces did not present the same number or degree of problems.
The volume opens with background chapters recalling the experience of Negroes in the Army in World War I, the position of Negroes in the Army between wars, and Army planning for their use in another great war, as well
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as the clash of public and private views over employment of Negroes as soldiers. It continues with chapters on the particular problems associated with absorbing large numbers of Negroes into the Army-the provision of separate facilities for them, their leadership and training difficulties, their physical fitness for service, morale factors influencing their eagerness to serve, and the disorders that attracted so much attention to the problems of their, service. The concluding eight chapters are concerned principally with the employment of Negro soldiers overseas, in ground and air combat units and in service units.
The author wrote most of this volume between 1947 and 1951, and the University of Chicago accepted its opening chapters as a doctoral dissertation. After Dr. Lee left the Army to return to teaching, he revised his work in the light of comments and criticisms received from the many reviewers of his original draft. As revised by Dr. Lee, the work was still too long for publication as a single volume; and in my capacity of General Editor I have reduced the revised manuscript considerably in length and reorganized and consolidated certain of the original chapters. The changes made by me were along lines agreed to in conferences with Dr. Lee and in consonance with his expressed wishes, or at least with my interpretation of them.
Certain other volumes of this series, as planned in 1946, gave particular I attention to the Army's use of Negroes, notably The Procurement and Training of Ground Combat Troops, by Robert R. Palmer, Bell I. Wiley, and William R. Keast; The Women's Army Cords, by Mattie E. Treadwell; and The Army and Industrial Manpower, by Byron Fairchild and Jonathan Grossman. Bell I. Whey's Army Ground Forces Study No. 36, "The Training of Negro Troops," offers an interesting comparative treatment of that topic. Dennis D. Nelson's study, "The Integration of the Negro into the United States Navy, 1776-1947," deals mostly with the Navy's policies and practices during World War II, and the monograph by Jean Byers, "A Study of the Negro in Military Service," describes policies and practices in both services during the war. The volume by Charles E. Francis, Tuskegee Airmen: The Story of the Negro in the U.S. Air Force (Boston, 1956), and the one by Lee Nichols, Breakthrough on the Color Front (New York, 1954) , offer useful insight into the military service of Negroes during and after the war. The reader is also referred, for more detailed maps of the p, many theaters of war in which Negroes served, to the theater volumes of the Army's World War II series.
In its planning, this work owes much to the Army's first Chief Historian, Dr. Walter L. Wright, Jr. The original draft, less the two concluding chapters, was carefully reviewed and criticized by a panel under the chairmanship of his successor, Dr. Kent Roberts Greenfield, which met on 4 January 1952. Panel critics in addition to Dr. Greenfield were Dr. John Hope Franklin, then Professor of History at Howard University; General
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Wade H. Haislip (USA Ret.), then Chief of the General Staff's Personnel Division; Lt. Gen. Arthur G. Trudeau (USA Ret.), then Commandant of the Army War College; Dr. William T. Hutchinson, Professor of History at the University of Chicago; Col. (now Brig. Gen.) George C. O'Connor, then Chief, Histories Division, OCMH; and Dr. Donald R. Young of the Russell Sage Foundation. Paralleling this panel review all or parts of the author's work went to a large number of knowledgeable critics, many of them the leaders of Negro troops during the war, and the work as revised for publication has also been reviewed by several individuals qualified to do so. To all of these, named and unnamed, who have read and criticized this work, the author and the Office of the Chief of Military History owe a debt of gratitude.
Acknowledgment is due also to those who have contributed materially in preparing this work for publication: Mrs. Loretto C. Stevens, assistant editor; Miss Barbara J. Harris, editorial clerk; Mrs. Norma B. Sherris, photographic editor; and Billy C. Mossman, map compiler. Mrs. Dorothy Neill McCabe prepared the index.
Prefaces usually conclude not only with acknowledgments of assistance but also with a statement of the author's sole responsibility for any errors of fact or flaws of interpretation. Since Dr. Lee has not been able to participate fully in the final revision and editing of his work, it would be improper to hold him responsible for the contents of the work as printed. I accept this responsibility.
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Washington, D. C.
18 June 1965
Tables
Maps
1. The Area of Operations, 1 September 1944-24 April 1945 | 536 |
2. The Massa Area | 546 |
3. The Serchio Valley | 563 |
Illustrations
All illustrations are from Department of Defense files.
page created 15 January 2002