Marine Engineers in Vietnam.
Men of the 11th Engineer Battalion move culverts into place in a mountain stream during "Operation Pegasus."
Later, military efficiency would be the rationale for the Defense Department's fight against discrimination in the local community. The Gesell Committee was used by Adam Yarmolinsky and others to demonstrate to Secretary McNamara if not to the satisfaction of skeptical military traditionalists and congressional critics that the need to solve a severe morale problem justified the department's intrusion. Appeals to military efficiency, therefore, became the ultimate justification for integrating the units of the armed forces and providing for equal treatment of its members in the community.
Beyond the demands of the law and military efficiency, the integration of the armed forces was also influenced by certain individuals within the military establishment who personified America's awakening social conscience. They led the services along the road toward integration not because the law demanded it, nor because activists clamored for it, nor even because military efficiency required it, but because they believed it was right. Complementing the work of these men and women was the opinion of the American serviceman himself. Between 1940 and 1965 his attitude toward change was constantly discussed and predicted but only rarely solicited by senior officials. Actually his opinion at that time is still largely unknown; documentary evidence is scarce, and his recollections, influenced as they are by the intervening years of the civil rights movement, are unreliable. Yet it was clearly the serviceman's generally quiet acceptance of new social practices, particularly those of the early 1950's, that ratified the services' racial reforms. As a perceptive critic of the nation's racial history described conditions in the services in 1962:
There was a rising tide of tolerance around the nation at that time. I was thrilled to see it working in the services. Whether officers were working for it or not it existed. From time to time you would find an officer imbued with the desire to improve race relations.... It was a marvel to me, in contrast to my recent investigations in the South, to see how well integration worked in the services.[24-4]
Indeed, it could be argued, American servicemen of the 1950's became a positive if indirect cause of racial change. By demonstrating that large numbers of blacks and whites could work and live together, they destroyed a fundamental argument of the opponents of integration and made further reforms possible if not imperative.
How the Services Integrated, 1946-1954
The interaction of all these factors can be seen when equal treatment and opportunity in the armed forces is considered in two distinct phases, the first culminating in the integration of all active military units in 1954, the second centering around the decision in 1963 to push for equal opportunity for black servicemen outside the gates of the military base.[24-5]
The Navy was the acknowledged pioneer in integration. Its decision during World War II to assign black and white sailors to certain ships was not entirely a response to pressures from civil rights advocates, although Secretary James Forrestal relied on his friends in the Urban League, particularly Lester Granger, to teach him the techniques of integrating a large organization. Nor was the decision solely the work of racial reformers in the Bureau of Naval Personnel, although this small group was undoubtedly responsible for drafting the regulations that governed the changes in the wartime Navy. Rather, the Navy began integrating its general service because segregation proved painfully inefficient. The decision was largely the result of the impersonal operation of the 1940 draft law. Although imperfectly applied during the war, the anti-discrimination provision of that law produced a massive infusion of black inductees. The Army, with its larger manpower base and expandable black units, could evade the implications of a nondiscrimination clause, but the sheer presence of large numbers of Negroes in the service, more than any other force, breached the walls of segregation in the Navy.