Air University Review, January-February 1981

Beyond Integration

Written in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Alan M. Osur’s Blacks in the Army Air Forces during World War II* and Alan L. Gropman’s The First Air Force Integrates, 1945- 1964,** appear anachronistic. Implicit in both books is the assumption that black participation in the military and, more important, integration of blacks into the armed forces possesses an inherent value. When the Air Force proceeded toward the accomplishment of these objectives, Osur and Gropman insist, it achieved a measure of progress and success. For example, although Osur considers it only a partial success, he nevertheless concludes that ‘‘during World War II the Army Air Forces (AAF) made some headway toward improved race relations." (p. 133) Gropman, somewhat more cautious in his judgments, reaches a similar conclusion in his companion volume. While high-ranking Air Force officials such as General Hoyt S. Vandenberg may have opposed integration in 1945, Gropman writes, once "ordered to integrate, a plan already had been prepared and the Air Force integrated with grace, speed, honesty, and success." (p. 85) In fact, Gropman adds, "Air Force integration was one of the great success stories of the civil rights movement." (p. 90)

*Alan M. Osur, Blacks in the Army Air Forces during World War II: The Problem of Race Relations (Washington: Government Printing, Office, 1977, $2.40), 227 pages.

**Alan L. Gropman, The Air Force Integrates, 1945-1964 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1978, $4.75), 384 pages.

Notwithstanding this praise, the war in Vietnam revealed that the indignities blacks had experienced previously in the Air Force persisted years after integration. Gropman himself notes that the Air Force leadership’s unawareness of the problems that blacks still confronted throughout the 1960s precipitated a violent outburst at Travis Air Force Base, California, in 1971. A Department of Defense study published in 1971, which is discussed by Lawrence M. Baskir and William A. Strauss in Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, the War, and the Vietnam General,* reported that widespread frustration existed among black airmen serving in Southeast Asia, a frustration compounded by the difficulty or impossibility these blacks experienced trying to voice their problems. (p. 138) An Urban League study, which Baskir and Strauss also reported, disclosed that dishonorable discharges for black airmen numbered three and one-half times more than those which all other airmen received. (p. 139) As a result of their analysis of the relationship between the American class structure and the selective service system, Baskir and Strauss themselves discovered that Air Force deserters "tended to be black, better educated, and discouraged about the menial tasks to which they had been assigned." (p. 120)

*Lawrence M. Baskir and William A. Strauss, Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, the War, and the Vietnam Generation (New York: Random House, Inc., 1978, $10.00), 312 pages.

Many of these black airmen, Baskir and Strauss added, deserted because of their opposition to the war, a war which they undoubtedly perceived as racist in nature. Other observers have reached similar conclusions about the character of the war. Historian Stephen E. Ambrose, in his Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy, 1938-1976,* emphasized that the element of racism played a large role in the American involvement in the Vietnam War. (p. 335)

*Stephen E. Ambrose, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy, 1938-1976 (New York: Penguin Books, 1976, $4.95 paperback), 390 pages.

In an article that appeared in 1968, former White House staff member James C. Thomson, Jr., acknowledged that what he called "cryptoracism" dominated much of American foreign policy in Vietnam.¹ Professor Leslie Fiedler minced few words. Writing in the Saturday Review, he noted that when added to the estimated 1,000,000 North and South Vietnamese killed during the war, the nearly 6000 American blacks killed brought the number of non-Caucasian deaths beyond a million. ". . . the final result," Fiedler wrote, "is approximately: U.S. [Caucasian], 50,000; Them, 1,000,- 000…"² The implications are obvious.

Additional findings of Baskir and Strauss as well as Department of Defense figures lend further credibility to this conclusion. During the course of their research, for example, Baskir and Strauss discovered that "men from disadvantaged backgrounds were about twice as likely as their better-off peers to serve in the military, go to Vietnam, and see combat.’’ (p. 9) Proportionately, more disadvantaged blacks than whites found themselves in such circumstances, and, proportionately, a larger percentage of them died as a result of hostile fire.

According to Department of Defense statistics, the percentage of black draftees serving in Southeast Asia during the war ranged from a low 10.5 percent in 1967 to a high 12.6 percent in 1969 and 1970. The percentage of blacks killed by hostile fire through the period ending June 1971 exceeded these percentages: 14.5 percent in the Army and 13.1 percent in the Marine Corps. Combined, black casualties among these two branches equaled 14 percent, a figure significantly in excess of the percentage of blacks in both these services. Stated differently, proportionately more blacks than whites served in the war zone and received assignments in combat units.³

That these casualty figures reflect deaths primarily in the Army and Marine Corps diminishes little, if at all, their implications for the Air Force, for just the opposite occurred in this branch. During the course of the Vietnam War, a relatively small number of black airmen were killed: nineteen enlisted or 6.9 percent of the Air Force casualties and three officers or 0.5 percent of all officers killed.⁴ Figures such as these raise serious questions about the depth of the Air Force’s integration. Indeed, they reveal an Air Force that seems only nominally integrated, and Gropman’s own statistics testify to this. In 1970, 11.7 percent of the Air Force’s enlisted men were black, but in the first five grades (E-1 to E-5) blacks constituted 12.8 percent of the total while in the upper four grades (E-6 to E-9) they held only 8 percent of the slots. (p. 226)⁵ Perhaps more significantly, after twenty years of integration, only 1.7 percent of the officer corps in the Air Force was black. Officers in the Air Force, of course, constitute the bulk of the front-line combat personnel; and, ironically, in order for the Air Force to demonstrate the thoroughness of its integration, it needs to increase the percentage of black officers killed in combat situations.

Generally, however, Osur and Gropman concern themselves with other matters. Osur, for example, applauded when blacks received what he euphemistically described as "the glory of shooting down . . . enemy aircraft. . ." (p. 46) Gropman, on the other hand, measured success in terms of integration. Defined this way, the Air Force did succeed once it moved to integrate, for within three years it eliminated its segregated black units and integrated blacks throughout formerly all-white units. (pp. 120-45)

In reality, the evidence which Osur and Gropman present suggests that success by any definition proved elusive for the Air Force. As Osur himself reveals, conditions for blacks remained virtually the same at the end of World War II as they did at the beginning. Indeed, Osur’s entire book demonstrates incident after incident where AAF leadership circumvented War Department orders to utilize blacks in all phases of Air Force activity, limited black participation primarily to service units, and generally proved reluctant to fulfill the spirit of military orders regarding equal opportunity for blacks. Just prior to the outbreak of World War II, for example, Congress passed Public Law 18 expanding flight training facilities and requiring that the AAF establish at least one school for the training of blacks. The AAF concluded that while a school must be designated for this purpose, the law did not actually require the service to train anyone. (pp. 21 -22) Five years later, AAF attitudes toward blacks remained similar. According to Osur, Major General Frank O.D. Hunter, First Air Force Commander, in formed blacks in March 1944 of the 477th Medium Bombardment Group that he refused to ‘‘tolerate any mixing of the races and anyone who protests will be classed as an agitator, sought out and dealt with accordingly. (p. 59)

When Osur does report the so-called successful resolution of racial difficulties, the solution appears odd. For instance, in his chapter entitled, "An Era of Change: 1943," Osur praises General Ira C. Eaker’s pointed efforts to diffuse race-related problems plaguing the Eighth Air Force in Great Britain. Over 3000 blacks in small segregated units were stationed with the Eighth and apparently scattered throughout the various units. Eaker restructured the black units, incorporating them into a single segregated unit, the Combat Support Wing. Decentralized segregation experienced a metamorphosis, reemerging as centralized segregation; and the occasion for confrontations between blacks and whites lessened. (p. 100)

While contradictions such as these characterize Osur’s work, an element of ambivalence surfaces in Gropman’s. On the one hand he was pleased with what he perceives to be the Air Force’s positive efforts to integrate. On the other, he criticizes the Air Force for its failure to move willingly beyond the minimum requirements of’integration. For instance, he notes disapprovingly that at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, Air Force officials discouraged socializing between the races, bowing to the virulent racism of white Alabama. (p. 156) When a Mississippi court found a black Air Force lieutenant guilty of some questionable charges, Gropman laments; the Secretary of the Air Force succumbed to political pressure from a Mississippi senator and forced the lieutenant to resign. (p. 160) As recently as 1962 and 1963, Gropman writes, Air Force leadership sanctioned the continuation of segregated recreational activities, especially on southern bases. (p. 157) That the violent racial protest which erupted at Travis Air Force Base in 1971 resulted in part from the base commander’s unwillingness to challenge off-base discrimination in housing testifies further both to the persistence of racial discord within the Air Force and to the substance of Gropman’s complaints. (p. 215)

Despite the contradictions and ambivalence, numerous insights do emerge from both books. Blatant racism, as Osur demonstrates time and again, dominated Air Force policy toward blacks during World War II; and such racism existed at both ends of the military hierarchy. For example, when Colonel Robert R. Selway, Jr., commander of the 477th, encountered efforts to achieve some form of integration, he declared defiantly that "there will be no assimilation except over my dead body." (p. 11 7) Osur discovered also that a high-ranking AAF committee meeting in May 1945 argued strongly that officers’ clubs should remain segregated in what it deemed the best interests of the service. (p. 120)

Gropman, too, presents considerable evidence attesting not only to the reluctance of the Air Force to confront the difficulties of black airmen but also the Air Force failure to achieve racial harmony. By 1952, the Air Force had integrated all blacks into regular units, but for the next twelve years the Air Force followed a policy that Gropman termed curiously ‘‘benign neglect.’’ In the enlisted ranks, according to Gropman, although the number of blacks by the 1960s increased to 9.2 percent, "only .8 percent of the highest enlisted grade, Chief Master Sergeant (E-9), was black." (p. 168) When a Presidential committee under the leadership of Gerhard A. Gesell published an initial report in June 1963 arguing that the services’ responsibility to blacks extended beyond the perimeters of the base to which they were assigned, Air Force officials balked at the prospects of implementing the Gesell committee recommendations seeking to reduce off-base discrimination against blacks. (pp. 188-94)

The difficulties that blacks experienced in the Air Force are, of course, symptomatic of the larger problems they confront throughout American society. The Air Force, as Osur and Gropman stress frequently and correctly, mirrors American society; and the prejudices, bigotry, and racism that blacks encounter in the service also exist in civilian life. Were these prejudices manifested only in more dishonorable discharges, de facto segregation of military clubs, and off-base housing discrimination, black servicemen would have experienced enough injustice. Unfortunately, as already noted, during the Vietnam War these prejudices cost many blacks their lives.

This situation for blacks in the armed forces seems destined to remain static, for American society shows little inclination to change. In his recent work, The Declining Significance of Race, William J. Wilson reminds his readers that for the majority of American blacks, economic deprivation has resulted in the emergence of a black underclass, a group of people who exist on the periphery of American society, denied at every crossroad access to middle-class America. This continued combination of class bias and racial prejudice retards significantly the ability of most black Americans to escape the ghettoes in which they were born. They are a large percentage of America’s poorly educated and less advantaged.⁶

The Air Force, of course, as the more technically oriented service, seeks recruits from the other side of the spectrum, those who are better educated and more advantaged. Due to the basic infantry missions of both the Army and the Marine Corps, educational levels obviously play a smaller role in recruiting. Not surprisingly, more highly educated, better advantaged persons qualify for Air Force openings; and the less advantaged, poorly educated, of whom a large percentage are black, enter readily into the Army and Marine Corps. It is they who in a wartime situation will again find themselves in front-line units.

When Gropmnan concludes, therefore, that as long as the Air Force diligently pursues racial justice within its ranks it "can expect to continue to enjoy the relative racial peace it has experienced," (p. 220) he not only ignores much of the record he has presented but also underestimates the extent to which blacks continue to be victimized in American society. Successful integration of all the services will occur only when blacks and whites risk shedding proportionately an equal amount of blood. That in 1978 blacks constituted over 29 percent of the enlisted ranks in the Army, 19 percent in the Marine Corps, and only 3.6 percent of the officers in the Air Force suggests that the Air Force as well as America’s other armed forces must intensify their efforts to achieve racial justice.

Notes

1. James C. Thomson, Jr., "How Could Vietnam Happen? An Autopsy" Atlantic Monthly, April 1968, pp. 47-53.

2. Leslie Fiedler, "The Cost in Human Lives: Who Really Died in Vietnam?’ Saturday Review, December 1972, p. 42.

3. Department of Defense, The Negro in the Armed Forces: A Statistical Fact Book (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1973), pp. 4-6, 230-31.

4. Ibid., p. 231.

5. Percentages were extrapolated from Gropman’s figures. William J. Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing Institutions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978).

Contributor

Philip J. Avillo, Jr. (B.A., Hofstra University; M.A., University of San Diego; Ph.D., University of Arizona), is Assistant Professor, Department of History and International Studies, York College of Pennsylvania. Dr. Avillo has published articles in Civil War History and Southwestern Historical Quarterly. He is currently preparing a book-length study entitled "Human Rights, Property, and Race: Southern Republicans in Congress, 1861-1877."

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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