RACES: The Unbunching

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Mom, this is something I want you or Dad to do quick. They are mixing the niggers in the same barracks with us. If everyone's parents write their Congressmen to ask for something to be done about it, it will. Mom, please don't let me down. Quick!

Such anguished pleas were suddenly commonplace in June 1949, a month after the U.S. Air Force set out to abolish its all-Negro units. The integration of whites and Negroes, everyone agreed, would take many years, perhaps decades. Yet within a few months, the Air Force had broken through its color barrier. And by 1954, in the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines, white and colored men worked together, marched together and learned to fight side by side. Not all of them liked it; but everyone accepted it.

Across the desk of Lee Nichols, a night rewrite man for the United Press in Washington, passed the terse Pentagon announcements and the brief press dispatches that were the communiques in the war against armed-forces segregation —the Unknown War, as Nichols came to know it. Nichols became fascinated in the subject, and his interest led to previously secret files, to military bases, to scores of interviews. His book, Breakthrough on the Color Front (Random House; $3.50), published this week, is the most complete report to date on a war already in the mop-up stage.

The Bug-Out Song. Throughout U.S. history, Negroes have fought—and died —in the nation's wars (and Crispus Attucks, a runaway slave, was the first to fall in the Boston Massacre of 1770, prelude to the American Revolution). Yet always the verdict was the same: in combat, Negro units were "unreliable"—a euphemism for an uglier word. Even in the Korean war—nearly three years after President Truman's 1948 order for armed-forces equality—the classic story was of Negroes who fled from battle, then huddled around a campfire singing The Bug Out Boogie, the "official song of the [Negro] 24th Infantry Regiment":

When them Chinese mortars begins to

thud, The old Deuce-Four begins to bug . . .

But even as that tale went its round, segregation was ending—and with it the old belief in "bug out" as an inborn Negro weakness. The Navy, under the firm hand of James Forrestal, had started integration first of all, but soon began to run aground on service traditions. The Air Force started its successful program less than a year after the Truman order, and the Marine Corps moved ahead. The Army, as Author Nichols says, was "the mule of the military team." Korea changed that; there simply were not enough white replacements, and field commanders were forced to fill in with Negroes. Once away from his Jim Crow unit, the Negro was a different soldier. How different became readily apparent in the results of Project Clear, an Army survey of the new racial policy. Items: ¶ On the test of standing up to mass attack, where Negro soldiers had had a reputation for taking to their heels, 85% of the officers interviewed in Korea said that Negroes in mixed units performed "about the same" as whites.

¶In care of weapons, a phase of soldiering in which the Negro had been charged with laxity, 90% of the officers said "integrated" Negroes were on a par with whites.