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PHOTOS OF AFRICAN AMERICANS IN WORLD WAR II

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WORLD WAR II

Of the more than 2.5 million blacks who registered for the draft in World War II, about 909,000 served in the Army. In 1944 there were over 700,000 blacks in the Army; this represented the greatest proportion of blacks to total Army strength in World War II. So at its peak, only 8.7 percent of the Army -- instead of the planned 10 percent -- was black. In June 1945 blacks accounted for less than 3 percent of all men assigned to combat duty in the Army. About 78 percent of all black males -- and only 40 percent of all white males-in the Army were placed in the service branches (including quartermaster, engineer, and transportation corps).

Approximately 167,000 blacks served in the Navy during the war, about 4 percent of total Navy strength; and over 17,000 blacks enlisted in the Marine Corps, 2.5 percent of all marines.

"Despite the multitude of problems with which the Army was faced in the use of Negro troops in World War II," historian Ulysses Lee would later write in the Army's official account of the war, "at the war's end a greater variety of experience existed than had ever before been available within the American Military Establishment": 

They had been used by more branches and in a greater variety of units, ranging from divisions to platoons in size and from fighter units to quartermaster service companies in the complexity of duties. They had been used in a wider range of geographical, cultural, and climatic conditions than was believed possible in 1942. All of this was true of white troops as well, but in its manpower deliberations and in its attempts to wrest maximum efficiency and production from the manpower allotted to it, the Army found that it was the 10 percent of  American manpower which was Negro that spelled a large part of the difference between the full and wasteful employment of available American manpower of military age.44

 44  Lee, Employment of Negro Troops, pp, 703-04. 

SOURCE: Martin Binkin and Mark J. Eitelberg with Alvin J. Schexnider and Marvin M. Smith, BLACKS AND THE MILITARY: Studies in Defense Policy. Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1982. pp, 24-25.

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