The Korean War integrated the US military. President Truman’s Executive Order 9981, calling for the desegregation of the armed forces, was certainly important to him, and it was of utmost importance to African Americans, whose century-long commitment to using military service as a lever for final freedom and equality they hoped was finally paying off. But the order had less impact in a large swath of the military itself; cooperation with Truman’s order was sporadic at best during the several years after it was issued. And for most white Americans, the desegregation of the military was for the most part a back-burner story in the postwar United States. Most white Americans in 1948 and 1949 were far more concerned with what they hoped was the peace and prosperity that had finally come to stay. White suburbanites flourished in newly built homes filled with washing machines and televisions and shiny-faced children. The reality for most African Americans, however, was far different and for them far from Perry Como’s musical version of an America where “You can let your worries flutter by and do the things you please / In the land where dollar bills are falling off the trees.”1 There was no “Dreamer’s Holiday” for a majority of African Americans in late 1949, when Como’s version of the song hit number three on the charts, and for white Americans, the warm days following World War II were about to give way to the freeze of the Cold War. As the decade wound toward a close, carefree dreams would be replaced by what many feared would be nuclear nightmares. They were already gathering form. The Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb in August 1949; on October 1, Mao Zedong announced the establishment of the People’s Republic of China; in January 1950, the trial of accused Soviet spy Alger Hiss drew to a close; and in February, Senator Joseph McCarthy announced that he had a list of Communist Party members and evidence of a massive spy ring within the State Department. With the specter of Nazi Germany still lurking, leaders feared that the Soviet Bear posed the next big threat to both world peace and American democracy.
But no one, especially the United States, which had greatly downsized its armed forces following the war, expected war again so soon, and especially not in faraway Asia at 6:00 a.m. on June 25, 1950, when massive numbers of North Korean forces suddenly crossed the 38th Parallel, the line that divided North from South Korea. Truman gathered his advisers in Washington, DC, and furiously communicated by teletype with Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Tokyo. Believing that the Soviet Union was behind the attack and no less than the fate of the free world was at stake, the United States called on the United Nations to meet in emergency session. With the Soviet Union conveniently absent—they were boycotting the United Nations over its refusal to recognize the People’s Republic of China—the UN Security Council voted to come to South Korea’s aid with a multinational force under the command of the United States and led by MacArthur. It put the United States in charge and named MacArthur commander of the allied force. Twenty-two nations offered troops and other help, and an additional thirty-one nations registered official support. Although the conflict would be termed a United Nations “police action,” it was in reality a war, and one led by the United States, which provided 88 percent of the 341,000 international soldiers sent to aid South Korean forces. And it was a war that the United States, and its ragtag band of allies, was little prepared to fight. In the first few weeks, the United Nations threw in troops as it could muster them and had them repeatedly overrun. In the first month, more than 2,800 Americans were killed. Overall, American casualties numbered over 36,000, with another 8,000 missing in action. Korean casualties, on both sides, numbered around 900,000 soldiers and some 2 million civilians.
American forces comprising what was called Task Force Smith arrived in early July, but initial victories along a northward drive back to the 38th Parallel were deceiving, and the international forces were quickly pushed back again to a small area around Pusan in the South, an area that became known as the Pusan Perimeter. The tide appeared to turn again with General MacArthur’s daring surprise landing of US Marines at Inchon in the North, allowing a rapid UN counteroffensive from the South that drove the North Koreans past the 38th Parallel again, almost to the Yalu River.
Victory seemed certain—indeed, US forces were celebrating the thought of being home for Christmas—when suddenly the People’s Republic of China entered the war, with thousands upon thousands of well-trained troops marching from Manchuria across North Korea’s northern border. Chinese intervention forced the southern-allied forces to retreat behind the 38th Parallel again. Although the USSR did not directly commit forces to the conflict, the Soviets provided material aid to both the North Korean and Chinese armies. Several truce agreements petered out before the fighting finally ended on July 27, 1953, with the signing of an armistice agreement. This agreement restored the border between North and South Korea near the 38th Parallel and created the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), a two-and-a-half-mile-wide buffer zone between the two Korean nations and patrolled by international peacekeepers.
Korea and the situation there, especially in North Korea under the current leadership of Kim Jong-un, continues to make the news, but most Americans still know little about this area or the war and its devastation. And fewer still know the roles played by African Americans in the war or the role that the war itself played in the history of the African American freedom struggle and a democracy that did not always practice what it preached. When US troops were sent to Korea as part of the UN-sponsored police action on June 25, 1950, segregated African American soldiers were some of the first to land and fight. But what indeed were they fighting for? Where was this place, Korea, a reclusive East Asian peninsula the size of Utah?
To understand how North and South Korea came to war in 1950, and how the United States got involved in a Cold War struggle half a world away, we must look first to Korea’s long history of subjugation by a foreign nation. Long before the war that bears its name, Korea was a battleground for global politics. Japan, emboldened by victories over China in 1894 and Russia in 1905, made Korea a protectorate in 1905. From 1910 to 1945, with the blessings of the United States and Great Britain, Japan ruled Korea as a colony.
At the onset of Japanese colonization, Korean culture was quite uniform across the span of the country: its people shared a common ethnicity, culture, and language, and it had maintained consistent national boundaries since the tenth century.2 Traditionally, Koreans had close ties to the Chinese and, like them, viewed the Japanese as culturally inferior. It was therefore a bitter pill that those whom they considered below them were now their rulers. Furthermore, the Japanese proved harsh masters. Japan chose to destabilize Korea’s relatively strong cultural and political infrastructure through wholesale replacement with Japanese systems. They eradicated much of Korean culture with often-brutal army and police enforcement and replaced the Korean language and the Confucian classics with Japanese language and literature. Korea’s traditional rulers, a scholarly and aristocratic group of officials, were either co-opted or replaced outright by a new class of imported Japanese elites.
Korean society before colonization was not, however, uniformly beneficial for all of its citizens. Under Korea’s final dynasty, which lasted around five hundred years, a small aristocracy ruled over, and in some cases owned, a far larger population of peasant farmers, without any middle or merchant classes to speak of. The aristocracy, known as yangban, managed a civil service with a ruling class of scholar-officials and fostered artwork and education for members of this class. The new Japanese colonial rulers exploited this unequal class structure, often operating their colonial rule through these local landed aristocrats. The yangban even prospered briefly under colonial rule during the 1920s, when a relatively lenient period of imperial rule allowed their offspring to succeed in a series of professions, building what could have been the basis of a new ruling class for an independent Korea.3 However, the 1930s brought global depression, war, and ever-harsher Japanese colonial measures. Korean elites, rather than being allowed to blossom into a new ruling class, were often turned into Japanese collaborators. Those yangban who refused to buckle under to the Japanese sometimes became underground nationalists who now found a common patriotic bond across class lines with their peasant compatriots. The climate was ripe, therefore, for the growth of Korean nationalism by the time World War II ended in 1945.4
The movement for Korean independence gained international support at the highest levels. At the international Cairo Conference, held in November 1943 as World War II raged on in Europe and racial violence peaked in the United States, China, which feared potential Soviet designs on Korea, joined forces with the United States and Great Britain on the Korea issue. They created a joint statement claiming themselves “mindful of the enslavement of the people of Korea [and] determined that in due course Korea shall become free and independent.”5 Two later international conferences, at Potsdam and Yalta, reaffirmed support for an independent Korean nation. However, the phrasing of the Cairo Conference statement hedged its demands with the phrase “in due course,” revealing President Franklin Roosevelt’s belief that it would be years before Korea was ready for truly independent status. In the meantime, the Cairo Conference statement mandated that Korea should be overseen by an international “trusteeship” consisting of the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China.6
Multinational support for a trusteeship faded once the Soviet Union entered the war in the Pacific on August 8, 1945, occupying the northern portion of Korea as far south as Pyongyang. With Soviet troops on the ground in northern Korea and no American troops in the vicinity yet, the United States, without consulting Korean leaders, rushed to establish an occupation zone south of the 38th Parallel. This put the Korean capital of Seoul within its jurisdiction. The Soviets voiced no objections to the division of Korea, and it was made public on August 15, 1945, as Japan surrendered and Korea was declared liberated.7
American occupying forces arrived on September 8, 1945, under the command of Lt. Gen. John R. Hodge, a veteran of the Okinawa campaign. Hodge, however, was insensitive to Koreans’ longing for independence as well as to their resentment of the Japanese who had formerly ruled them. Ignoring Korean wishes, his occupation government worked directly with Japanese former officials as well as with Korean collaborators, maintaining much of the repressive systems established by Japan. Thus, though supposedly liberated, Korea was once again occupied, and in such a way as to leave much of the oppression intact.8
The Soviet occupation of northern Korea had a very different feel, at least initially, than the American occupation of southern Korea. In contrast to the US military leaders who were ignorant of or indifferent to local political realities and nationalist feelings, the Soviets styled themselves as liberators, routers of the Japanese overlords, and facilitators of a democratic revolution. Initially enthusiastic, Korean support in the North faded over the ensuing months as it became apparent that the Soviet Union’s style of indirect control elevated only those North Koreans who shared Soviet political views. A truly independent Korea was not yet in the offing north or south. And envisioned plans for a countrywide Korean election in 1945, supported by both the Americans and the Soviets, were never realized. Instead, when the Americans and Soviets announced that Korea would be governed for the next five years under a Soviet-American trusteeship, Koreans responded with demonstrations and work stoppages. Although the Korean reaction was nationwide, it was also clear that different visions of an independent Korea were developing in the North and in the South, each with its own potential leader, Syngman Rhee in the South and Kim Il-sung in the North.9 Meanwhile, as the Cold War emerged and then intensified, the Soviets and Americans took increasingly opposing approaches to each other, positions that played out in their Korean policies.
Like many other independence leaders of colonized nations, Syngman Rhee developed much of his philosophy, training, and planning while in exile. Born in 1875, he was involved in Korean independence activities as a youth, earning him imprisonment and torture under the Japanese. After participating in a failed revolution in 1919, Rhee immigrated to the United States, where he married, earned a doctorate from Princeton University, and began an academic career. He also formed a Korean government-in-exile with himself at the head.10 The American occupation forces in South Korea turned to Rhee to help calm potentially explosive civil unrest that had resulted from the American suppression of political leftists in the South who had embraced Communism and established people’s committees to undertake local governance. In order to pacify the civilian demands and calm the situation, the Americans brought in Rhee, who was both anti-Japanese and anti-Communist, to create a new base of power. Arriving in Korea on General MacArthur’s personal plane in mid-October 1945, Rhee founded the right-leaning Korean Democratic Party and quickly established himself as the South’s new political leader. His demands for an immediate reunification of Korea under an independent Korean national government, however, put the Americans in an uncomfortable position. Since Rhee embraced conservative landowners and did not champion the peasant majority, in order to counter Communism in all of Korea during the Cold War, the Americans had to also be willing to embrace an antidemocratic independent Korean government.11
Unlike the exiled intellectual Rhee, Kim Il-sung’s rise within nationalist leadership had its roots in military resistance and Communist loyalty. Although many of the facts of his early life remain unknown, it is believed that in his youth he became a guerrilla resistance fighter against the Japanese, joined the Communist Party sometime in the 1930s, and continued to fight the Japanese along the Manchurian border with Korea. He then joined the Soviet army in 1939 or 1940, eventually earning the rank of captain, where he led a Korean battalion and trained soldiers for the fledgling Korean People’s Army (KPA). Specifically groomed for leadership by the Soviets, Kim and sixty-six fellow Korean officers established the North Korean high command, with Kim as chairman of the Interim People’s Committee, charged with establishing a civil government in North Korea.12 An opportunist, Kim sought close ties with Joseph Stalin while eliminating local resistance to his establishment of a Communist government. At the same time, he continued to present North Korea on the international stage as a model independent nation.
With prospects seemingly dashed for a successful trusteeship relationship with the whole of Korea, the United States called for an UN-sponsored general election. Refused entrance to the North by the Soviets, the United States focused its efforts on the South, and the UN election thus became an election only for an independent South Korean government. Rhee’s allies brutally suppressed attempts by the Communists and others on the left to influence the election, and Rhee was elected as the first president of the Republic of Korea (ROK), officially announced on August 15, 1948.13 Despite South Korea’s new independence, the United States kept a strong hand in South Korean affairs, especially in its developing military. A group of five hundred American officers and men, organized as the Korean Military Advisory Group, served as advisers but also held operational control over the ROK Army, giving the American military a great deal of power in the fledgling democracy.
At the time of the formation of the ROK, the possibility of a united Korea still existed. One hundred seats were even set aside for the North in the new National Assembly, although this remained a symbolic gesture after Kim Il-sung refused to participate in the elections or the new government. Instead, Kim Il-sung established the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in Pyongyang, north of the 38th Parallel, on September 9, 1948. The DPRK was soon revealed as a repressive totalitarian state whose constitution contained no protections of individual rights and that was enforced by a tight control on the media through a brutal police force. Kim also quickly built North Korea’s army, formed around a core of thousands of battle-hardened soldiers recently returned from fighting for Mao Zedong in the Chinese Civil War.14
The North Korean government also supported a diverse coalition of rebels operating in the South. Composed of Communist Party members, other leftists, and even common thugs, the guerrillas operated out of the woods and hills of South Korea, attacking installations such as police stations and raiding small towns when they needed supplies. The guerrillas hectored South Korea for two years, from 1948 to 1950, before Rhee managed to suppress them, although enmity remained on both sides. Conditions for a potential clash between North and South Korea ramped up when both the Americans and the Soviets withdrew their armed forces.15 As part of a consistent policy of downsizing its military in the years following World War II, the United States pulled out the majority of its troops in June 1949. The Soviets had removed their own forces the previous year and seemed to have other, more strategically important positions in mind for them in Eastern Europe and elsewhere in Asia.
With most Soviet and American troops now gone, the two Koreas began spoiling for a fight, harassing each other with border incursions instigated by the armies of both North and South Korea and brief skirmishes occurring with increasing regularity. The United States threatened to remove its five-hundred-strong force of military advisers from South Korea if Rhee’s men continued the attacks. In addition, the Americans refused Rhee’s requests for tanks and heavy artillery for his ROK Army, which by now had expanded to a hundred thousand troops, roughly equal in size to the North Korean forces.16 When North Korea escalated from border raids to a full-scale invasion early in the morning of June 25, 1950, instigated by Kim but with the permission and support of the Soviet Union, the South Koreans were unprepared—and their army underequipped—to respond properly.
Recent scholarship has revealed that Kim Il-sung himself was the main proponent of the attack and convinced the unenthusiastic Soviets to support him, although at the time President Truman and his advisers were convinced it was the Soviets’ call. Alexander Haig, the four-star general who would serve as President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, was a twenty-five-year-old aide in MacArthur’s Tokyo headquarters when North Korea invaded the South. Years later he recalled, “I think both MacArthur and the President concluded that this was an action that could not be tolerated because it was clearly instigated by the Soviet Union.”17 Although this turned out to not be exactly the case, Stalin did support the attack. Stalin, who first consulted with China’s Mao, did not desire a war with the United States, but he was convinced by Kim that his forces would win a quick victory in the South and that the Americans, whose forces had already been withdrawn from the region, would not have cause to become involved.18 Still, Stalin insisted on protecting his own interests should Kim fail to win the South quickly or provoke US involvement. Stalin required Kim to seek Chinese support and refused his own nation’s military involvement. During a secret meeting in Moscow before the attack, Stalin reportedly demanded that Kim get Mao’s support, saying, “If you get kicked in the teeth, I shall not lift a finger. You have to ask Mao for all the help.”19 Nevertheless, he gave his blessing, and in the weeks immediately before the attack, the Soviets shipped large quantities of armaments to North Korea.20
While the troop strength of the northern and southern troops may have been roughly even, the North Korean Army was far more experienced from its time fighting in China and better equipped, with 150 Soviet tanks and sixty-two light bombers bolstering its arrsenal.21 To this day, it is unclear whether North or South Korea invaded first; each side claimed that the other first crossed the 38th Parallel at the remote Ongjin Peninsula, northwest of Seoul. Whatever actually happened, the North used it as a chance to launch a full-scale invasion. Within hours, forces clashed at another site along the parallel, just south of Chorwon, where KPA forces crashed through ROK Army defenders and began moving toward Seoul. They met little resistance, as poorly trained South Korean units, fearful of the North’s superior firepower and with little faith in the Rhee government, turned on their own commanders or fled before the advancing northerners. The Rhee government and the remainder of the southern troops retreated south of Seoul, which fell to a northern force that numbered only about thirty-seven thousand troops. When the fighting stopped several days later, half of the southern troops were dead or missing, and the survivors retained only about 30 percent of the equipment and weapons with which they had begun.22
Most Americans at the time, including President Truman and his military and political advisers, were not aware of Kim’s secret meetings with Mao and Stalin or of Stalin’s hesitancy and demands. Instead, they assumed that the Soviet Union and China had designed the attacks themselves as a Communist incursion of a democratic country. Secretary of State Dean Acheson pressed for US intervention, believing that the North Koreans had attacked American prestige by invading a country crucial to the United States’ efforts to rebuild Japan. His arguments were endorsed by the president and subsequently brought before the Congress and the United Nations for approval. Despite the extreme reluctance of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who believed that US armed forces were not numerically prepared for a war against the North Korean army, let alone the huge numbers of reserve forces in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, US ground forces were committed to battle in Korea on June 30, 1950.23
The Joint Chiefs of Staff were right to be concerned. American armed forces, which had peaked in size at 12 million during World War II, had been drastically reduced following the end of the war. By 1950, only 1.6 million remained in the armed services, and the US Army, which suffered the most severe cuts, was down to 593,167 personnel.24 The army had four divisions stationed in Japan—the 7th, 24th, and 25th Infantry and the 1st Cavalry—but numerically they were short an entire battalion. As one former lieutenant colonel recalled, “All of the divisions were filled with new replacements and were in a poor state of combat readiness. With only one exception, all of the regiments had only two of their three infantry battalions, and the artillery battalions also were short one of their firing batteries.”25 Despite the legitimate concerns of the Joint Chiefs, Douglas MacArthur approached the war with characteristic bluster. On the first day of the war, he claimed, “I can handle it with one arm tied behind my back,” and initially requested a regimental combat team only. His request, however, soon increased to two divisions and, within a week, to four divisions and then eight.26
In addition to being understaffed, the divisions were inadequately equipped and not battle trained. Life in Occupied Japan was relatively laid back with plenty of leisure of time for the troops. Lieutenant Col. Charles M. Bussey, a former Tuskegee airman who was then serving with the 25th Infantry Division on Honshu, Japan, recalled, “Good living was the order of the day. Occupation meant occupying the best of Japanese facilities, holding a glass in one hand and a Japanese girlfriend in the other, and seeing how much food and drink one could indulge in and how much hell one could raise.”27
America’s first ground troops, Task Force Smith, composed of the 1st Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment, 24th Infantry Division, was drawn from these ill-prepared forces and sent to Korea on June 30, 1950. The rest of the 24th arrived on July 1, 1950, followed nine days later by the 25th Infantry Division and the 1st Cavalry Division. Among the first into battle were some of the army’s remaining all-Black regiments. The poorly trained and poorly equipped troops, Black and white alike, suffered great losses at the hands of the better-prepared and armed North Koreans. The United Nations added more troops as soon as they were mustered, but saw them repeatedly overrun.
Within the first two weeks of the war thousands of African American troops were among the five-division force now on the ground. Variously described by stateside newspapers as Negro, Colored, or Tan, African American troops arrived with the 2nd Infantry, the 3rd Infantry, and the 82nd Airborne. But the best known was the 25th Division’s 24th Infantry Regiment: the Deuce Four. This regiment included the 10th Cavalry—the famous Buffalo Soldiers—as well as the 369th Infantry, which fought in World Wars I and II and became known as the Harlem Hellfighters, and the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion, the Triple Nickles. The three battalions in the 24th Infantry Regiment were three thousand strong and made up one-sixth of their division; still, when they arrived in Korea two weeks after the start of hostilities, African Americans (and Puerto Ricans) made up less than 10 percent of the total force.28
As the most famous historically Black regiment, the 24th was closely followed from home, aided by a phalanx of veteran Black reporters who frequently accompanied them into battle or interviewed them afterward. Just days after arriving in Korea, “Tan GIs Go into Action,” trumpeted the Chicago Defender, describing the men of the 24th Infantry as “the first United States footsoldiers rushed into the fury of the Korean Conflict.”29 This was a slight exaggeration, but fervor could be forgiven. Even more of a stretch was their description of the 24th as coming from “strenuous maneuvers in the Tokyo area.” But those easy days on occupation duty would be quickly forgotten as African American soldiers, sailors, and pilots found themselves thrown into a series of bloody battles, some of which they turned into heroic victories, much to the enthusiasm of the Black community rooting them on from the home front.
“Eyewitness Tells How Negro GIs Won First U.S. Victory: 24th Takes City,” ran the headline of the Pittsburgh Courier on July 29, 1950, after the 24th helped capture the city of Yechon, and marked the first UN triumph of the newly minted police action. Black newspaper reporters could not temper their excitement. “Sputtering machine guns coughed out their staccato rattle, the sharp zing of bullets whizzed overhead—now and then thudding into the dirt—and keen-eyed tan infantrymen wormed their way forward foot by foot as they drew nearer the North Korean lines … [before] all hell broke loose!” Describing the sixteen hours of fighting, the paper painted a stirring racialized portrait: “Brown-skinned doughboys became spattered with blood. Some of it was their own. But most of it was that of slant-eyed North Korean Reds who found themselves in hand-to-hand combat facing America’s oldest and most battle-tested and proved Negro infantry outfit.”30 Black soldiers were, said one paper, “clothed … in glory,” their effort on the battlefield “an eloquent plea for full integration in American life.”31 The victory, after two weeks of hellish fighting and loss of territory, was most welcome, especially, as the Chicago Defender wrote, “to Negro America.” The victory at Yechon was “‘the big lift’ in the morale of a group whose war against segregation had also been marked with the torment of defeat.”32 Between the lines, the paper seemed to suggest that the bigger victory over Jim Crow must soon follow.
That battle, however, would continue long after the conflict in Korea reached a stalemate, even after nearly all vestiges of segregation had been eradicated in the ground troops during the war itself. But in those early days, much seemed possible, even historically determined; as one newspaper noted, “negro heroes” had fought in America’s wars since Crispus Attucks, and asked, “Who will be our heroes in the Korea campaign?” To African Americans, that answer was certainly the men of the 24th Infantry, at least at first, as well as those from a handful of other units. Folks at home had reason to be proud and to believe that their men would indeed be thought heroes. President Truman joined this chorus, noting on September 11, 1950, that in a war he described as “a great struggle for the minds, hearts, and loyalties of millions … America’s Negroes are destined to play an ever more historic role. All of America is proud of our Negro fighters in Korea.”33
The 24th Infantry continued to be closely followed by the Black press and mainstream media alike, turning into a bit of a litmus test on Black soldiers and, by extension, Black equality. Through August, Black newspapers were reporting that “our boys are demonstrating again and again that skill and courage know no color line,” and even noting that “tributes to their remarkable stand have come from the entire nation’s press and that all Americans are proud of their achievements.”34 This would prove to be an overstatement as the early victories of mid-July were followed by lost ground and many lost lives and, with them, eventually, the reputation of the 24th Infantry.
By mid-August 1950, the 24th Infantry had been in continuous fighting for a month straight. On August 14, the troops held the line in heavy fighting near Haman, but they were reported to be wearing tattered uniforms, lacking equipment, and taking heavy losses. The “crack regiment,” a Black newspaper reported, “is continually being sent into the line without vital equipment necessary for combat and at a time when the casualties in the regiment approach a staggering total which is steadily mounting.” It was also reported that some of the equipment brought with the 24th from Japan had been in such poor condition that some of the men had hired civilians to fix it when the army refused.35 At no time, however, did the army or the mainstream media suggest that Black troops were at best getting the short end of the stick and at worst being intentionally assigned to the most difficult duty with the greatest possibility of fatalities and, ultimately, defeat.
As the late summer of 1950 ground on, UN forces continued to encounter heavy fighting and to retreat, finally being driven back all the way to Pusan, where they were able to hang on long enough to establish a defensive perimeter. The men of the 24th and other units suffered heavy casualties—as much as 50 percent—while trying, without success, to hold the line.36 It was a tense time, with the very real possibility that the UN troops would be pushed right off the Korean peninsula. And newspapers and magazines at home made much of the retreating units, especially those who were overrun and forced to abandon positions and equipment. Much of this ire was directed at the men of the 24th Infantry, who were of course only one small component of the larger force.
The Black community was well aware that its soldiers had been unfairly singled out. As one Black reporter wrote in mid-August, “Every single regiment here has at one time or another run off and left vital equipment on the field. A better yardstick might be to compare the number of dead and wounded in the 24th with the number of the other regiments.” He also pointed out that resupply drops favored white units and that the men of the 24th were supposed to fight and hold the line with broken equipment and even, at times, barefoot, since their summer clothing and boots had long since worn out.37 They were also being led by often-unprepared white officers, such as Lt. Col. John T. Corley, who in late August was charged with threatening to shoot a Black 1st lieutenant.38
At last, more American troops began to arrive, along with much-needed tanks and artillery, but the tide really turned in the United Nations’ favor on September 15, 1950, when General MacArthur audaciously landed a surprise attack of two amphibious divisions of US Marines at Inchon, a port on Korea’s west coast, about one hundred miles south of the 38th Parallel and twenty-five miles from Seoul. Criticized as taking excessive risk, MacArthur insisted on the landing, and caught the North Koreans completely unawares, then drove his marines inland, liberating Seoul—captured by North Korea at the start of the war—within a month. Buoyed by the new forces, the 8th Army, which had hunkered down at the Pusan Perimeter, now pushed northward, breaking through the retreating North Korean force.39
This sudden turn of events presented the UN and US forces with a new challenge. The UN resolution supported defending South Korea against the northern invasion, not invading North Korea itself, although that is what both Syngman Rhee and MacArthur both urged. Still not believing that China or the Soviet Union would risk war in Korea, Washington backed the plan to attack north on September 27, 1950, and a UN resolution concurred a little more than a week later. United Nations forces crossed the 38th Parallel en route to the Yalu River on October 9, 1950. As in the first days of the war, segregated Black troops were again at the forefront of the offensive. In fact, the men of the 24th turned the drive toward Inchon into a competition against the other two regiments, both white, in their 25th Division, to see who would arrive first. The 24th Infantry, with the help of the all-Black 77th Combat Engineer Company cutting roads and erecting bridges, won the race.40
Exemplary service from Black troops did not necessitate equal treatment, however, and from the home front came increasing calls for desegregation, spurred in part by the army’s recent decision to embed South Korean troops with white units on the ground. “Now is the time” to desegregate ran an editorial in the Courier newspaper. Since Koreans had been integrated into white units, it read, “for any officer to contend now that likewise integrating American Negroes into ‘white’ units ‘would not work’ becomes not only ridiculous but criminally stupid if not downright disloyal.” Playing into the Red Scare and Cold War fear, the editorial argued that desegregation must be fostered immediately in order to stop the scourge of Communism: “Certainly the only way to answer effectively Soviet propaganda against American Jim Crowism is to demonstrate on the field of battle that this propaganda is false.”41 This was an argument that would gain strength throughout the building Cold War, as America tried to counter accusations of “Communist propaganda that has made the most of racial discrimination in American society as proof of our hypocraisy [sic].”42
The NAACP seized on the news of white-Korean integration and anti-Communism and threw its weight behind this argument immediately, announcing in September 1950 that America could not win the battle over Communism “by guns alone” but, in order to gain the allegiance of nonwhite peoples around the world, “will have to demonstrate that democracy is a living reality which knows no limitation of race, color, or nationality.”43 According to historian Mary Dudziak, “The lesson of this story was always that American democracy was a form of government that made the achievement of social justice possible and that democratic change, however slow and gradual, was superior to dictatorial imposition. The story of race in America, used to compare democracy and communism, became an important Cold War narrative.”44 In the hands of the Black press, it was used to put greater pressure on the government—if African Americans could fight and live as equals, if “Jim Crow at least doesn’t wear an American uniform,” went the argument, surely the superiority of the American system would be without question.45
With the North Korean forces largely destroyed or in hiding, the UN troops moved quickly, occupying Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, on October 19. United Nations forces moved through Pyongyang and began to set up near the Yalu River, and expectations of a quick victory seemed on the verge of realization. Eisenhower was promising turkey for Thanksgiving and victory by Christmas, and the troops were already imagining the taste of their dinners. But the Chinese don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, and leaders in Washington failed to predict that China, with its massive forces of battle-hardened, trumpet-blowing, supposedly drugged and enraged soldiers, was about to enter the war on the North Korean side.
Chinese troops, in fact, had begun crossing the Yalu into North Korea in October, and by the time Americans were imagining turkey and cranberry sauce, several hundred thousand had amassed. Staying hidden in the hills, the Chinese waited until US and UN troops had passed north on the narrow mountain passes, then poured out, advancing from the front and neighboring hills while cutting off the rear. Soldiers grimly joked that the Chinese troops were formed not into platoons or battalions but into infinite hordes. “It was the most depressing, extravagant use of human resources I’ve ever seen,” recalled Haig, “The Chinese would attack against a steel wall of heavy fire over and over and [their] bodies would be stacked up like cord wood.”46
As the war slogged into winter, the North Koreans drove UN forces south some two hundred miles, back below the 38th Parallel again. MacArthur’s stubborn advance toward the Yalu had cost dearly, with thirteen thousand UN troops dead, wounded, missing in action, or taken prisoner and thousands losing body parts to severe frostbite. As the UN troops retreated all the way back to Pusan, Black soldiers continued to be featured in some of the scant victories still to be had. Lieutenant Harry E. Sutton of the 15th Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Division was awarded a Silver Star and lent his name to Sutton’s Ridge after his men held off a North Korean assault for around eighteen hours in fierce fighting outside Hungnam.47 The ten-year army veteran, who had fought with the Triple Nickles during World War II, was not to survive the war, however, dying in another battle two months later. He would join the large number of Black soldiers lost in the first six months of the war.
African Americans had answered the call of their country, but was their country watching? Some certainly were, although their reactions must have been violently mixed. Back in Meridian, Mississippi, for example, both Blacks and whites read news in late September that the “Town’s First War Dead Are Negro.”48 Fourteen years later, Meridian would be in the news for a different reason, the infamous 1964 abduction and murder of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner. Was the sacrifice of Meridian’s Black soldiers in vain?
Strangely, alleged poor performance of segregated Black soldiers and reports of superior, heroic fighting by the very same men both were forecast as speeding necessary desegregation in the army. In late August, Senator Herbert Lehman of New York had an article on the bravery of Black troops read into the record, including a line that quoted a white officer as saying, “The quicker the entire Army adopts the policy of non-segregation, the better.” Lehman added that “if those troops are accorded true equality of treatment, which means non-segregation, they will fight with a greater will and a greater determination for victory in Korea in the battle against communism throughout the world.”49
When the army announced on October 1, 1951, that the 24th Infantry Regiment would be disbanded and its men reassigned to other mixed units, with the remaining vestiges of segregation supposedly soon to be jettisoned also, the loss of a proud tradition was noted, but the majority of readers of the Black press celebrated and felt that their people deserved credit for fighting both against Communism and for desegregation. Writing in his column Civil Rights Watchdog in early August 1951, Charles Lucas said, “All Americans should be proud of the action in Korea toward integrating Negro troops with other divisions fighting under our flag” and credited Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP’s exposure of “excessive and outrageous courtsmartial … which led to the recommendation by commanding officers in Korea to abolish the segregated pattern.”50 Lucas went on to wonder aloud why the praise that had greeted the 24th’s early battle victories had turned to condemnation, “as if in a concerted effort to discredit the record of the Negro fighting men.” Only in integrated units, he concluded, would they now find the respect they deserved. And the integration of the men of the 24th Infantry was just the first step, he wrote, inviting readers to keep the pressure on until all aspects of the military followed suit. “Don’t relax brother, our battle is just begun. This development is only the first step. We have this segregated jinx to face here at home in scores of training camps both north and south. No, the NAACP is not satisfied to rest on the initial victory of integration covering the 24th Infantry and other Negro troops in Korea. We insist on COMPLETE CONVERSION. The army must catch up with the air force and the navy. Separate National Guard units (such as we have in Ohio) must be liquidated. Our homegrown brand of racial inequality in the armed services must be genuinely cleaned up. Stick with us a little longer and help finish the job. Let’s take the other necessary steps so that we can stop apologizing to other countries for our segregated practices with our precious warriors.”51
The deactivation of the 24th and the desegregation of the army that followed was not solely the result of the alleged poor performance by Black troops or the pressure continually applied by the Black press and groups like the NAACP. In some ways it was the eventual—if slow—result of Truman’s executive order, army studies, and the work of the Fahy Committee. Although the army was still segregated by the start of the Korean War in 1950, thanks to the steps taken since 1948, chiefly the Fahy Committee’s abolishment of racial quotas, integration was now a viable option. Another side effect of the army’s abolishment of quotas in March 1950 was that in the first four months directly following that action, the number of African American recruits went up from 8.2 percent to 25 percent of all enlistments.52 The hungry maw of the battlefield and its need for replacement troops regardless of color rapidly increased the timetable of army desegregation but also gave conservative army brass an out; racial integration could be attributed not to social engineering or moral certitude but to military efficiency. “Everybody knows you’ve got to be able to use all available manpower, and we have some 13 million Negroes,” said one commander interviewed for a sociological study. “That’s a vast pool.”53
Plenty of examples were also to be found of integrated units working well. One newspaper article in early September 1950 profiled the 89th Medium Tank Battalion, which after a scant three weeks of fighting had racked up a strong record based on interracial cooperation: “Tan Yanks are integrated in almost every level of the tank crews. They include commanders, drivers and gun loaders. Prime requirement of the five-man crews is that the men be able to work together in harmony … [since] close contact in the small chamber of a rolling hulk of armored steel requires good comradeship, and unity of purpose.” Particularly striking was that most of the white soldiers were from the South, had knowingly volunteered for the mixed unit, “and many state that they would not have it any other way.” The white commanding officer of Able Company, Capt. James Harvey of Los Angeles, summed it up: “All of our colored personnel are darn good. We would not trade them for whites. That’s a true picture of what we think of the fellows.”54
Desegregation, coming as it did after the abolishment of racial quotas, also coincided with an overall growth in African American troops as Black enlistment and reenlistment rates increased and the proportion of Africans Americans in the army, for example, rose from 10.2 percent in April 1950 to 11.7 percent in January 1951. And just as had happened with desegregation of military bases stateside, the proclivities of certain commanders also hastened integration, especially within the hard-hit 9th Regiment. Those commanders of the 9th who embraced desegregation saw their battalions perform especially well, which did not go unnoticed by military analysts, who also noted that by May 1951, 61 percent of combat infantry companies in Korea were now racially integrated to some extent.55 This fact is interesting for both how quickly desegregation moved once it started and how bold-faced the lie was that desegregation was widespread by the beginning of the war.
Encouraging reports from newly desegregated units on the front lines also indicated the psychological impact that desegregation could have on the weary troops. Warrant Officer Raymond Burden, for example, returned stateside in October 1951 after thirteen months with the 573rd Engineers Pontoon Bridge Company, reporting that “the mixing of the fighting units has done more to boost morale than anything else could possibly have done. They’ve gone all the way too. Even the 1st Cavalry is integrated and the men are getting along together, understanding each other, fighting together like real teammates.” This was notable, the reporter added, because the 1st Cavalry, while on occupation duty in Tokyo following World War II, had earned a reputation as “Negro haters.”56 If the racists of the 1st Cav could embrace Blacks in their unit, it seemed to say, then this segregation thing would not be nearly as hard to topple as predicted.
Still, as willing as the troops on the ground may have been to embrace their new colleagues, segregationist attitudes remained deeply entrenched among some at the top of military leadership, especially in the US Army. General MacArthur had favored retaining segregation, and his second in command, Lt. Gen. Mark Almond, was known as one of the fiercest segregationists, and most personally prejudiced leaders, in the military. Learning of the quick progress toward desegregating the 9th Regiment, Almond tried to stop it, ordering further study and instructing his new 2nd Division commander, Maj. Gen. Clark L. Ruffner, to cease placing Blacks in “white” combat troops and to use new replacements to restore the previous segregation of the units. Ruffner was a believer in desegregation, however, and subverted the order by assigning Blacks to white noncombat units until a further change in command could replace Almond.57 And when Truman relieved MacArthur of command in April 1951, at a time that MacArthur’s Tokyo staff was still grinding through a study of Black troops, hope was raised that his segregationist ways would be on the way out, that “now that General MacArthur has been fired, why not fire General Jim Crow too? He must be fired for the sake of democracy.”58
MacArthur’s replacement, Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, favored action over surveys. Even as the independent Operations Research Office at Johns Hopkins University began a major study of the social implications of military integration, to become known as Project Clear, which would become one of the defining products of the Korean War era, Ridgway was moving forward. He considered segregation to be demeaning, to inhibit growth and leadership, and to be “both un-American and un-Christian.” Ridgway believed that integration would both encourage fighting spirit and make best use of the personnel at his command. Project Clear revealed that a slight majority of troops in Korea were actually hesitant about desegregating, but in May 1951, their commander abolished racial segregation in the 8th Army and throughout the Far East Command. Although Project Clear recommended that African Americans make up no more than 20 percent of the army, even in integrated units, by 1951, Blacks would account for 30 percent of all combat replacements. Mark Almond was reassigned from commanding X Corps to become president of the Army War College, and he left Korea in July. The 24th would be decommissioned on October 1, and smaller units would be gradually desegregated through color-blind troop assignments and guided by an informal maximum of 12 percent African Americans in any one unit.59 By the end of the month, 75 percent of the 8th Army had been desegregated, with completion within the Far East Command supposedly achieved by May 1952.
Sometimes the version of events that becomes accepted as historical fact differs to greater or smaller degrees than that experienced on the ground. Ralph Hockley, a white Jewish artillery officer with the 2nd Infantry Division in Korea, remembers a very distinctive version of how desegregation was instituted in October 1951:
I know what Ridgway says, but the actual thing that happened to change it from one day to the next was that in 1951 General MacArthur’s assistant secretary of defense was a little lady about five foot tall by the name of Anna Rosenberg, who was an advertising executive in New York. And I don’t know how General MacArthur knew her, but he took her and made her assistant secretary of defense [in November 1950]. And Anna Rosenberg came to Korea in 1951, and she got rid of the [racist] generals. She talked to the troops, and somewhere she became aware of the fact that the army in Korea was not integrated. And after she researched that and asked enough questions, at the end of her stay she got ahold of the top generals, and she gave them two weeks to integrate the army in Korea. From my personal experience that’s what happened.
At the end of October or beginning of November I got called in. By this time I’d been in Korea for over a year, and I was the only guy I know who got seven combat stars, but the last two months, after being in the 37th Battalion, in the middle of October I was transferred into the 87th Anti-Aircraft Battalion as a platoon commander. And while I had this platoon, I was called in and they said, “Okay, tomorrow morning you’re going to receive ten Black soldiers. Use them as you see fit.” They were all from the 9th Infantry. They busted up the 3rd Battalion of the 9th Infantry, the Black battalion. In so doing everybody got some of their soldiers. There wasn’t a document that was handed to me that said what the army wants you to do.
So I decided that I would take one of these soldiers and assign them to each squad. So I would have one at each squad plus two at HQ. There was one sergeant, there were two corporals, and the rest were privates according to class, and I assigned the sergeant as an assistant squad leader, and I assigned them to different vehicles, and that was my integration. When I assigned them, … I told [the sergeants,] “As far as I’m concerned, they’re American soldiers [and] they’re going to be treated no better or worse than any soldiers that you’ve had.”
Four weeks later, all the sergeants asked to talk to me. And they said, “Lieutenant, we have heard that the army or the division is being cut back by 10 percent”—which I knew nothing about, probably a rumor in the first place—“but we just wanted to ask you, if you have to make a decision on releasing 10 percent of the platoon, that you keep the Black soldiers.” And they said that they wanted me to know that since the Black soldiers had been assigned to the platoon, morale problems had absolutely disappeared.
There is some kind of moral to this story. A soldier whether Black or white is a soldier. He can be a good soldier or a bad soldier, but whether he’s Black or white doesn’t mean he’s good or bad. My experiences have been that it’s the individual who counts, not his background of any type.60
By the beginning of January 1953, the Black press at home was declaring desegregation a success. “The U.S. Army has effected a major social revolution in Korea by abolishing racial segregation and the troops today are fighting better because of the change,” read an article in the Chicago Defender, adding that the process seemed to have gone smoothly. “A frontline [white] private commented: ‘When the commies start moving in, you don’t care whether a guy is Black or has two heads. … All you care about is can he fight? These boys are fighting.” Acknowledging that “social significance is more or less secondary since the Army is mainly interested in increasing combat efficiency” did not diminish the achievement.61 And observing it gave those who championed civil rights hope that it would serve as an example for more widespread change. By May 1953, one reporter in Korea claimed that “the word ‘race’ seems to have been abolished and a man’s color or kind roams about unnoticed. Out of the blood and stench and dust and mud of this battleground someone has found a solution to the race problem.”62
Pockets of segregation persisted, however, often in National Guard units and in some stateside training camps that maintained Jim Crow at the whim of their commanders. Even where it gave way, some army leaders refused to change their long-held opinions; Gen. Mark Clark, former UN commander in the Far East, never ceased his support of a segregated Jim Crow military and in 1956, three years after the war had ended, still insisted on the inadequacies of Black soldiers and that desegregation was therefore the wrong move from “a military standpoint.”63 Some southern senators objected as well, but their voices were soon drowned out, at least when it came to racial policies in the military, and in 1954 the army’s official report on desegregation was published, titled “Breakthrough on the Color Front.” On October 30, 1954, the secretary of defense announced that no segregated units still survived in the United States Armed Forces.64
The armed forces, of course, were far bigger than just the US Army, and each branch had its own unique path toward ultimate desegregation. The Marine Corps’ story of segregation and its eventual dismantling followed a path similar to that of the army, but perhaps even more so. Whereas the army went to war in Korea with some segregated and some mixed units, Marine Corps leaders utterly ignored Truman’s desegregation order and entered the Korean War strictly segregated. Black marines served only in noncombat positions, half of them as stewards. As early as the first few months of the war, however, the Marine Corps began to experience troop shortages that prompted the shifting of Black service units into combat augmenting the 1st Marine Division. On the ground, given the choice of maintaining segregation or sending raw service personnel into deadly combat unaccompanied, many field commanders chose to break up the Black units and distribute the men among experienced combat troops.65 Some Black marines found themselves single-handedly integrating a white company, as Private 1st Class Richard B. Dinkins of Columbia, South Carolina, did with a company in the 5th Marine Regiment. In general, those experiences went relatively smoothly; in Dinkins’s case an awkward moment of silence at this arrival was quickly dispelled when a tall, white Texan invited him to share his shelter. Over the next few months, Dinkins went on to become the best marksman in the company, with an estimated eighty-five kills by the start of December 1950. Echoing the “no color in a foxhole” sentiment that would become gospel in years to come, his company commander noted that on the front lines, “we don’t worry about color much up here. They’re all Marines to me.”66
Interestingly, the fighting esprit of still segregated Black soldiers in the army may have also done something to convince the marines that African Americans could fight. In early October, the commander of the 1st Marine Division sent an official letter of thanks to the all-Black 96th Field Artillery Battalion “for giving brilliant and effective support and saving the lives of many leathernecks.”67 And as in the army, once in the Marine Corps, African Americans like Dinkins proved themselves on the line, and in August the first, experimental racially integrated replacement units landed, arriving from Camp Lejeune and Camp Pendleton.68 When the Marine Corps conducted an official review of its racial policies in the fall of 1951, it resulted in a December decree that from then on men would be assigned regardless of race. Throughout 1952, this policy rendered the remaining segregated units officially desegregated, and Black marine enlistment skyrocketed, rising from 1.6 percent of all marines at the start of the war to 6 percent by the time of the truce in July 1953.
The postwar Marine Corps still did feel some repercussions of its previous policies, however. Although now mandated to be open, the Steward Branch had no success placing whites and such a strong decline from Blacks that major personnel shortfalls and poor morale resulted. Worse still, was a stipulation in Marine Corps regulations that Black NCOs could be barred from certain positions if such was “in the overriding interest to the Marine Corps.”69 Thus certain commanders excluded Black NCOs in certain southern towns where the locals objected, and some special services also refused them entry, especially to positions in honor guards or other units with public standing. Thus, even though officially eradicated, racist segregation persisted in small pockets of the Marine Corps for years.
Of all the branches of the military, the US Air Force had acted most quickly on Truman’s order, and by the time his Fahy Committee held its first meeting on January 12, 1949, an air force desegregation plan was sitting on the table. Beyond abandoning segregated units, it called for abolishing racial quotas and standardizing and integrating all training. Some reported general wariness about integrating barracks or banning African Americans entirely from air force service soon gave way to acceptance of an organized and systematic implementation of the new policies, with the general overseeing Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, for example, reporting that “the integration of the base was accomplished with complete harmony” among the twenty-six thousand troops stationed there.70 But despite the air force’s commitment to ending segregation in both operations and training, some neighbors of its southern bases had other ideas, and a few Dixiecrat senators vowed to ban Black airmen from “white bases.” The air force simply ignored the senators, although the branch was not immune from local laws and the same bus incidents that plagued the army visited themselves upon the air force. Black airmen from Maxwell Field were forced to sit in the rear of Montgomery, Alabama, public buses taking them to and from the field, and the white woman managing the segregated USOs refused to combine them despite a national order.71 The air force, however, was putting pressure on southern mores, and it was indeed a sign of things to come, especially concerning the segregated bus system of Montgomery, where Martin Luther King Jr. would rise to prominence as the leader of a bus boycott just a few years later.
After the bases came desegregating the forces themselves, which proceeded apace. When the 332nd Fighter Wing, which had an unfortunate reputation for lacking battle readiness, was disbanded, its men were fairly reviewed on their own merits and 95 percent of them retained in the service and reassigned. With the successful reassignment complete, the air force quickly moved toward attempting full integration. On July 15, 1950, two weeks into the Korean War, the Pittsburgh Courier reported that “tan flyers are well integrated … and are taking part in all phases of the operations over Korea … [and] are turning in commendable performances.” Indeed, the paper said, the “great results” the Air Corps had achieved in integrating its men were “one of the main reasons why embattered US forces are still able to cling to even a foothold in the rugged South Korean fighting.” In the nineteen Air Corps units under the 5th Air Force Command in Korea, eighteen were integrated and the last was about to be. “Integration over here is spelled A-I-R C-O-R-P-S and the Air Corps likes it that way.”72 Although it hadn’t reached this goal by the beginning of the Korean War, by the end of 1950 the air force was 95 percent desegregated, with the final vestiges eradicated by 1952.73
The air force also gave the US forces one of its first Black military heroes of the war, fighter pilot Capt. Daniel “Chappie” James, who commanded a squadron of white flyers, flew sixty-four combat missions over Korea, and survived two crash landings. His exploits were followed closely by African Americans during and after the war, when, as leader of the 437th Interceptor Squadron, he commanded four hundred white airmen.74 The other Black hero to emerge during the Korean War period was Benjamin Oliver Davis Jr., son of famed US Army brigadier general Benjamin O. Davis, and in 1954 himself made a general, in charge of the operations and training for the Far East Air Forces. Although he “avoided becoming involved in nebulous racial conflicts,” his achievements were held up as an “inspiration to Negro air crews” and proof of the legitimacy of equality of treatment and opportunity in the air force.75
Another Black pilot hero emerged from the US Navy, which moved toward desegregation with even fewer difficulties than the air force. The navy’s post–World War II racial policies were already mostly in line with what was called for by Truman’s executive order and then elaborated on by the Fahy Committee. Unlike during World War II, when most African Americans in the navy served as messmen and cooks in the Steward Branch, afterward they were widely dispersed among the specialties and were fully integrated in training and living arrangements. Their numbers remained low, however, and there was a paucity of Black officers, who had arrived in the navy only in 1947, with just five on active duty when the Fahy Committee first met in early 1949.76 The committee concluded that despite the racial changes it had instituted, the navy had done little to publicize them and to alert African Americans that they could now do more in the navy than wash dishes. In May 1949, the Fahy Committee declared that the navy would have to better publicize its racially equal opportunities, standardize promotional opportunities within the Steward Branch, and reform its entrance standards to along the lines of those of the army for the purposes of allowing greater Black participation.
Some of these now challenged practices had taken on the form of cherished naval traditions, and letting them go proved difficult, although the navy did accede to all changes but lowering its entrance standards. And although it showed good faith in implementing these changes over the next several years, results came slowly. Whereas in 1949, 65.1 percent of all Black sailors were in the Steward Branch, that figure fell by 1953 to 51.7 percent, even though the Steward Branch itself still hired few whites. Despite its efforts to integrate, the navy’s overall percentage of Black sailors fell during the Korean War years. The experience of naval desegregation was a stark lesson that traditions and public perception would be almost as difficult to overcome as de jure segregation and could often amount to de facto.77
A great deal of visibility, however, was accorded a few Black naval flyers, most notably Ensign Jesse L. Brown, called “one of the best pilots in the air group” by his carrier commander. Brown, who in 1948 had become the first Black naval aviator to earn his wings, on October 13, 1950, also became the first to fly a combat mission, taking out a series of railway targets near Chonji, Korea.78 He set another unfortunate record in December, however, when he became the first Black naval officer to lose his life at war, succumbing to injuries sustained in a fiery crash. A fellow white flyer from his unit, Lt. Thomas J. Hudner, attempted a daring rescue for which he would later be awarded the Medal of Honor, landing his own plane next to Brown’s well beyond enemy lines and attempting to extinguish the engine fire with clumps of snow.79 This act of selflessness for a Black colleague was in itself an important statement about equality and overcoming racism.
Beyond the naval flyers, other Black seaman played crucial rolls in the war from its first days. Artillery bombardment from ships at sea helped “soften up” the lines for army ground troops, and one admiral described “splendid coordination as an integrated crew under wartime conditions.”80 A review by a reporter for the Black newspaper the Chicago Defender found in September 1950, however, that the crew of the aircraft carrier Philippine Sea had less than 10 percent African Americans among its crew and that most of these were in the Steward Branch. Still, the navy, with its limited successes, was heading toward desegregation and equality of opportunity.81
Changes were also slowly coming for those few African American women who served in Korea during the war; in fact, at the beginning of the conflict, only even thousand nurses of all races were in the armed forces, and only a few hundred served in-country despite a continuous call for more. The draft never applied to women, and so all females were volunteers. The first army nurses to arrive did so almost immediately after North Korea’s invasion, establishing a hospital in Pusan in July 1950 that by August had nearly a hundred nurses on staff. By the spring of 1951, the army had more than three hundred nurses working throughout Korea, and a small number of air force and navy nurses staffed air evacuation teams and hospital ships. And although most women in the war effort were restricted to positions as nurses, they often not only did unsupervised medical procedures that would normally done by doctors stateside but were the ranking officers on hospital trains and evacuation flights. Indeed, the workload and responsibilities afforded many women a chance for relatively quick advancement in rank. As was the case for men, desegregation in the armed services for Black women mostly came about during the war itself, often out of necessity. The army was the only branch that had enlisted and commissioned significant numbers of African American women in World War II; now the air force and navy saw more Black women enlist and become officers, and women were among the first African Americans to serve in the Marine Corps.82
At the start of the war, women’s official status in the armed forces was still relatively new, having been won only a few years earlier by the passage of the Army-Navy Nurse Act in 1947, followed by 1948’s Women’s Armed Services Integration Act. While these acts created opportunities, they also limited them, for example setting the maximum for the Women’s Army Corps at 7,500, with 500 officers and the maximum number of female officers throughout the services at no more than 2 percent of the total. It also continued to apply a 10 percent quota for African American WACs and to segregate Black servicewomen through at least the mid-1950s. All Black WACs entering training were assigned to the same segregated company, and despite Truman’s executive order and the dismantling of segregation among men in Korea during the war, women’s training and facilities remained segregated, with the only exceptions being women’s Officer Candidate School and certain army specialist schools.83
Mary (Smith) Teague’s experience was typical. When she enlisted in November 1948, she ended up in the Women’s Army Corps after the US Navy told her it was not enlisting African American women at all and the air force reported that it had filled its quota. She proceeded to segregated basic training, followed by integrated OCS and leadership schools, and then, following her commission as a 2nd lieutenant, was assigned back to segregated units. When she complained up the chain of command that white women from other units were being promoted faster than women in her segregated unit, she found herself transferred to Japan while nothing was done about the discrepancies in promotions. “I will always believe they reassigned me to get rid of a troublemaker,” she later recalled.84 And Lt. Col. Lucy Bond, although she enlisted after army integration was supposedly official, found herself segregated from white troops she was escorting on a stateside train. “It was frustrating,” she said, “but there was nothing I could do about it.”85
The Marine Corps added its first two Black women in 1949 and a third in 1950. The air force, as we have seen, was relatively quick to respond to Truman’s order, with the last segregated classes going through at the end of 1948. The first air force women into the Asian theater was a squadron of forty-eight assigned to Tokyo in September 1950. African American army women came in even more slowly, with the first six Black nurses arriving in early 1951, such a novelty that it made national news stateside, while less than a handful actually served in-country.86 One to do so was Sgt. Eleanor Yorke, a six-year army veteran from Orange, New Jersey, who worked twenty-eight months in Japan and then eight months near the Korean front lines before being rotated stateside in October 1951. Serving with a mobile surgical unit, she said she treated the wounded “20 to 45 minutes after they were hit.” She described an endless parade of helicopters and ambulances bring in the wounded and being “rocked to sleep in my Army cot” by the sound of artillery fire. “It was a terrible eight months but I was too busy to be scared.”87 Black newspapers reported that at the same time that that army was publicizing a great need for nurses, nursing training programs were refusing to admit Black women.88 Yokohama, Japan, emerged as having the greatest number of African American women at the time, including about a hundred WACs and about fifty Red Cross volunteers. Sylvia Rock recalled that as a Black Red Cross worker in Tokyo in the fall of 1950, she was such an anomaly that “when I walked down the street, I would be surrounded by crowds of people who would gingerly touch me to feel my skin, my hair, and my clothes. People turned around while driving to watch me on the street. I have never felt so conspicuous in all my life.” Visiting a nightclub in Yokohama, she found it as segregated as if “I were back in Harlem.”89 Jim Crow may have been starting to slip in the military, but there was still a long way to go before it would fall in the United States or in those foreign countries that hosted its military forces. Those changes that had come about so far, and would be steps on the path from segregation to desegregation to integration, did so because of the war itself.