Note (Back) — CHAPTER 17

Commanders in Korea had already begun to apply the only practical remedy. Confronted with battle losses in white units and a growing surplus of black replacements arriving in Japan, the Eighth Army began assigning individual black soldiers just as it had been assigning individual Korean soldiers to understrength units.[17-14] In August 1950, for example, initial replacements for battle casualties in the 9th Infantry of the U.S. 2d Infantry Division included two black officers and eighty-nine black enlisted men. The commander assigned them to units in his severely undermanned all-white 1st and 2d Battalions. In September sixty more soldiers from the regiment's all-black 3d Battalion returned to the regiment for duty. They were first attached but later, with the agreement of the officers and men involved, assigned to units of the 1st and 2d Battalions. Subsequently, 225 black replacements were routinely assigned wherever needed throughout the regiment.[17-15] By December the 9th Infantry had absorbed Negroes to about their proportion of the national population, 11 percent. Of six black officers among them, one commanded Company C and another was temporarily in command of Company B when that unit fought in November on the Ch'ongch'on River line. S. L. A. Marshall later described Company B as "possibly the bravest" unit in that action.[17-16]