Note (Back) — CHAPTER 2

The Army integrated its officer candidate training in an effort to avoid the mistakes of the World War I program. In 1917 Secretary of War Newton D. Baker had established a separate training school for black officer candidates at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, with disappointing results. To fill its quotas the school had been forced to lower its entrance standards, and each month an arbitrary number of black officer candidates were selected and graduated with little regard for their qualifications. Many World War I commanders agreed that the black officers produced by the school proved inadequate as troop commanders, and postwar staff studies generally opposed the future use of black officers. Should the Army be forced to accept black officers in the future, these commanders generally agreed, they should be trained along with whites.[2-85]