Note (Back) — CHAPTER 7
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No sooner had the demands of the overseas theaters been dealt with than the enlarged black quotas came under attack from the commanders of major forces. Instead of planning to absorb more Negroes, the Army Air Forces wanted to divest itself of some black units on the premise that unskilled troops were a liability in a highly technical service. General Spaatz reported that some 60 percent of all his black troops stationed in the United States in January 1946 were performing the duties of unskilled laborers and that very few could be trained for skilled tasks. He predicted that the Army Air Forces would soon have an even higher percentage of low-scoring Negroes because 15 percent of all men enlisting in his Regular Army units—expected to reach a total of 45,000 men by 1 July 1946—were black. To forestall this increase in "undesirable and uneconomical" troops, he wanted to stop inducting Negroes into the Army Air Forces and suspend all black enlistments in the Regular Army.[7-17]