Conclusion: The Outcome of an Experiment

Summary

At the end of this story, I propose to compare the experience of segregated training at Huachuca during World War II to a ghetto: it presents the excluding and ostracizing face, as well as the protective and integrating face. Furthermore, the Huachuca experience had a double effect on the racial policy of the post-war army: the black hospital showed that interracial care could be accepted by doctors and patients, and set a precedent for integrated care at field hospitals based overseas during the war; the catastrophic fighting experience of the 92nd Division on the Gothic Line, as a result of its inadequate training, proved that segregated training was also negative from a strictly military point of view. Thus, the experiment carried out at Huachuca during the war laid the groundwork for the presidential decision to put an end to discrimination in the armed forces taken by Executive Order 9981 in July 1948.