plans
for a racially integrated general service when Japan capitulated.

To achieve equality of treatment and opportunity, however, takes more
than the development of an integration policy. For one thing, the
liberalization of policy and practices affected only a relatively
small percentage of the Negroes in the Navy. On V-J day the Navy could
count 164,942 enlisted Negroes, 5.37 percent of its total enlisted
strength.[3-138] More than double the prewar percentage, this figure was
still less than half the national ratio of blacks to whites. In August
1945 the Navy had 60 black officers, 6 of whom were women (4 nurses
and 2 WAVES), and 68 enlisted WAVES who were not segregated. The
integration of the Navy officer corps, the WAVES, and the nurses had
an immediate effect on only 128 people. Figures for black enlisted men
show that they were employed in some sixty-seven ratings by the end of
the war, but steward and steward's mate ratings accounted for some
68,000 men, about 40 percent of the total black enlistment.
Approximately 59,000 others were ordinary seamen, some were recruits
in training or specialists striking for ratings, but most were
assigned to the large segregated labor units and base companies.[3-139]
Here again integrated service affected only a small portion of the
Navy's black recruits during World War II.

[Footnote 3-138: Pers 215-BL, "Enlisted
Strength--U.S. Navy," 26 Jul 46, BuPersRecs.]

[Footnote 3-139: Pers 215-12-EL, "Number of Negro
Enlisted Personnel on Active Duty," 29 Nov 45
(statistics as of 31 Oct 45), BuPersRecs.]

Furthermore, a real chance existed that even this limited progress
might prove to be temporary. On V-J day the Regular Navy had 7,066
Negroes, just 2.14 percent of its total.[3-140] Many of these men could
be expected to stay in the postwar Navy, but the overwhelming majority
of them were in the separate Steward's Branch and would remain there
after the war. Black reservists in the wartime general service would
have to compete with white regulars and reservists for the severely
reduced number of postwar billets and commissions in a Navy in which
almost all members would have to be regulars. Although Lester Granger
had stressed this point in conversations with James Forrestal, neither
the secretary nor the Bureau of Naval Personnel took the matter up
before the end of the war. In shor