After the departure of the 93rd Infantry Division, the 92nd, which had hitherto been trained at various camps, assembled at Huachuca under the leadership of General Almond, a follower of the strictest regime of segregation. Under his command, the arrival of these men and their officers provoked a brutal change: the compromises and racial adjustments initiated by the fort commander were called into question by reinforced segregation (despite the general staff’s recommendations for arrangements), yet another level of humiliation, and even more repressive court martials. The imposition of a southern racial regime on the fort came close to provoking mutinies.

The choice of Fort Huachuca in Arizona to host the largest number of black soldiers in the country’s history can be explained by invoking its nineteenth-century history as a base for the buffalo soldiers, its remoteness from any white community, and the state’s transformation into a training ground and a rear base for the war effort. But the fort was woefully underequipped to train so many men, and the local community remained highly suspicious, despite the expectation of new resources.

The training of two all-black infantry divisions at Fort Huachuca during World War II is unprecedented in American history. Although it provides an insight into the contradictions of the US Army’s racial policy, this experiment has never been described before. This microhistory explores the agency of soldiers in the face of segregation and of their being treated as if they were inferior by the army.

While the fort’s surrounding towns became off-limits one after the other, Commander Hardy designed two enclaves directly at the fort’s gate to channel the boredom and anger brewing on the base. At “the Hook,” prostitution was supervised and regulated by the army, and STD control ensured by the hospital’s military team both for soldiers and for prostitutes. And, thanks to investments by Chicago businessmen, the “Greentop” became the largest segregated drinking establishment managed and controlled by the military. Through these two experiments intended to stem “vice,” the army extended its authority into civilian territory.

In the summer of 1943, African-American organizations stepped up pressure on the general staff to send black troops into combat. Attention was focused on the 93rd Infantry Division, which was finalizing its training. Sending it to the front was seen by black militants as a test of the army’s promise. At the end of the summer, Huachuca’s all-black training experience was publicized in the press by a major photo essay published by Life magazine. The 450 photos taken by Charles Steinheimer provide an insight into race relations at the camp and, on comparing censored and uncensored photos, give an idea of what the army was prepared to reveal about its race policy and practices. The photo essay played a decisive role in the decision to send the 93rd to Papua New Guinea.

The arrival of the 93rd Infantry Division in Huachuca necessitated the implementation of a specific racial regime. This was unprecedented, since no other all-black post existed in the country, but largely inspired by the “separate but equal” doctrine. It was applied both during and outside training, and was based on the separation of places along the color line, the matching of military and racial hierarchies, and the disproportionate repression of insubordination.

At the beginning of 1944, the War Department revised its doctrine on the employment of black troops, trying to purge it of essentializing racism, and prepared the deployment of black units abroad. To find out if the 92nd Infantry Division was fit for combat, despite the indiscipline and inadequacy declared by its commander, numerous inspections took place against a backdrop of extreme tensions and threats of mutiny. Only a regiment made up of the best elements was ultimately judged capable of going to fight in Italy on the Gothic Line.

To care for the 14,000 black infantrymen, a new hospital opened when the men arrived. Equipped with state-of-the-art material, it employed the best black doctors in the country, recruited by the Surgeon General’s office. It offered all the features of Deluxe Jim Crow, black excellence in a segregated setting. During the war, it offered the best care possible to men whose health was often shaky, and provided a safe haven for those seeking to escape a racially biased discipline.

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.

While the country’s public hospitals were still virtually all segregated, a unique experiment in medical integration took place at Fort Huachuca, involving both patients and doctors. The black hospital’s reputation for medical excellence attracted white patients – first officers, then their wives (despite the taboo of interracial intimacy), then civilians from the surrounding areas who knew they could not find such quality of care elsewhere. Prejudices about white patients’ reluctance to see black doctors were thus invalidated. Furthermore, given the inadequate qualifications of white doctors and the departure of many of them for the front, the white hospital had to call on black doctors. Care was therefore provided on an interracial basis. This experiment was tolerated by the Surgeon General’s Office, but turned out to be difficult to sustain.

Despite strong opposition within the army and society, the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps was created in 1942. Although segregated, it attracted many African-American women in search of income, emancipation or recognition of their contribution to the nation. The first two black companies were assigned to Huachuca to take over bureaucratic duties and traditionally female tasks. They were welcomed both as rivals and as possible sexual partners. Most of them turned this experience into an opportunity to assert their political, professional, and sexual agency. Their photographic and written documentation of their military experience at the fort offers a unique female gaze on the infantrymen’s training experience.

Since the beginning of training at Huachuca, sport and entertainment had been used as diversions from boredom and uncertainty as at other forts. For the 92nd and 93rd Infantry Divisions, however, the latter was stronger than elsewhere as doubt hung over the assignment of the men once training ended. The commander of the fort therefore had the idea of offering a level of leisure and cultural exposure unknown to blacks in civilian life, even though he perpetuated stereotypes about the natural talents of African Americans for sports and music. In a unique gesture of recognition, however, he granted artists-soldiers and -Wacs based in Huachuca new responsibility in the programming and choice of entertainment, even opening the fort to the fine arts. This attitude certainly contributed to explaining the non-explosion of the fort during the war.

In the summer of 1942, the governor of Arizona and the Secretary of War planned to enroll black soldiers from Huachuca to harvest cotton, which had become an essential raw material for the war. Faced with what was experienced as a humiliation, the infantrymen began to speak of the fort as “a plantation” on which Southern ante bellum slavery would be perpetuated. It is true that training conditions there were harsher than on other camps, repression more severe, and military justice racially biased.