Fort Huachuca was home to as many as twenty thousand black soldiers at a time, and the commanding general and his staff didn’t seem very interested in keeping their morale high. One black soldier, Sergeant Carter from the 597th Field Artillery Battalion, recalled, “Here was a big sprawling camp containing between 17,000 and 20,000 black men with a small percentage of white officers . . . who enforced the strictest segregation possible between themselves and the black officers. Their only contact was strictly in relation to military activities; social contact was out. How they could possibly function together in combat was a question that had to pass through many a black officer’s minds, not to mention the minds of enlisted men.”28

The black medical staff at Fort Huachuca had the largest group of African American medical professionals in the military. Hospital One, the first all-black hospital at the base, had 946 beds and was designated exclusively for blacks, from patients to personnel. It was led by Lieutenant Colonel Midian Othello Bousefield, the highest-ranking African American army physician. There were three dental clinics, with dentists treating approximately a thousand cases per week. The medical corps was staffed with forty-two black medical officers and many African American orderlies. In 1942, there were sixty black nurses, and by 1943, there were a hundred. The number grew each year as Fort Huachuca became the transitional station to train black nurses before shipping them out to various posts throughout the country and occasionally overseas.29

With an elite group of medical professionals and an abundance of black enlisted men in the immediate vicinity, Elinor and the other nurses primarily socialized inside the gates of Fort Huachuca. There wasn’t anywhere else to go, and at least when they stayed on base, they were surrounded by other black people who acknowledged and appreciated them. The 25th and 368th Infantries, the largest units of black troops, were activated at the fort; they included the fabled 92nd and 93rd Divisions, which had helped France achieve victory during World War I.30 There were thousands of black military personnel everywhere on base, which made both the black nurses and soldiers happy. Seeing black men in uniforms smiling and tipping their hats was comforting, and more in line with what a young nurse like Elinor thought the army would be like.

The concentrated population of young black women and men at Fort Huachuca had distinct social advantages. In 1942 two black companies of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (later simplified to WAC) arrived to assist with various jobs around the base. These women were part of the Service Command, whose tasks ranged from repairing stalled trucks to putting on dances for the troops—anything to boost morale and aid the war effort.31 That same year, Fort Huachuca finally built an officers’ club for African Americans, called Mountain View.