Ninety-five to ninety-eight percent of the white officers were southerners. I think I was in a position to say that the majority of the white officers with the 93d were people who could not have made it with the 37th or 87th divisions, or any white division of any caliber. They might have been all right in the quartermasters, or some laundry units. Instead of being sent to jobs they were fit for, they were sloughed off on the 93d. . . . The black officers as a whole were superior to their senior officers in the 93d. And the black officers knew it; dissension was bound to arise. Then too, those white officers, though Lord knows they would never admit it, knew they were outclassed by their junior officers and this heightened their resentment. They took advantage of their rank to strike out at black officers.34

Even the presence of a superstar proved to do little for race relations between blacks and whites at Fort Huachuca. Boxer Joe Louis, born in rural and impoverished Alabama to sharecroppers, became the heavyweight champion of the world when he knocked out James Braddock on June 22, 1937. Louis became a hero to all soldiers, white and black, when in 1942, after defeating Buddy Baer, he donated his share of the purse to the Army and Navy Relief Fund. When Louis himself enlisted in the army and became a sergeant, he visited Fort Huachuca in 1943 to stage an exhibition match for the soldiers.35 It was a highlight among black and white soldiers alike. But the racism continued.

And the incidents of discrimination inevitably affected the plight of black nurses. After gaining admittance in 1941, the actual enlistment of black nurses in the army remained incredibly low. It was obvious the army didn’t want them in the war effort. In 1944, there were only 330 black nurses in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, even though 8,000 had tried to enlist.36

After Elinor and the other nurses in her cohort completed basic training in the summer of 1944, the army gave them official orders to report to another destination as second lieutenants in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps. Until then, none of the nurses knew where they would end up during the war. Many longed to go overseas. There was a group of black nurses from the 25th Infantry who were in New Guinea and the Philippines tending to the black soldiers stationed in the Pacific. But foreign assignments were rare for black nurses and largely depended on how many black soldiers would be stationed nearby. There was a revolving door of transfers at Fort Huachuca. Soldiers came in and were then deployed out to other bases. Black nurses tended to follow the black soldiers, given the strict segregation rules, but Elinor’s group received shocking instructions. They were headed to Camp Florence, a prisoner-of-war camp for German soldiers located in an even more remote area of Arizona.