This is the first of a series of articles explaining the organization and functions of the Harvard navy and army Reserve Officers' Training Corps and their part in the national defense system.

The 500 men enrolled in the departments of Military Science and Naval Science are actually the historical descendants of the "Minute Man" militia of 1776 and of the privateersman of 1812.

Trained by the four courses in each department in the fundamentals of the science of war, they will on graduation become part of a citizen army which forms the bulk of the defense forces of the United States.

Trained Civil Populace

The army reserves and the navy reserves are organized on the same theory, that of providing a trained civil populace to form around the regular army in a time of what both the War Department and the Department of the Navy refer to euphemistically as "national emergency."

The army's Reserve Officers' Corps, into which the members of the University's Reserve Officers' Training Corps will automatically step on leaving college, is one of three bases of the country's land defenses along with the National guard and the Regular Army.

Contains Only Officers

Inactive in peace time, it consists entirely of reserve officers grouped into regiments which contain no private soldiers, nothing' but officers. These skeleton regiments will be filled out by volunteers and by the draft in the event of a war.

The present system was initiated in 1920 following the War, when it was found that the method of training used by the army was woefully lacking in scope. 90,000 reserve officers were on the rolls in 1935, but the strength of the corps at that time was far below War Department mobilization plans.

The Naval Reserve Officers' Corps is very similar in its general organization, but it differs in details. It is divided into four branches: the Organized Reserve, who meet to train every week and correspond roughly to the National Guard; the Merchant Marine Reserve, made up of American seamen and officers on American ships which might be converted to auxiliaries in time of war; the Fleet Reserve, composed of men who have served in the Regular Navy; and the Volunteer Reserve, which class the graduates of the Harvard Naval Science courses and the courses of the seven other colleges which give the naval training will fall into.

The Volunteers are civilians and go about their regular jobs. Between promotions they must go on training cruises, just as the army reservists must go to camp in order to reach a higher rank than second lieutenant, and just as the reservists can join the National Guard if they wish, the volunteer naval reservists can enter the the Organized Reserves when vacancies occur in that highly crowded branch of the service.

Modern warfare is a highly technical science, and it is impossible to train efficient officers in a short space of time. Both in the army and in the navy the commanding officers must be specialists, in some field of engineering or tactics