TO LOOK at their Palm Beach sport jackets and their wives' Lord and Taylor prints, you'd never guess that the boys from '46 suffer from an acute lack of class consciousness. But that's exactly the problem that every one kept uneasily in the back of his mind when the organizers of this year's 25th Reunion sat down to map out their respective strategies nine months ago.

"This class just didn't seem to want to get involved," explained Diana Statler, one of the secretaries who man the Reunion's 1 Court Street office. "They all seemed to be too busy. They just never felt like a class."

"Most of us feel like comparative strangers to one another," repeats Robert Aaron in the very first of the alumni biographies that comprise the '46er's mammoth 1600 page class record. "It would have been nice to have had it otherwise."

But, of course, that was not to be. After all, there was a war out there to fight and so the Class of '46 never had much time for traditional college paraphernalia. Many arrived in Cambridge during the summer of '42, eager to enter upon a hectic round of three semesters per year as the University escalated its schedule in an effort to process more troops and officers for the front lines overseas.

Dillon Field House was laundering over 4000 towels a day at the time, as the existing athletic program gave way to an intensified effort at civilian fitness and military drill. Simultaneously, actual civilian enrollment in the University shrank to less than 1000 as 5000 servicemen enrolled in a panoply of 13 different on-campus military programs. Even the CRIMSON shut up for a moment as its editors suspended publication in favor of printing a non-editorializing, twice-weekly-sheet unimaginatively titled the Harvard Service News.

The Coop jumped on the bandwagon by advertising "Slightly Used" Naval Uniforms for a mere $22.50. Humphrey Bogart hit town in a new flick called Casablanca. And a move to liberalize parietal hours by permitting women in the dorms until 8 p.m. instead of seven (just a few years earlier, the rule that required that a third person also be present had fallen by the wayside) was defeated by the masters.

NOT THAT a good deal of the old Harvard didn't also remain, if only in their memories, to remind the Class of '46 of the world they were so rapidly leaving behind. After all, they well knew, they had been the last class to have known waitresses in the dining halls. And they were also the only class capable of bequeathing Harvard traditions to those who would follow them in the postwar years. For they could recall the days when they-and not the Navy-had lived in the Yard. And they could also tell of those publications like the Guardian and the Advocate which had collapsed only when their editors went off to war.

When the construction of Lamont Library was first suggested, the CRIMSON, almost salubrious with the class's sense of the past, protested: "TheUniversity must not allow the Yard to disintegrate into just another Cambridge block. To do this while disregarding outside and convenient sites is to misuse a treasured locale and to insult generations of men who lived there."

Not that the Class of '46 felt the least bit sorry about the sacrifices it had made. In fact, when the CRIMSON resumed publication in the spring of '44, one could almost detect the first intonations of a new reverse-snobbishness: "The handful of pre-war students had too many memories of peacetime luxury," a '46 editor wrote of the class that had preceded him. "[They had] too many good times for them to be very happy this last year, or so they said. At any rate, the Class of '46 was too busy or too ignorant to be so gloomy."

A sullen frown was about the only kind of dissent that was at all tolerable throughout the turmoil of the war years. If anyone chose to criticize the ROTC drills, it was only on the grounds that their massing in the Yard destroyed the grass which kept the topsoil from blowing off into Somerville.

The minor controversies that did exist were like that which surrounded the appearance of Hitchcock's Life boat in the spring of '44-unfortunately, many felt, Walter Slezak in the role of a Nazi gunboat captain had been spotlighted too sympathetically.

On a more serious level, there was something of a genteel attack on anti-Semitism in the air-particularly after the Gilbert-Poor Affair in which two freshmen, victimized by townies because one of the two was a Jew, received a column and a half of attention in Time magazine, but only one inch in the Service News. Similarly, when F. O. Mathiessen, professor of American Literature, submitted a review of "Strange Fruit," a 1943 novel on racism, to the News, he was forced to run it as a letter because of the editors' fears of potential editorializing. So clearly the times weren't as tranquil as the gauzy haze of nostalgia would make them appear at first sight. As '46 classmate James G. Trager wrote at the time, the Service News was forced "to walk a tight rope carrying a fine-silk parasol" to maintain its pose of equanimity, and, one suspects, many other aspects of college life were forced to pursue a parallel course.

IF THERE was no other reason to tame youthful exuberance, there was always the constant specter of death that haunted the fortunes of the class. The 32 classmates who graduated as scheduled in June '46 (the rest of the record-breaking class of 1400 had either already managed to leave with diplomas or else they had enlisted or been drafted to return to Harvard at some later date-or, in a sizeable number of cases, not at all) were painfully aware of the fact that an even larger number of their classmates, 35 to be exact, were already dead. One classmate, in what surely must be a courageous story he is too reticent to tell, spent 14 years hospitalized as a result of wounds received during the war.

What of those who had been to the war and survived? "We returned, most of us, to get our degrees and get started, it would seem, on safe somnambulating lives," wrote John P. Marquand, Jr. in his 25th report. "I don't think we had a trace of youthful radicalism nor of conservatism beyond a wish not to be threatened again."

As if to bear witness to that fact, the dominant impression one has of the class's subsequent choice of occupation is that of dogged professionalism. Lawyers, brokers, doctors and professors abound. Scholarly monograms are listed in abundance. But traces of flamboyant personality are rare. And the true eccentrics must have made off with those last of the Union waitresses for they are almost nowhere to be found.