Holtan, a retired lawyer currently living in Naples, Fla., completed his studies early in 1942 and served in the ROTC artillery unit. With diploma in hand, he left Harvard and headed to Fort Sill and eventually to Europe.

"There was a sense that people were leaving [campus] and within a couple of years, people were dead from Guadalcanal," says Thomas R. Goethals. "There was a feeling of the fleetingness of life and there was a tendency to eat, drink and be merry--to hell with our studies, we thought."

For Goethals, the decision to volunteer for service was a matter of carrying on a family tradition. A sophomore when Pearl Harbor was bombed, Goethals says the war was a "troubled time" for him because he had difficulty deciding if he should complete his years at Harvard or enlist as many of his classmates did.

Although his "first inclination was to enlist immediately," Goethals, a retired teacher from Vineyard Haven, Mass., says he decided to remain at Harvard and join his father later, who had dropped his medical practice and enlisted before the war started.

"Much of my undergraduate years consisted of great night-long bull sessions deciding whether to enlist or enroll in medical school," says Goethals, adding that because of this internal struggle, he "didn't enjoy Harvard at all."

He also says he felt isolated from world events within the walls of Harvard Yard because "the day after Pearl Harbor, I went to Latin class and the professor droned on as if nothing had happened in the world."

The war, however, did touch upon the personal lives of Harvard and Radcliffe students with insidious discrimination directed toward "the enemy."

The day Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, a Japanese-American member of the Radcliffe Class of '43 was in Harvard Square purchasing supplies. On her way back to the Radcliffe Quad, she was stoned and bloodied.

Still, the campus remained relatively peaceful during wartime. While most men participated in drill practice or served in ROTC, Radcliffe students also aided in the war effort by volunteering in local hospitals, working part-time jobs after class, or participating in women's volunteer corps such as WAVES and WAACS.

And some accelerated or shortened their studies to marry before their Harvard sweethearts went off to war.

"[The war] made women more independent," says Rochellc Mirsky Cohen, a retired social worker living in Montreal. "We all got jobs straight out of the University and a number of classmates left campus, either to marry or to follow the [war] camps."

In the wake of the hundreds of drafts issued to men across the country, Cohen herself accelerated her studies to marry, graduate early and join her husband, Maurice S. Cohen '41 in New York.

Many women also donated hand-knitted sweaters, mufflers and caps to the fighting Americans in Europe. "Everyone was always carrying knitting around," Cohen remembers. "I couldn't imagine [the products] were very useful, but they took it to lectures often and instead of taking copious notes, they would knit."

Frances E. Hermann, a 1943 Radcliffe graduate who served as a weather forecaster through the WAVES program, remembers Radcliffe during wartime in her submission to the 50th Reunion Report:

"We witnessed WAVES drilling in our quadrangle; we saw some of our classmates participate in the communication program; we attended five o'clock socials with the naval officers studying at Harvard; and danced with busloads of service men from Fort Devans," writes Hermann, a part-time publications specialist from Bridgeport, Conn.