On a pitch black evening the night before Thanksgiving in the middle of World War II, A dozen Radcliffe students traveled to a military base in a remote area on the coast of Massachusetts to entertain troops watching for enemy submarines.

"We were in the mess hall. There was a big pot-bellied stove at one end," recalls Marilyn Whisman Tyler '45, who organized the two dozen women who made up Radcliffe's entertainment Unit.

"[Beverly Maynard Jeffers '45] had this song and dance member. She fell over backwards off the stage into the coal bin, with her legs sticking up," Tyler said. "The men thought it was wonderful. They thought it was on purpose."

"She just got up and smiled and waved," remembers Tyler.

The members of Radcliffe's class of 1945 who spent four full years in residence at the College are the only alumnae to have attended school for the entire war.

"Then came Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941," reads the Fiftieth Reunion Book. "The next day a mass meeting was held in Agassiz House. [Radcliffe's President Ada Louise Comstock advised, it is our] `immediate duty to continue our college work in order to prepare ourselves for the organization of a peaceful world."

Four years later, as the class prepared to graduate, the somber mood had changed.

"1945 was a spring of celebrations: V-E Day Celebration. W.K. Jordan Address' (5/11/45)," the reunion book reads.

Throughout their years at Radcliffe, the women were urged to participate in the war effort. The reunion book records knitting sweaters for the Red Cross, performing in benefit shows, apple picking, watching for enemy planes, ecouraging the study of math and science and complaining in the spring of 1945 that too few undergraduates were doing was work.

But in the fall of 1943, according to the reunion book, half of all students were doing some sort of war work.

"Everybody's boyfriend was off someplace," Tyler recalls.

"We all had boyfriends; we all had brothers, fathers who were in the war," says John Keenan '45-'44. "There were people...in my dorm who had loved ones who were killed."

"Everybody wanted to do something then," remembers Patricia M. Sheehan '45. "There was a clear cause and everybody was in agreement. You felt guilty if you didn't do something."

Volunteer Work

The Entertainment Unit first performed at the Radcliffe College United Nations War Relief Benefit, a show and carnival Radcliffe students sponsored to raise money for war relief, and continued to perform for troops on weekends through 1944.