"It was so cold when you walked on the snow it squeaked," Dee recalls. "I looked down the line [of soldiers] and [saw] Court Crandall, my roommate, and he turned to me and said 'You son of a bitch.' Yeah, he was from California."
Dee and Crandall would spend the next four years together in the Tenth Mountain.
Their division saw a lot of action as it slowly moved up the Italian peninsula; but not all Harvard soldiers had such experiences.
Ousley had already completed five semesters of coursework when he applied for a position working on electronics for the Navy. Instead, he was drafted into the Army, and he spent the war as a postal service worker working on various islands in the Pacific.
"I had it too easy in the military," Ousley says, adding that there were about 20 workers to do the work of five.
But along with the postal workers, sailors and soldiers who came back to Harvard after the war, there were those who would never return.
Almost 700 names are engraved on the wall of Memorial Church in remembrance of those from Harvard who died in World War II, including 37 names from the Class of 1946.