When World War II began, no one in the University was immune to Harvard's transformation from an institute of higher learning to a military training center.

Students became soldiers. Chemists and engineers worked for the government, developing new munitions and sophisticated radar systems. President James B. Conant '14, a brilliant chemist himself, was a major player in the development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

When the war ended and the soldiers returned to campus, the College had changed forever.

Whether draftees or volunteers, 93 percent of the Class of 1946 served in the armed forces. This military experience had a vast but subtle effect on the soldiers as they returned from the guns and bullets of war to the textbooks and classes of college.

In a class already so fragmented by time and experience, the men found that rather than wanting to relax, they just wanted to get through their studies as soon as possible.

"We had four years to make up for," says Robert F. Dee '46-'49, who fought for the Tenth Mountain Ski Troop. "We had lost so much time we were doing our damnedest to get out quickly."

Another member of the Tenth Mountain agrees, saying that having fought in the war also made some of the soldiers more eager to learn.

"Frankly, I was more ready to go to school [after the war] than when I was right out of prep school," says Kenneth P. MacPherson '46-'48. "I had a better appreciation of what college can do for me. As a freshman, all I had to look forward to was being drafted."

MacPherson's desire to complete his schooling as quickly as possible had a curious result when the time finally came to receive his diploma.

"Having gone through combat, and having lost a lot of friends, I never even went to graduation," he says.

MacPherson says he did not like the ceremony surrounding his final departure from college. "With all the pomp and circumstance, I just wanted my education. Give me my diploma."

Other soldiers say the war matured them intellectually, thus making their education more beneficial.

"It was wonderful to get back to that kind of thing," says H. Roderick Nordell '46-'48. "A lot of us coming back were...more serious about our studies."

Nordell says he remembers being told by an academic adviser: "You seem to have matured intellectually."

The regimented military lifestyle during the war also changed students' perceptions of the pace of college life.

"I found that I was on a little bit of a faster rhythm, and I was impatient when things went slowly or inefficiently," Nordell says, although he admits the slower pace of thought and conversation could be appealing. "It was wonderful to gradually get back into casual talking and thinking."

For Nordell, service in the war did not mean that he sat around trading stories. Instead, the time spent in the trenches and the jungles seemed almost unreal.

"The war was there almost...like a dream," Nordell says. "You could hardly realize that you had been on that boat and in the foxhole. The war was like an intermission."

When that intermission was over, the curtain rose on a College that had been permanently changed by the half-decade of war.

The University had begun to admit women into classes, although in an ironic historical note, Conant declared, "Contrary to certain scare-heads in the papers, this date will not mark the beginning of coeducation here in Cambridge."

The G.I. Bill meant that returning veterans across the country would be able to afford a college education. Prior to the war, Conant, originally from middle-class Dorchester, had created new "National Scholarships" for students from the southern and western states to broaden Harvard's student body. But it took the war and the G.I. Bill to have a significant impact on the homogeneous student population.

Another aspect of the war years at Harvard was the tremendous over-crowding on campus. Students returning from military service often brought wives and sometimes families to school with them.

Harvard's decision to admit veterans who had not previously been College students under the G.I. Bill also contributed to the cramped housing situation.

"There were quite a few G.I. Bill people who had not been at Harvard before and who were quite older," says J. Anthony Lewis '48, a Crimson editor who is currently a New York Times columnist. "There was a lot of crowding."

In order to cope with the numbers, the University applied for help in finding housing for married veterans. In addition, the University doubled the capacity of the Yard, leaving only 10 singles available for the entire incoming class. And new bunk beds in place of single beds also increased the capacity of the rooms by 30 percent.

Students who lived within a 45-minute commute to the College were not permitted to live on campus.

Even the social atmosphere changed when the students returned to Cambridge.

Harvard before the war was largely an institution of social clubs and prep schools.

Joseph L. Ousley '46-'47 was assigned to Leverett House upon his arrival at the University in the fall of 1942 and roomed with three juniors who had attended the prestigious Choate School. Coming from a public high school, he says, he and his roommates "couldn't have contrasted more."

Ousley says he managed to adjust to the social scene, but that the scene had changed after he returned from the war.

Ousley had joined the army in the fall of 1944 and was shipped off to the Pacific. When he returned to school in the fall of 1946, he says he noticed an immediate difference in the social atmosphere around campus. Apparently, some of the more egalitarian military experience had rubbed off on the veterans.

"The aloof, elite sense that one gets from a superior class was dissolved," he says. "The whole place was opened up. The business of chasing club membership seemed silly."

Ousley himself was invited to join the Hasty Pudding Club and says, "It gave me the greatest pleasure to refuse it."

But this newfound egalitarianism could not overcome the divisions within the Class of 1946 caused by the war.

The men of the Class of 1946 had no orientation week, no simultaneous moving into dorms and did not even eat in the same dining hall. There was no time for class bonding with war looming on the horizon.

"It was terribly fragmented," Ousley says. "It bothers me now when I read the yearbook. There were people I should have known that I never knew at all."

Others agree that service in the armed forces often dictated who a student's friends were.

Because many of the men on campus--both graduate students and undergraduates--were in military training programs or were actively serving in the armed forces, students tended to make friends based on the service to which they belonged, rather than their graduation class.

"I knew most of the people from the Navy," says James J. Collins '46, who enrolled in the Navy's V-12 program, which meant that he was sent to midshipman school after the Navy determined that he had been sufficiently educated for the job.

"Initially, I lived in Kirkland House with the V-12, where I knew everybody," he says. "When I got out of the Navy and lived in Adams House, I knew very few people from my class."

If the Class of 1946 could not learn lessons from textbooks, at least they got an education in the brutal classroom of war.

"That experience of being thrown together with people from other parts of the country and totally different outlooks on life...was one of the most valuable things," Nordell says.

And Dee agrees: "Without any doubt we had acquired at least some more wisdom."

"I always felt pretty damn lucky," Ousley says. "I owe a great deal to the school. It was more of a challenge then I was ready to face."

Entering the War

Harvard, like much of America before Pearl Harbor was somewhat complacent about the gathering clouds of war. But there was one figure at the University who defied the isolationists and the appeasers--Conant.

Although Conant had been rather ambivalent about the German army's march across Europe prior to the Nazi invasion of Poland, after the start of the war on September 1, Conant "emerged on the national scene as a leading interventionist and in the Roosevelt administration as an apostle of military preparedness," according to a biography of Conant written by James B. Hershberg '82.

The man who advised students at the June 1939 Commencement to "neglect the tumult of the moment" would later send a telegram to Franklin D. Roosevelt '04 after the evacuation at Dunkirk in May 1940 stating, "I believe the United States should take every action possible to ensure the defeat of Hitler."

For the next year and a half, Conant played a major role in the interventionist movement. He began to make more frequent trips to Washington and also became a member of the influential "Gentleman's Club," an informal group of wealthy activists who used their connections with the influential elite to create the public support necessary for war.

This group included such men as Time and Life publisher Henry Luce, future Secretary of State Dean Acheson, future head of the Central Intelligence Agency Allen Dulles, columnist Joseph Alsop and others who felt the need to prod the Roosevelt administration toward greater support for the Allies.

In the early stages of Nazi aggression and even after the German invasion of Poland, the student body reacted angrily to Conant's position.

"We are frankly determined to have peace at any price," said a Crimson editorial appearing in the fall of 1939. "We refuse to fight another balance-of-power war."

At the 1940 Harvard-Yale Game, a group of Crimson and Lampoon editors joined forces to parody Conant's leading role in the interventionist movement. In 1941, students protested outside the president's office in Mass. Hall.

But as the signs of German aggression became clearer during 1941, greater numbers of students, in what another Crimson editorial termed a "seemingly drastic shift," prepared to leave school and head off to fight the enemy.

Finally, following Pearl Harbor, Harvard, along with the rest of America, decided to go to war.

The War Effort

Harvard's Class of 1946 was at the center of the global conflict.

The war fragmented the class, forcing the members to accelerate their college experience and, in most cases, interrupt it with a tour of duty in the military. Even with a sped-up trimester system allowing students to graduate in two-and-a-half years instead of the normal four, only 32 members of the class managed to graduate in June 1946. Most had to return after being discharged from the service to a University which had, in some sense, left them behind.

"The class was totally fractured," MacPherson says. "It was all screwed up." He says he moved into Wigglesworth in the fall of 1942, then lived in Adams House until he joined the Tenth Mountain Division that winter.

Many in the Class of 1946 never got a chance to spend their first year in the friendly confines of Harvard Yard, a privilege since taken for granted by the entering class, because the dorms were occupied by military trainees.

In June 1942, the first members of the Class of 1946 began their college careers under the new trimester system, but this educational device could not enable them to avoid the long arm of the draft.

College students had the option of either enlisting in the military or waiting to be drafted.

"I think most were drafted," says Robert S. Sturgis '44-'47, a former Crimson president. "There was a little bit of a class thing there. Most of the proper Bostonians I knew went out to enlist the day after war was declared."

Others students at the College agreed that the draft loomed over their years there before they joined the war effort.

"People were being drafted left and right," says MacPherson, who was already in Army ROTC so that he could be an officer when his number was finally chosen.

One unfortunate consequence of his ROTC membership came during the Harvard-Army football game of 1942.

"When Army came to play Harvard, we had to sit on the other side. We were told to dress up in our uniforms, parade around and all the time we were Harvard students," MacPherson recalls with a laugh.

In the winter of 1942-43, MacPherson decided to stop waiting. A recruiter from the Tenth Mountain ski troop came to Kirkland House to encourage Harvard men to volunteer, looking for anyone with either skiing or rock-climbing experience, and MacPherson joined.

"That ski troop had the highest IQ of any troop in the army, because most of them were recruited from college," MacPherson recalls.

MacPherson, who was awarded the Bronze Star during the war, spent most of his two years fighting in Italy, where he was wounded several times, but never sustained an injury more serious than a concussion.

Like MacPherson, other members of the Class of 1946 began to head off to the battlefield. Some even followed the same path he did.

Dee also volunteered for the ski troop that winter. Dee joined with a friend, Courtney A. Crandall '46-'48 with whom he would be together for the next six years, first in the war and then back at Harvard, earning his degree.

"We knew we wanted to get in the service. What intrigued us was that this was an all-volunteer outfit," Dee says.

Dee adds that by 1942 most of the other students were also preparing to fight.

"At least three out of four guys...had either joined the ROTC or the NROTC," Dee says.

Dee and Crandall trained at a camp about 150 miles west of Denver, Dee says, high up in the Rocky Mountains. As Dee tells it, Crandall who was from sunny California, began to regret volunteering for the troop.

"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.Photo courtesy of Harvard YearbookLong lines formed at Memorial Hall as students waited for book authorizations after the influx of veterans began in February, 1946.