Men of '43 Faced a Different War

During the year following Pearl Harbor the United States girded itself for war. It wasn't like the last time, though. There was less cheering as the boys marched off, and more fear. But still the nation pulled together, and Harvard resolutely took up her share of the load.

For the first time in her history, a summer school session became part of the regular college schedule. Harvard officials declared the twelve-week period equal to a semester, to hurry the Seniors off to war. On June 29, after a month's vacation, the Class of '43 registered for a last abbreviated year.

The registration envelope is a bulging, irregular bag of mysteries. That year it was stranger than ever. The Phillips Brooks House activities questionnaire, for example, offered a momentous choice of activities--the Red Cross, War Service Committee, or the Committee of Public Safety, if you dug civil defense.

The first issue of the year? It was rubber. The Japanese had occupied Southeast Asia and Massachusetts lagged far behind the rest of the nation in her collection of scrap rubber. For Harvard, the humiliation was compounded--President Conant headed the national scrap rubber committee.

Harvard and sons strove to atone for Yankee niggardliness. Seniors welcomed freshmen to the Houses, while the Navy took over the Yard; the Freshman Union became a communications school. Upperclassmen, those above the draft-eligible age of 20, heard their country call, and ROTC and the Enlisted Reserve Corps accepted many of them.

The CRIMSON, steadfast in her role as self-styled vanguard of the people, wrote of those who refused to take part in the War Bonds campaign: "If their conclusions are that any money they lend the government will aid in prosecuting the war, that Roosevelt should shoulder all the Burden, and that their own troubles come first--then let them think carefully before giving monetary aid to their country. They should be applauded for their courage to stand up for their own rights. They will probably still be doing, so when the Japs land at San Francisco and the Nazis are crossing the Ohio."

The attitude of alarm is understandable. The Germans hadn't yet stalled in Russia, and in Africa, Rommel, the "Desert Fox," was pestering the British back to Tangiers. The Japanese island-hopped across the Pacific.

Harvard didn't flinch. On July 29, "the first modern guerrilla warfare unit ever organized in the United States" held its first meeting in Emerson Hall. 175 sneaky undergraduates put their sangfroid on the line and joined the group, which announced it would emulate the tactics of Colonel Lawrence of Arabia. Four athletic credits were promised all participants.

In such an electric climate, anti-war feelings didn't prosper. The Harvard Pacifist Association counted 14 pious members, all Quakers and Jehovah's Witnesses. Even they did their best to contribute, as conscience and beliefs would allow--the CRIMSON noted with grudging approval, "They have offered themselves as subjects for study to psychologists who have been invited to attend their meetings."

Not all aspects of war were grim. The ordinary Harvard summer school continued to exist together with the College's summer semester, and 500 females lived in the Yard. So there was ample opportunity for that one last fling. Where to squire your sweet-heart? In August the Keith Memorial played "Pride of the Yankees," the story of big, brave Lou Gehrig, the man death had cloaked with quickened immortality some ten years before. For the more romantically entwined couple, Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire starred in "Holiday Inn" at the Paramount. Dinner could be had for an easy sum at Durgin Park. And if a Harvard man was lonely and alone, or out with the fellows instead of a girl, Boston's Scollay Square beckoned from its Old Howard Casino.

So there was hay to be made that summer, but the season was short. In September, when the girls left Grays and the ones from the "Annex" -- Radcliffe -- returned to take their places, Selective service head General Louis Hershey announced that every able-bodied man who passed his twentieth birthday was sure to be drafted. And there were no 2-S deferments then.

For some, the resulting combination of duty and inevitability dictated early response. Late that September, 125 Harvard students, class of '43, "graduated," without Commencement exercises, and entered the Armed Forces.

Some stayed on, trying to salvage and savor what remained of "college life." There was still some life to be had. The Student Council, led by Thomas Matters '43, president, and Adam Yarmolinsky '43, secretary, struggled on with eventful issues; but in October it merely recommended to the Faculty that Harvard adopt a year-long trimester schedule or keep the two semester-cum-twelve week summer period, and was immediately branded "powerless" for its equivocal efforts. On October 5, the Crimson football team locked helmets with mighty Penn, but though Coach Harlow's boys struggled like friends, they lost, 19-7.

And, at first, the world war did not leave the nation bereft of more personal social issues. On the last day of October, Harvard upset Princeton, a school Cambridge men scorned because it still refused to admit Negroes, by a 19-14 score. During the game Boston police confiscated all issues of the Massachusetts Free Press, which Harvard students were distributing outside the Stadium. The Press supported the impending state referendum legalizing the dispensation of birth control information by doctors. Boston's finest ended the effort because, as they explained, "someone would have to come and pick up all the pamphlets that were dropped in the streets."

But war's gloom couldn't be put out of mind. Some two weeks before the Princeton game, President Roosevelt, in a Fireside Chat, announced that he would shortly ask Congress to lower the draft age to 18. Several days before that, James Conant called for the "conversion" of Harvard to war-time status. According to his plan, soon to be adopted in modified form, Harvard and the other Ivy schools would cease providing "college" educations altogether, and devote themselves exclusively to training local high school graduates for Army and Navy duty.

At last, prideful and vain as Harvard was, she had found a cause bigger than herself, and in the act of giving aid she was being swallowed up.

In November the United States took the offensive against the Germans in Africa, penetrating Oran and pushing Rommel's desert rats before them. On the 23rd, the Crimson lost to Yale, 7-3. Five days later the roof of Boston's Coconut Grove restaurant came crashing down in flames on its hundreds of screaming victims. Five Harvard undergraduates died. But by now Harvard's seniors had little attention to spare for local news. America had tasted blood in North Africa, and beginning in late November thirty members of the class of '43 dropped out of Harvard each week.

The student, having attended the summer semester and most of the fall, was assured of a degree. Why not drop out? One could always come back to school, if one lived. Besides, Harvard wasn't Harvard anymore. As soon as undergraduates left, the Army and Navy moved men in. On December 6, General Hershey froze the Enlisted Reserves, and enlistment or the draft were the only alternatives left. A fellow could be picked up at 18 now, so no one--freshman, sophomore, junior, or senior--was going to stay in school much longer anyway, if he were able-bodied.

So a large chunk of men had left Cambridge in September. In January, most were scheduled to graduate. This time, there were Commencement exercises, shortened though they were. Saturday, January 9, 1943, was Class Day. The Senior Super was held that night. On Sunday President Conant delivered a Valedictory address, paying tribute to those about to leave for war. Before that freezing Sunday in Massachusetts' mid-winter, Harvard's Class of 1943 numbered 525 remaining members; afterwards, 149 stayed in Cambridge, some of them deferred, some in ROTC and Enlisted Reserve units that hadn't yet been called to active duty, was it worthwhile staying on? A Harvard undergraduate was rarer than a soldier now, and 20 per cent of the Faculty--400 men--had left the University for military duty. And most portentous of all, the WAVES had established a headquarters at Radcliffe.

If the way of the Service seemed hard, civilian life was no more inviting. Food and gasoline were available only on the ration system. There was little money to spend on Boston night-life. And even free speech was thought an extravagance that couldn't always be allowed. Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell fell victims to a controversial court decision in February, 1943; they were told they could no longer criticize high government officials on their radio broadcasts in this state of national emergency.

Most of Harvard's remaining professors found themselves understandably pre-occupied with the war. Charles Townsend Copeland might continue his annual poetry readings in Emerson Hall, but Pitirim Sorokin abandoned purely academic pursuits to perfect and publicize his plan for world peace--national sovereignty, he believed, had to be sacrificed for a world government with a monopoly of force.

And, of course, athletics could not remain the same, under tensions of the war-time economy and the brawn drain. In March Harvard announced that all inter-collegiate sports would end after the baseball season; the intra-mural program would be developed more extensively to take their place.

Harvard officially went on trimester that month, but the change went unnoticed by most Harvard "students," who were new-comers; Harvard was now a military school. On May 27, the Harvard CRIMSON suspended publication, "to return only when Harvard is once again a liberal arts college." And on that same date, Harvard's Spring version of Commencement took place, a one-day affair. Of 1115 degrees conferred, only 368 of them were awarded to undergraduates, of both the Class of '43 and '44.

All members of the Class of '43 were out, at last.

Perhaps, the gulf between the Class of '43 and the graduates of 1968 is not as wide and profound as one may initially beliee. A visiting Nieman Fellow by the name of Fred Neal wrote in the CRIMSON in 1943, "Harvard's reputation in Washington is not only academic. Particularly in that maelstrom called Capitol Hill, Harvard is almost synonymous with long hair, unworkable theories, and those vague activities described as 'un-American.'"

Neal went on to mourn that Capitol Hill's image of Harvard was for the most part mistaken, that Harvard men hadn't yet fulfilled the radical potential they undoubtedly had.

At a Harvard which was more military school than anything else, it was perhaps impossible for Harvard men to fulfill the radical potential that undoubtedly had. If not for the war--the war which was so clear-cut--the Class of '43 might have been much more like the one graduating this Thursday