HARVARD AT WAR

The sight of two Army lieutenants on their hands and knees paiustakingly "making mud-pies" seems a far cry from war training, but it's a deadly serious business to the 28 Army Engineers now Building behind the Law School.

studying Soil Mechanies at the Rotch various kinds of soils from all parts of

By studying the characteristics of the country these Army Engineers are working to make air ports "not any muddier than they have to be in the wet seasons of the year."

Graduates of this little publicized training school at Harvard are already in the deserts of North Africa, the hills of England, and many other parts of the world stabilizing shifting sands, and sticky clays for runways, roads and foundations for temporary structures.

Although the school was only started

Four Groups Finish Course

early in July, four groups of twenty-five officers each have passed through the six weeks course and another twenty-eight are busily at work in the Rotch Building testing soils.

It is a "dirty" job these engineers have to do, for their days in the lab are spent weighing soil under pressure, in water and dry. The primary purpose of the school is to give the men such a familiarity with soils that just by fingering it they can decide what type of planes could land safely.

Men Learn Soils

Many of their afternoons are spent at local military airports with picks and shovels gaining familiarity with airport construction and soil composition. Soil types which can't be investigated, at hand have been collected and are kept in many bowls in the lab. Each day for several hours the men work with these soils to gain familiarity for later emergency decisions.

In their long and muddy lab periods the Engineers concentrate on tests such as the determination of grain size, their plasticity, and load carrying capacity. From these tests the Engineers must quickly decide how to construct runways with available materials.

Men in the first four groups wore drawn from the ranks of professional civilian engineers. After a short basic, period they were sent to Harvard. Highway engineers, soil conservation experts, and men from the Bureau of Reclamation were represented.

Today's group has gone through OCS at Fort Belvoir Engineer School were then assigned here. It is made up of much younger men and Southern drawls and Western twangs are the rule rather than the exception.

Work Important

Their work is of the utmost importance especially in areas captured from the enemy. By quick tests these Soil Engineers decide whether a field is safe for Flying Fortresses or just pursuit ships, and on them rests the responsibility for a half a million dollar bomber.

Like many other war courses at Harvard, such as the "retreading course for businessmen at the Business School," this course is under the ESMWT program. Dr. Arthur Casagrande, associate professor of Engineering is in charge of this all-important branch of Harvard's war training effort.