World War II: Faculty Plays Key Role

World War II brought many changes to Harvard: plastic trays replaced china in the dining halls, and hundreds of WAVES swamped Radcliffe; the Lampoon and the Advocate suspended publication, and the CRIMSON became the Service News; the College was in session all year, and the fervor of a nation at war pervaded the usually staid Cambridge scene. Just as World War II did things for Harvard, however, the University did things for World War II. 25,540 of the almost 100,000 living alumni and students served in the Allied forces and 455 of them never returned. In addition, 654 Faculty and staff members, one-third of the peacetime total, were serving in either military or government capacities as of D-Day.

Many of these people remain on the Faculty today, and a sizeable number of men with war experience have been added since 1945. Some of the functions that these men performed include scientific research, administration, teaching, writing history, and spying. And as Harvard's President, James B. Conant '14 exercised his leadership to a far-reaching extent.

Morison: Naval Historian

Of all the wartime careers of Faculty members, that of Samuel Eliot Morison '08, now Jonathan Trumbull Professor of History, Emeritus, stands out. His work as naval historian of the war earned him the inevitable comparison with Thucydides--and he richly deserves it. It was not long after Pearl Harbor that Morison had the brain wave that resulted in a brilliant 13-volume history of U. S. naval operations. Even before the December 7 disaster he had become a prominent spokesman on maritime affairs. His active pre-war support of President Roosevelt's foreign policy won Time magazine's epithet, "a Boston Brahmin with a brain;" and in April, 1941 his urging that convoys accompany supply ships crossing the Atlantic was but an example of his acute perception of naval problems. When heeded, his plan proved successful in cutting down the high mortality rate of cargo vessels.

His idea of writing a naval history of the war was relayed to F.D.R. by Judge Samuel Rosenman, and then to Secretary of the Navy Knox, who arranged for Morison to receive a commission as a Lieutenant Commander in the Naval Reserve--provided he passed the physical. With characteristic vigor and energy, Morison started out by himself in May, 1942; by V-J day he had a staff of five officers and three enlisted personnel. He was personally responsible for all that appeared in the history, and though he was commissioned to write it, it was not "official" since neither Morison nor the Navy wanted a mere outline of facts without judgements, an uncritical chronicle or catalogue.

Yachting for the Navy

"Some men enter the Navy through the hawse hole, as enlisted men, but I entered through the cabin window," he related. He set sail first on the Guinevere, a converted yacht on anti-submarine duty off the Atlantic coast; his influence first showed when he persuaded the captain to dock at Maine's Matinicus Island, where the entire crew was feted with a lavish lobster dinner. The historian who had earlier retraced Columbus' path to the New World was off on another, more dangerous mission, applying his philosophy of writing history once more, a philosophy that told him to relive history in order to write it. He borrowed from Ovid to express his method: "Dream dreams, then write them. Aye! But live them, too."

Baptism by Fire

After a spell of convoy duty, he boarded the light cruiser Brooklyn in October, and went to Casablanca where he experienced his baptism by fire. Operation "Torch" was then the greatest amphibious undertaking in history, and Morison was on hand to record it, in all its complexities. The captain praised him after the battle, saying, "By his alert, active, analytical work in recording the events of the action; by his keen fighting spirit . . . ;and by his calm manner he contributed to the general and overall performance of the vessel."

A brief turn at writing in Washington soon ended when in the spring of the following year he set out to the Solomons, where he formed a friendship with Admiral Nimitz. Establishing headquarters in Hawaii, he spent the summer canvassing the combat area of the South Pacific. He survived the Japanese air attack on Guadalcanal and saw even more action on the night of July 12, when his ship engaged in a skirmish as it crossed the "slot" between Guadalcanal and Bougainville. A brief review of Atlantic waters notwithstanding, he stayed in the South Pacific until the end of the year aboard the heavy cruiser Baltimore, which was involved in the capture of the Gilberts. Morison was on the ship when the carrier Liscome Bay, alongside, was torpedoed; he thus saw rescue operations in action.

Action and Writing

Interspersing action with writing, he worked on the first volume about the Atlantic, while assistants covered the fighting at Kwajalein and Eniwetok. Returning to the Pacific to observe the "breaking of the Bismarcks barrier," he sent an assistant to the Mediterranean to report on the landing at Anzio. Still in the spring of '44, Morison took part in the Saipan and Guam landings, as an assistant was on hand for D-Day. Another assistant observed the action in Leyte Gulf.

A third spell in the Atlantic--following up anti-sub action--and then an inspection tour of the French and Italian beach-heads occupied Morison in the winter of '44-'45, and then back to the Pacific. He arrived too late for Iwo Jima but on time to take in the action at Okinawa, on the battleship USS Tennessee. While he was on that ship, a kamikaze pilot provided him with his closest brush with death, narrowly missing him, Admiral Deyo, and Captain Heffernan on the suicidal plunge. After visiting the Phillipines, Morison planned to participate in the long-awaited Kyushu landing in October; the product of other Harvard men--the atomic bomb--ended that.

Enemy Archieves Used

After examining both the Japanese and German naval archives, and armed with a view of the war as a whole, he and his assistants then set out to record what they had seen and learned. In April, 1946, he returned to his Chair in the History Department and wrote the naval history "weekends, holiday, and other days before 0900 and after 1700."

His pet antipathy is toward "gonna" historians--scholars who are always "gonna" write the great work. He had promised F.D.R. that would write the naval history himself, with only necessary assistance, which was provided by former pupils and one Yale man (an already established naval historian). His unbeatable approach left the Navy Department-- and the world--a first-hand account of what happened at sea. His example proved the military value of a scholar.

Taylor in Intelligence

Another such example was that set by Charles H. Taylor, whose wartime activity almost resulted in a visit to Kirkland House by General Omar Bradley. Taylor went into the army in 1942, and was assigned to the editorial branch in Washington, where his job was to aid in collecting and disseminating intelligence reports and bulletins, writing reports on how to use captured weapons. He worked in this capacity with Tony Lanero, the Scotty Reston of his day as chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times.

When the army set up "G-2," an historical branch of military intelligence, Taylor was assigned to it for obvious reasons. Under Colonel Kemper, now headmaster of Andover, he helped develop a system of field men attached to GHQ, and ficial records through interviews with the troops. In the European Theatre alone there were over 200 field men attached to GMQ, and Taylor was one of them.

He spent three days with a paratroop battalion in Normandy a few weeks after they had been dropped, reconstructing the action one day for a case study along the lines of Max Weber's "ideal type" theory. Then followed ten days with a ranger battalion that had hit the Normandy beaches, including the wounded. He helped write a series of 16 monographs on landings, concentrating his efforts on the story of Omaha Beach. After the war, series on the workings of the engineers, the medics, the supply corps, and the general staff were prepared, modeled after the original case studies.

100-Volume History

The 80-100 volume army history of the war is still being written, Taylor reports, with about 50 now published. Now part of the army system, and utilized most recently in Korea, the "biggest thing of its kind in U.S. records" meant a great deal to him. "I am very proud to have been in on it," he says, recalling even today the tension of London under V-2 fire and buzz bomb attacks. He emphasizes the loneliness felt by each individual in combat, alone in a foxhole or behind a solitary bush, and relates that he then learned how difficult the piecing together of history actually is.

Taylor stated that "the American army is generally a civilian army in time of war, and plans never work out according to the way they're set up." Trying to record "not merely what was supposed to happen but what actually happened," Taylor and his group must have succeeded, as the fact that their case studies are still used in training in camps will testify.

According to Taylor, "one of the great public servants in the war" was his own colleague in the History Department, Coolidge Professor William L. Langer '15, who directed the Research and Analysis Branch, Office of Strategic Services. Starting in 1941 under "Wild Bill" Donovan, Langer helped organize what he calls a "super-university," a group of highly qualified experts on foreign affairs, experts that knew other countries inside out from personal experience and years of study. One of the first few in OSS--which was barely organized by Pearl Harbor--by the end of the war he had a staff of 1500 working under his guidance and direction.

"We tried to pull all the knowledge of crucial areas together," he recalls, citing the secret intelligence reports from behind the lines as well as economic and political information that the staff of experts prepared from published material. The biggest problem OSS had to face was securing the most important information without angering army and navy intelligence men. Such information as the most important bombing targets ("We couldn't tell the Air Force what to bomb, but we could tell them what the relative importance of targets was") and what railroads needed attack was provided by the "cloak and dagger boys" of OSS.

Allies Capture OSS

Of course, there were occasional mishaps, and Langer recalls with a smile the group of OSS men sent to Burma by way of the Mediterranean who were stopped by Allied forces in North Africa. Since they could not reveal their secret mission, they were compounded for a week until clearance from Washington came through.

Langer relates with a good deal of pride the map room rigged up for the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff by OSS. Still operating today, "it is one of the most impressive things to come out of the war," according to Langer. Using the latest methods in cartography, these clay relief maps with exaggerated elevations and terrain markings in paint proved most helpful to the armchair generals.

At the end of the war, the Research and Analysis Branch of OSS became part of the State Department; in fact, the research division of that department is a direct descendant of Langer's group, while the entire top level intelligence system (CIA) was sired by other branches of OSS. The work done by Langer and his group became instrumental in setting up governments of occupation, and it was not until 1946 that he returned to the University.

Harvard Men Vital

According to Langer, "the Harvard contingent in OSS was a very powerful one;" included in that group were mostly History Department people, but here and there a professor of something else was accepted. Such a man is Milton Katz, Henry L. Stimson Professor of Law. After a period as Solicitor for the War Production Board and U.S. Executive Officer of the Combined Production and Resources Board (U.S. Britain-Canada)-- work which involved planning industrial mobilization for war--Katz in 1943 joined the Navy and was assigned to OSS duty in the Mediterranean and Western European Theatres.

His primary responsibilities, he says, "related to the placing of agents behind the enemy lines, first in northern Italy and Austria and (later) in Western Germany." Although he himself did not enter enemy territory, it was his job to select men for the job and to brief them, "to prepare them for what they should learn and how they should protect themselves," he recalls. He would then arrange for communications.

"It was easy getting men into occupied territory," Katz says, "but Germany was difficult. There weren't many Germans who wanted help, but our principal assistance came from the German practice of putting captured men to work as slave labor in Nazi factories. The roads were full of such people after the Ruhr bombardment, and we were able to get people in under cover as wandering unemployeds."

Troop Data Sought

The information sought was mostly military--troop movements and supply locations. "Toward the very end of the war," he recalls, "the rumor has been received that Hitler was planning a last redoubt in the Austrian Mountains, but it was pretty much dismissed."

After V-E Day, Katz returned to Washington, where he first helped work out the organizational changes required for the transition from the wartime activities of OSS to a permanent peacetime Central Intelligence Agency. Upon transfer to the Office of the Secretary of the Navy, he "was assigned to the so-called Eberstadt group . . . in the preparation of a report on the Unification of the War and Navy Departments and Postwar Organization for National Security."

Experience in OSS even brought people to Harvard. Among them is Franklin L. Ford, one of the six tenured members of the present History Deparement who served in OSS. After six months of signal corps training, Ford was assigned in autumn, 1943, to Langer's division of the Office along with H. Stuart Hughes, another of the six. He worked on political intelligence for about a year and then went to London in the winter. While on a courier mission in North Africa, his plane narrowly escaped destruction when a German aircraft crossed the Mediterranean, attacked, and wounded the gunner.

Ford Stayed Behind

One of the last three OSS men in Germany when the group was disbanded, Ford had his most interesting experience after V-E Day. In line with his work on political reorganization, he sat in on interviews with captured generals. His closest contact was with General Guderian, whose mind he characterizes as "naive politically, but brilliant and retentive." The former chief of the German General Staff provided for the trial of his colleagues.

Ford remembers Guderian as a loyal man, one who had no part in the famous July 20 plot to kill Der Fuehrer, and in talking to him, he was able to obtain much of the information needed to recreate that plot. Asking questions as historians, Ford and his colleagues learned for instance that the Germans had been told Coventry was bombed in retaliation for Dresden. The impression gathered from talks with the highly competent generals, Ford recalls, was that "if Hitler had let the generals run the war, such disaster would not have occurred."

A Ride in the Country

One afternoon in July, 1945, Guderian requested permission to be taken for a drive through the German countryside. Agreeing, Ford--and a couple of soldiers--piled into a jeep and took him for a ride. All along the way, Germans stopped and came to attention when they saw the great man. "Had the war still been on," Ford muses, "we would have been court-martialed for this, but after the war we got information any way we could."

Recalling his OSS work, Ford says that "until I'd had this experience, I'd never thought of coming to Harvard." Discharged in March, 1946, he entered the GSAS in the fall. Even today he jokes about the "danger that OSS would begin to look like a Harvard colony."

Over in Asia, another History Department "cloak and dagger boy" was at work. John K. Fairbank, now Associate Director of the Center for East Asian Studies, battled the Hump, inflation, poverty, and disease as he attempted--rather unsuccessfully, he thinks--to gather information on the Japanese and to distribute microfilmed American publications to Chinese universities.

Over the Hump

Flying in C-47's over the Hump from Calcutta to Kunming could be frightening. Sometimes they would run into storms and go down, he recalls, and "You'd always wonder whether you were going to make it. One night fourteen planes went down."

Chunking was his home for a good part of the war--Chunking, cut off from the world except by air, with its population combatting the difficulties of the Chinese war resistance and sweating out bomb raids in the crowded caves through 1942. Fairbank himself was beset with jaundice and dysentery, but says he was not in much danger of losing his life. "We ate better than the poor people," he reports, although stringy water buffalo meat and goat's milk doesn't sound too appetizing today. The group he was with lived