Soldiering for Freedom: A GI's Account of World War II

Chapter 2. Back to College as a Soldier

Chapter 2 12 chapter 2 Back to College as a Soldier TWO MONTHS after I left Dartmouth I was back on a college campus—this time in uniform. I was assigned to the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), the country’s first purely merit-based experiment in higher education. To be accepted , enlisted soldiers who had graduated from high school had to meet only two criteria: They had to obtain a high score on the General Classification Test (the Army’s IQ test) and be between eighteen and twenty-two years of age. Created by a special act of Congress, the ASTP was different from college-based Navy programs, which were designed to train officers. Upon graduation, all participants in the Navy’s college plans were commissioned. The ASTP was not an officer training program. It was created to fulfill the Army’s need for a pool of educated enlisted men to draw on for technically demanding assignments. Thus, between April and November, 1943, approximately 150,000 GIs were assigned to ASTP units at 222 colleges and universities around the country. Before being assigned to a particular institution for training in engineering, foreign languages, or medicine—the three areas of ASTP study—soldiers were screened at Specialized Training and Reassignment (STAR) units. So it was that over a three-week period I took a battery of tests at a STAR unit at Virginia Polytechnic Institute (VPI) in Blacksburg, Virginia. At first I was considered a candidate for Oriental language study because I had done well in a language-aptitude test. However, I was subsequently rejected because I did not speak at least one foreign language fluently . In the end I was chosen to study civil engineering because Back to College as a Soldier 13 I earned high grades on the algebra and geometry portions of the test. In August, 1943, I arrived at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, to study civil engineering. We were taught basic courses, similar to those in the freshman curriculum at engineering colleges (calculus, English, history, physics, chemistry, mechanical drawing, and geography). In addition to our scholastic endeavors, we were required to adhere to a strict military schedule. Each week soldiers in the program received a minimum of twenty-four hours of classroom and laboratory work, twenty-four hours of supervised study hall, six hours of physical training, and five hours of military instruction—a fiftynine -hour work week. The haste with which ASTP was organized required the recruiting of faculty with limited academic credentials. Oliver Freud, a prewar railway engineer in Europe and the son of Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, taught mathematics at William and Mary in such heavily accented English that soldiers rarely understood him. Since most of the young males who, under normal circumstances, would have applied for entry-level faculty positions had already been drafted into the military, the bulk of the specially recruited ASTP faculty were women who had recently graduated from college. There was considerable socialization between the young female instructors and the soldiers, particularly since coeds were restricted by curfews, visitation regulations, and alcohol consumption prohibitions. Chartered in 1693 by King William III and Queen Mary II of England, the College of William and Mary is America’s second oldest institution of higher learning. It severed formal ties with Britain in 1776 and became coeducational in 1918. The school boasts that it has sent its sons into every armed American conflict since the colonies came to Britain’s aid in the French and Indian War. Yet, not until 1943 did it have any experience in housing U.S. soldiers—and it proved ill equipped for that task. Most of us were billeted in a 1920s gymnasium with more than 250 men sleeping in double-decker bunks arranged on a 94-by50 -foot basketball court. The toilet facilities were designed for Chapter 2 14 brief usage during sporting-event intermissions, not for several hundred men who needed to shave and shower before breakfast . Still, we did not complain. We were envied throughout the Army because we were out of harm’s way. Yank, the Army’s weekly magazine, said ASTP stood for “All Safe Till Peace,” and its motto was “Victory in ’44 or Fight.” Prior to the war, William and Mary had enrolled more men than women students. But by 1943, the ratio of women to men was three to one. The girls...