Engineer Memoirs
1943. My class, which would originally have graduated in 1945, graduated in June of
1944. So I went only three years.
Q:
I see. So you started in the fall of 1941?
A:
I started in July of 1941, and the United States entered the war in December of 1941.
But all the classes finished out things pretty much as planned through June of 1942. At
that point, great changes started to occur. For example, the cadets who were going to
go into the Army Air Corps started going off to flying training. So the program started
accelerating in June of 1942, and the new first class had its final year cut short and
graduated in January and so forth.
In our case the third and fourth years were compressed. Our first year was not affected.
Our second year was not affected very much. We did have, in the spring of our second
year, a few courses out of the third year, but not too many. Then, at that point, in the
last year, we had a selection of courses from the third and fourth years, all crammed
into one.
Q:
So you almost did two years of academic work in one?
A:
Well, we did, except that we could cover only so much ground in a year. For this
reason, when it came time for me and some of my classmates and some out of the next
class to go to graduate school after the war, the Army sent us to the Naval
Postgraduate School to take a year of senior undergraduate courses in math, physics,
and chemistry. Otherwise, we could not have done well in graduate work in the
sciences, because we hadn't had the necessary undergraduate work.
A few people sent straight into graduate work had had a very tough time. They had not
done well at all, even though they were very talented academically. The personnel
people realized something had to be done, and they decided to send us to the Naval
Postgraduate School, which was located at Annapolis [Maryland]. It has since moved
to Monterey, California.
I have a lot of memories of academics, I guess, because that was what I did well at
West Point. I worked hard to do well.
I sent my grades home to my father every week, and he kept a running tally of how I
was doing. He compared my average with how people had done in the past. To judge
how well I was going to do, he would calculate the proportional parts that I was going
to have based on my grades in each course. Then he would compare these figures with
past cadet records, which he obtained from the cadet register published each year.
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