When even the most avid history buffs think about the Second World War, tweed-wearing, bespectacled professors don’t usually come to mind. Instead, one thinks about iconic Life magazine images and grainy black-and-white gun-camera footage, the “Why we Fight” film series or perhaps about other war movies such as Saving Private Ryan. Certainly not teachers in a college classroom, right?
But academics were vital in the fight against the Nazis and the Japanese empire, and not just in the Manhattan Project (though this is perhaps the closest any recent pop-culture phenomenon has come to making scientists into the main protagonists). While many of the brilliant researchers in that project were recent émigré physicists and engineers from Europe, others, such as Lilli Schwenk Hornig (1921-2017), would contribute in less-heralded ways before embarking on long careers as professors. In this case of Hornig, she worked as a chemist as on the Manhattan Project and later advocated for women in science as an accomplished scientist herself.
What’s less well known is that many rank-and-file academics, at both the elite Ivies and the more modest public universities, contributed to the war effort, too, in everything from helping educate officers in “90-day-wonder” commissioning programs at campuses such as Northwestern in Chicago, to teaching critically important languages such as Japanese at universities such as UC Boulder, where WAVES, i.e. “Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service,” were also trained.
As Robin Winks has explored in Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961, academics committed themselves to supporting the Allied cause in a number of ways, including with their research. This was especially the case in the information war against the Axis, who, it should be noted, started the conflict by winning more than losing — it was not foreordained that the Allies would succeed.
My own field, that of mass communication, has much of its own origin story in how it conducted research on public opinion with and for the Office of Strategic Services (or OSS), the immediate predecessor of the CIA, and the Office of War Information (or OWI), a kind of ancestor to the United States Information Agency of Cold War fame, as well as organizations such as the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe.