How Professors Helped Win World War II

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?

The patriotic “Why We Fight” video is an example of how America typically remembers the heroes of World War II (Department of Defense, Uploaded to YouTube by U.S. National Archives)

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.

The OWI worked to motivate the home front and our fighting forces, along with those of our Allies, with a comprehensive propaganda campaign around the planet, and in ways that had important repercussions for the post-war years. For example, at the OWI outpost in London, researchers worked on practical projects designed to encourage occupied Europe to resist. And in the immediate aftermath, these same OWI researchers produced illustrated magazines and other publications that tried to convince people of the need for a post-war, U.S.-led democratic coalition as part of the “American century.” Ruth Benedict, an anthropologist working out of the OWI’s London outpost, specialized in this kind of outreach in the Netherlands with practical guides for American servicemen there.

The OWI also worked closely with the American Forces Network (AFN) to produce morale-boosting broadcasts for our servicemembers. One particularly effective program, Command Performance, featured Bob Hope and Bing Crosby for a Christmas Eve show in 1942, when the outcome of the war was not yet certain.

Elmer Davis, the director of the OWI in the Roosevelt administration, believed that scholars such as Wilbur Schramm, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Ralph Casey could help the War Department understand not only popular sentiment at home but also the effectiveness of our messaging abroad. Schramm and Lazarsfield pioneered surveys and the analysis of what we would call “big data” today, looking for patterns and themes in a larger mass of messages. Casey did important research on political propaganda. Their work, along with other pioneering scholars from that same era, would lead to the formation of modern mass communication as a field of study during the early Cold War, as well as aid in the development of American public media. As explored by UC Boulder associate professor Josh Shepperd, the foundational work on outreach to the American public during the war years strengthened the need for a robust, government-supported information infrastructure. To put it another way, one could argue that PBS wouldn’t exist without “buy war bonds.”

The OWI also ran an operation that encouraged regular Americans to report what their neighbors and coworkers were saying. This “rumor control” campaign ultimately did not lead to much useful information, but it shows how research could be put toward more negative ends.

The work of the OWI also contributed to the winning cultural and political messages that led to the end of the Cold War, setting the stage for the world we have today (for better or worse). One poignant example of this kind of messaging was Amerika magazine, a glossy, photo-heavy Russian-language publication put out by the United States Information Agency as a kind of government-published Life.

The OSS had an even more direct connection to the war effort, conducting in-depth research and morale-crushing “black propaganda” efforts against our enemies in that global conflict. The OSS’s Research and Analysis branch involved geographers, historians, anthropologists, economists, political scientists, and early mass-communication researchers, among others. The U.S. State Department maintains a similar office to this day, which supports the American intelligence community more broadly.

Among other achievements of the scholars, as Winks writes, were discerning critical intelligence such as the effectiveness of Allied bombing campaigns, the reorganization of the Nazi weapons-making efforts, the structure of enemy units throughout Europe, U-Boat operations, and details on how the Japanese Army were occupying China — all through the analysis of newspapers and magazines from around the world that had been smuggled back to the U.S., and through other, “open-source” collections of data, as well as interviews with American servicemembers. These scholars also wrote vital geopolitical, strategic, and tactical analyses of whole countries and regions — sometimes almost literally overnight — for battlefield commanders, in an era long before the internet or any kind of electronic database. In one particularly impressive case, OSS analysts found out almost everything there was to know about North Africa before the Allied invasion there, impressing the active-duty military and ensuring their value in future operations.

Academics could be found in not only the OSS and OWI, but also in other areas of government. For instance, the Librarian of Congress was noted poet Archibald MacLeish. While some gave up full-time teaching and research of their own during the war, others continued to do double duty, working for the government as a second job.

Neither the OWI nor the OSS were perfect, often working in tension with one another, and sometimes pursuing unsavory or morally ambiguous objectives. However, both organizations fought for freedom in a world facing darkness on a vast scale. And both employed professors, many of whom never became famous or crossed the door of places such as Yale and Harvard, but were instead modest people who did important work in a shadowy time, and helped to turn the tide.