The Two World Wars on Campus — Training Station, Influenza and the GI Surge

1917–1952 · the campus at war twice

The first war: an armed camp. When the United States entered the First World War in April 1917, military training at Notre Dame was already a student tradition running back to the Continental Cadets of 1859. In September 1918 the campus became, in Father Hope's phrase, in great measure an armed camp: the Students' Army Training Corps was installed under contract with the War Department, which paid the regular tuition of 120 dollars a year for each student-soldier plus 30 dollars a month for his subsistence. Captain William P. Murray took charge; on 1 October 1918 every applicant who had passed the physical examination was sworn in as a soldier while continuing his studies. Two future presidents served the war as chaplains — Matthew Walsh and Charles O'Donnell. The totals of Notre Dame service are carried two ways in the university's own record and both stand: the institutional history counts more than 2,200 students and alumni in service, while the magazine's memorial research counts about 2,500 Notre Dame men — students, faculty, alumni and priests — entering military service. The dead are likewise carried two ways, and the difference is definitional rather than contradictory: Hope counts forty-six Notre Dame men who gave their lives in the service, while the memorial plaques dedicated in 1925 carry fifty-six names, the larger list including at least twenty-one who died of influenza or pneumonia in 1918–19 rather than of wounds — thirteen are listed as killed in action and two as missing. Recent research published by the magazine finds the 1925 list itself imperfect: three surnames on the plaques — Lester Burrill, William Egan (Class of 1917) and Michael Guyette — are misspelled, and the list is not complete. The memorial itself is the east door of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, dedicated on Memorial Day, 30 May 1924, with the words "God, Country, Notre Dame" cut in the stone above it; the two bronze plaques followed in late 1925. Charles O'Donnell's doughboy helmet, hanging as a light fixture in that entrance, stands in the base.

October 1918: the influenza. The SATC's first month was the epidemic's month. Hope prints President John W. Cavanaugh's own accounting in a letter: more than two hundred cases of influenza at the university and nine deaths among the students. The magazine's day-by-day reconstruction adds the course: the first campus death was Robert "Bobby" Corrigan, on 13 October; South Bend's health officer forbade all public gatherings on 11 October; Cavanaugh wrote to the campus on 23 October reporting four student deaths and at least fifty ill — two days before the state health officer's survey declared an epidemic in South Bend with at least 750 active cases in the city. Classes at Notre Dame were abandoned for more than a week and resumed on 28 October. Three of the dead were SATC student-soldiers still in training, all taken by illness in October 1918; the youngest, Private Lester Burrill, was eighteen. The government ordered the SATC demobilized in December, weeks after the armistice, and the soldiers left, in Hope's dry line, with only slight damage to Brother Philip's campus. The flu's nine student deaths, against the war's own toll, are why the 1924 memorial door counts the epidemic's dead among the war's: on this campus, in that autumn, they were the same loss.

The second war: the Navy takes the campus. The association began before the war did: in September 1941, by agreement between President J. Hugh O'Donnell and Admiral Chester Nimitz, a Naval ROTC unit was formed under Captain H. P. Burnett, at about 150 students a year. Pearl Harbor emptied the college anyway — enrollment fell by some 1,200 between the fall and spring semesters of 1941–42, and the civilian student body sank at its lowest to roughly 700–750 men (the two figures stand in different institutional accounts). O'Donnell's January 1942 offer of the campus to the Navy, which the base fragment records, was answered in sequence. The V-7 program began in February 1942: college graduates were indoctrinated at Notre Dame in a short course — one month at first — and sent on to Abbott Hall in Chicago or the training ship Prairie State; the first class of about 1,200 officer trainees arrived in April 1942, housed in four South Quad halls (Morrissey, Howard, Lyons and Badin), while the Navy built a drill hall on the north campus, on the ground where the Hesburgh Library now stands. In September–October 1942 Notre Dame became one of four United States Naval Reserve Midshipmen's Schools in the nation, the course lengthened to four months, and in January 1943 some 1,100 ensigns graduated as the first group to receive all their training and their commissions at Notre Dame; ten V-7 classes passed through before the program ended in November 1945. The V-12 program followed on 1 July 1943: 1,851 active-duty trainees arrived that day, described in the Navy's accounting as the largest unit of its kind, against a civilian enrollment of about 700; V-12 men were taught by the regular Notre Dame faculty in the university's five colleges, granted regular academic credit, and housed in Dillon, Alumni, Walsh, Cavanaugh and Zahm halls, with a Marine detachment under Captain John W. Finney. The NROTC ran on through both, graduating its first class in February 1944.

The arithmetic, with its conflict printed. The university's own NROTC history gives the wartime campus in one exact census: in 1944 there were 2,610 students enrolled — 1,771 of them in the military, 639 civilians and 200 students of religion, the three figures summing to the total. For the war's whole output the institutional accounts differ by what they count, and this record prints the two totals as their carriers give them rather than splitting the difference: the NROTC history states that during the war Notre Dame trained nearly 12,000 naval officers, and the Midshipmen's School accounting gives more than 10,000 officers graduated from the V-7 alone by November 1945; the university's general history, carried in the base fragment, counts more than 25,000 reserve naval officers passing through across the three programs together between 1941 and 1946. The 12,000 and the 25,000 are not reconciled in the sources — they differ, most plausibly, by whether trainees who passed through without a Notre Dame commission are counted — and the alumni cost is stated separately: 331 Notre Dame men killed in the Second World War and some 1,200 wounded. What is not in dispute is the effect, in the judgment the base carries: the Navy kept the institution afloat through an existential challenge.

The surge after. The programs phased out by 1945–46, leaving the NROTC under the Holloway Plan, and the campus swung from sailors to veterans: under John J. Cavanaugh (1946–1952) the student census quadrupled across the era and graduate enrollment grew fivefold, in the institutional accounting the base carries. One arrival of the wartime campus stands in the base: Frazier L. Thompson, who entered through the V-12 in 1944 as the university's first Black student and graduated in 1947 as its first Black graduate. By the 1950s Notre Dame hosted all three services' ROTC programs — Hesburgh signed the Army ROTC's formal establishment in 1951 — and the university's Naval ROTC was named the nation's top Navy collegiate program for 2023–24 by the Department of Defense, a present-state line the NROTC's own history records.

Sources:

1. University of Notre Dame Naval ROTC history (weareall.nd.edu, originally Notre Dame News, 20 November 2025) — NROTC formed September 1941 under Captain Burnett; studies accelerated; V-7 from February 1942; Midshipman Training Center September 1942; 1,100 ensigns January 1943; V-12 in 1943 with the Marine detachment; the 1944 census (2,610; 1,771 military; 639 civilian; 200 religious); nearly 12,000 naval officers trained; Army ROTC documentation 1951; the 2023–24 top-program honor.
2. Arthur J. Hope, Notre Dame — One Hundred Years (1943), chapter XXIII, University Archives — the SATC contract ($120 tuition, $30 a month), Captain Murray, the 1 October 1918 swearing-in, Cavanaugh's letter (more than 200 cases, nine deaths), December demobilization, forty-six dead.
3. Notre Dame Magazine, "The Fall of 1918" and "A Century Later, Mysteries Remain about WWI Memorial Door" — Corrigan's death 13 October 1918, the gathering ban, classes resumed 28 October; the door dedicated 30 May 1924, plaques of 56 names late 1925, the names' flu share and the misspellings found by recent research; about 2,500 in service; facts summarized, no text lifted.
4. University history accounts of the Second World War campus (fightingirish.com institutional history; the Navy–Notre Dame series history) — the 1,200 enrollment fall of 1941–42, the V-7 halls and drill hall, 1,851 V-12 trainees on 1 July 1943 against about 700 civilians, ten V-7 classes and more than 10,000 V-7 officers by November 1945, 331 alumni dead; and the base fragment's institutional count of more than 25,000 across the three programs, printed unresolved beside the 12,000.