In the fall of 1941, pre­ced­ing the attack on Pearl Har­bor, under­grad­u­ate enroll­ment stood at 2,432. By Novem­ber 1943, how­ever, only 655 of the 3,742 stu­dents in res­i­dence were civil­ian. The footage on the two silent films shown here was shot a few years before and after the United States entered the Sec­ond World War. The first film cap­tures Prince­ton stu­dents at an ROTC sum­mer train­ing camp off cam­pus. In con­trast, the later footage fea­tures mil­i­tary stu­dents march­ing on Princeton’s grounds. The Prince­ton cam­pus, like many oth­ers in the coun­try, had turned into a mil­i­tary train­ing facility.

Prince­ton had main­tained an ROTC Field Artillery Unit since 1919, when the First World War had ended. The pri­mary objec­tive of the Reserve Offi­cers’ Train­ing Corps (ROTC) was to pro­vide mil­i­tary train­ing at civil­ian col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties to qual­ity them as Reserve Offi­cers in the US mil­i­tary. As part of a four-year elec­tive course in Mil­i­tary Sci­ence (lead­ing to the rank of Sec­ond Lieu­tenant of Field Artillery in the Offi­cers’ Reserve Corps) stu­dents attended a six-week sum­mer train­ing camp at the end of the junior year. The film, which was shot before 1942, cap­tures activ­i­ties at a sum­mer camp at Madi­son Bar­racks, New York, includ­ing a med­ical checkup (1:01), mess (4:05), drills (5:29 and 14:58), artillery prac­tice (7:48), and infor­mal scenes. In 1942 the sum­mer train­ing camp was sus­pended and in the fol­low­ing year ROTC was inte­grated in the Army Spe­cial­ized Train­ing Pro­gram (ASTP), which arrived on Princeton’s cam­pus in April 1943. The footage from 17:27 shows var­i­ous mil­i­tary train­ing units that resided on cam­pus dur­ing the war. More infor­ma­tion is pro­vided with the next clip, which con­tains sim­i­lar footage.

To com­pen­sate for dwin­dling resources dur­ing the war, Prince­ton hosted sev­eral mil­i­tary train­ing schools on cam­pus. In addi­tion to the ASTP (known as the A-12), Prince­ton accom­mo­dated the Army Post Exchange School, the Naval Offi­cer Train­ing School, the Naval Col­lege Train­ing Pro­gram (V-12) for Navy can­di­dates and Marines, and the Navy Pre-Radar School. Dor­mi­to­ries pro­vided bar­racks for the ser­vice groups, and four­teen of the largest halls were occu­pied by Army and Navy trainees. The trainees marched to meals and classes, as can be seen on this footage of var­i­ous uniden­ti­fied train­ing units.  The ROTC returned to cam­pus with the reestab­lish­ment of the Army Unit and the intro­duc­tion of a Naval Unit in 1946 and an Air Force Unit in 1951.

These silent 16mm films are part of the Uni­ver­sity Archives’ His­tor­i­cal Audio­vi­sual Col­lec­tion (item no. 0106 and part of item no. 0092).