Wartime Football (Part III)

It's time for Part III of our look at how select college football programs handled World War II. Parts I-II can be found here.

This time, we're going to check out four programs that operated throughout the war, but on a decidedly limited basis. They may have played, but they certainly didn't have visions of bowl games or national titles dancing in their heads. And let's start with a team had gone bowling in recent seasons.

Despite a run of three bowl appearances in four years (a pretty amazing feat back when there were five bowl games, tops), Boston College opted to dial down the program during the war. Holy Cross and Clemson were replaced with the likes of Camp Hingham, Rome Air Force Base ... and Harvard, which also went informal. (True fact: BC and Harvard have played each other only four times in football, twice in WWI and twice in WWII. Hopefully they won't play again for a LONG time.) Quarterback and future Holy Cross coach Ed Doherty was the lone Eagle from the '42 team that lost to Alabama in the Orange Bowl.

Yup, BC once faced Harvard on the gridiron, and
this page from the Sub Turri yearbook has the info. 

BC's uniforms kept the pace from recent seasons, and for some reason in '45 the Eagles unearthed the maroon pants from the late '30s. 

Unlike its Ivy brethren, Harvard opted to dial it down during the war. Yale and Dartmouth were dumped for gentler foes such as Tufts and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in addition to BC. Weird to imagine D-III Tufts hosting FCS Harvard today, but it happened. With the war over in August 1945, still-informal Harvard decided to add full-speed ahead Yale to its schedule. Yale prevailed 28-0 on Dec. 1, one of the latest dates in The Game's history.

As you can see from these photos, Harvard's varsity rosters
were tiny during WWII. (The second photo appears to be just a starting lineup,
however, and not a full roster.)

Harvard's helmets were a little odd, as the back top half of the crimson helmets were painted white. The jersey numbers were identical to the ones used by the Boston Red Sox, as noted here.

Maine barely qualifies for this post by virtue of a 1943 game against a prep school — a 20-6 loss to Phillips Andover that served as the Black Bears' entire schedule. In '44 Maine played New Hampshire and Norwich (Vt.) twice, and in '45 it faced UMass and UConn twice and Rhode Island once; I believe it was the last season Maine and UNH didn't face off until the truncated Spring 2021 season. 

The season summaries in the UMaine Prism yearbooks note that many team members had not previously played football, and if you look at the photo below, you can tell. Because most of the players were too young to serve Uncle Sam, it looks more like a high school team than a college team.

The 1944 Black Bears, who appear to wearing practice uniforms.
What photos I've seen of them in action are in the all-blue versions.

Wisecracks aside, the fact that these schools were able to put a football team on the field amid depleted manpower was a victory in itself.

Princeton is an odd case. The Tigers went 1-6 in 1943 as a "full speed ahead" team and retreated to informal status in '44, defeating Muhlenberg before losing to Swarthmore and Atlantic City Naval Air Station. (The NAS team was known alternately as the Corsairs, Hellcats, Sailors and Tars. Tars?) But in '45, Princeton reverted to a full-blown schedule and went 2-3-2, playing mostly against Ivy League foes.

I'm not 100% on the uniforms, but it appears the Tigers had orange numbers on the front and white numbers on the back. The traditional tiger stripes adorned the sleeves and socks.

Wartime Football (Parts I-II)

Not too long ago, I posted a photo of Cornell's 1945 roster on this site's Facebook page (and if you haven't done so yet, crush that like button like you're crushing a blocking sled during two-a-days), which got me thinking about wartime football. World War II turned the game upside down, as manpower shortages forced some programs to shut down entirely during the war and others to play on a limited basis. Some, however, kept on going like nothing was amiss.

The Northeast scene was no different. Twenty-one teams covered by this little ol' blog had football teams at the time World War II broke out. The state of the programs during the prime war years (1943-45) can be divided into four categories:

1) Shut down entirely (no team from 1943-45)

2) Partially shut down (played at least one season from 1943-45)

3) Played on limited basis (played throughout 1943-45, but with small schedules against smaller schools/military camps/etc.)

4) Full speed ahead (played full schedules).

First, we'll get category No. 1 out of the way.

Shut down entirely

Central Connecticut, Northeastern, Vermont.

Maybe it's a coincidence, but two of those three programs later dropped the sport. CCSU soldiers on, however.

OK, on to group No. 2, the main subject of this post.

Partially shut down

Six schools covered by this blog fall into this category.

Boston University shut down the program in 1943-44, but threw together a 5-game schedule in '45 upon the end of WWII that summer. Perhaps the '45 Terriers should have stuck with intrasquad games: BU lost all five game by a combined score of 235-3. When you're losing 70-0 to Tufts, that's not a good sign. The Wikipedia season summary puts it best: "The season finale against Harvard was so one-sided that head coaches Dick Harlow and Walt Holmer elected to cut 5 minutes from each of the final two quarters." (And, as we'll see later on, it's not like Harvard was operating on all eight cylinders during the war.)

The Terriers' uniforms were identical to what they wore at the start of the war: Black helmets, red jerseys and socks at home; white shirts and socks on the road. I like how the stripes on the sleeves and socks are in sync.

Connecticut took only the 1943 season off, then played full eight-game schedules in '44 and '45, unlike most smaller schools in New England. A few liberties had to be taken, however, as the Huskies played Norwich, CCNY and Brooklyn twice. (And those mighty '44 CCNY Beavers went 0-8 and were outscored 333-0. As in ZERO points. Wonder how they would have fared against BU.) The '45 team faced more traditional foes such as Maine, Lehigh and BU. UConn went 7-1 both seasons.

I think I've talked about these uniforms before, but the jerseys are distinctive; I can look at an old photo from the '40s and can immediately tell it's UConn thanks to the shoulder panels and the stripes on the wrists of the sleeves.

Depending on your source, Delaware either shut down entirely or returned in 1945 for a four-game slate. (The late, great College Football Data Warehouse lists the coach as "unknown," which should tell you how informal this team was.) The Blue Hens defeated Drexel and Haverford, tied West Chester and lost to Johns Hopkins — their only defeat from 1941-46, when the Hens went unbeaten in '41, '42 and '46.

I can't find any decent photos of Delaware's uniforms from '45, so I offer the ones from '42. Note the use of plastic helmet shells, a rarity in that era. Plastic shells took off after the war and were worn by almost everyone by the mid-50s. Ironically, one of the last holdouts was Delaware, which appears to have worn leather lids into the '60s. 

Massachusetts (State, as it was called until 1947) played a brief schedule in 1945, beating Maine twice, tying Amherst and losing to Brooklyn.

The uniforms were largely similar to what the Statesmen (yes, that was their nickname; "Redmen" came a couple years later and "Minutemen" in 1972) wore in 1942, with tan/gold helmets replacing the maroon versions. Wonder how people would react if UMass wore all-mustard yellow unis today?

New Hampshire is an interesting case, for a couple reasons: 

1) The Wildcats had no football in 1943, brought it back in '44 and dropped it again in '45;

2) For years, the Wildcats' media guides said UNH had no team in '44. (And for years, UNH and its arch-rival, Maine, listed different records for their all-time series, since they faced off twice in '44.)

But UNH indeed fielded a team, dropping two games to Middlebury and going 1-1 against Maine — the last time the rivals faced off more than once in a season until 2013, when they met in the regular season and the NCAA playoffs, which I'd rather not discuss. 😁

The Wikipedia entry on this team is remarkably detailed, and it's worth a read.

I'm unsure what the Wildcats wore on the road, but the best guess is they used the same duds as in 1942, when they went undefeated. (The home unis bear more than a passing resemblance to what Maine wore in the 1950s.) Only one member of the '42 crew played for UNH in '44.

Rhode Island (State, as it was called until 1952) punted on 1943-44 but played three games against Maine, Boston University (both wins) and Rutgers (a loss).

The few photos I've uncovered of the '45 Rams are fuzzy and hard to make out, so again I offer you the 1942 uniform, which used four different shades of blue. The helmets are light blue, but the front leather portion is painted white. The jerseys have a pair of light blue stripes down the sleeves and the numbers are the only dark blue portion of the uniform. It's not a pretty uniform, but it's an interesting one.

Next up: Teams that played on an informal basis throughout the war.