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Above, Ensign J. Read Murphy in 1943;
below, by 1945 Murphy was a lieutenant.

"I remember sad days steaming in column behind the USS Enterprise as she had funeral services for 75 sailors killed in action Aug. 26, 1942—each sewn in a canvas bag and dumped over the port side, honored with rifle salutes and Taps. We had to change course to avoid some of the bags that didn't sink right away. These were all sailors like the rest of us, but they had not been so lucky." —James Lee

As the "most privileged young men" of their generation, in the words of classmate Tommy Burns, they were unlikely fighters. But they answered the country's call. And this slender volume, spare in format and devoid of illustrations, rings with their vivid and unvarnished memories of service during what many see as the greatest crisis of the 20th century.

"Everybody's story is worth hearing," declares Joe Averback, of Newton, Mass., who along with Burns sat on the four-member committee from the class that pulled the book together.

And so we hear from the D-Day participant; the ship's artist; the officer raised, against his will, to serve as a captain during the Battle of the Bulge; the German exchange student who flew in the Luftwaffe and lost a foot when his Stuka dive-bomber was hit; the POW who entered a concentration camp in Poland to discover "ovens with burned bodies still in them"; the bomber navigator who plotted a course home using the sun when the plane's equipment failed; the naval officer who watched a kamikaze attack on a fleet carrier that killed a dozen sailors; the military policeman; the mule driver; the merchant mariner; the medical corpsman; and the Arctic expert who helped rescue a downed aircraft crew on the Greenland ice cap.

Averback's own story was as extraordinary as anyone's. A chemical engineer, he was enlisted in the Manhattan Project and spent his war years helping to build the atomic bomb. He "literally developed ulcers," he writes, worrying that the Germans would beat America to it. When the bomb was dropped on Japan, both his brothers were on ships heading to that island for the final push.

What Averback likes best about the book is that it presents the full sweep of experience. "We were a broad cross-section of what happened in the war years," he says.

J. Read Murphy, class secretary for the past 48 years and the driving force behind the book, points out, "We were not warriors, and we weren't brought up to be warriors. But a lot of these guys did remarkable things."

Murphy himself "didn't do a damn thing" as a naval supply officer, he says, although he manned a 30 mm gun on the deck of a PT boat in a night attack on two Japanese supply craft. But he believes his relatively tame war career helped him win over classmates who didn't think their stories worth telling.

Inspiration for the book was provided by the Yale Class of ’42, which produced a similar volume for its 50th reunion in 1992. Murphy also recalls that one of his law-school teachers after the war urged his students to write down their experiences.

"He said, 'What you did was all part of it'," recalls Murphy, who went on to a career as a lawyer in Hartford, Conn., and now lives in West Hartford. "It did reinforce my thinking later that we really should get these things down in black and white before we're gone."

Or, as Burns puts it, "before the colors fade." He is 79; Murphy, 80. Still, the notion of looking back past the better part of a lifetime wasn't eagerly adopted by the class, at least at first. "My own children don't have any idea what I did in the war," Burns says. "Getting people to talk about it was a real effort."

"Students at Andover ought to read this stuff," adds Burns, who headed one of the largest law firms in New England before retiring and lives in Boston. "The boys and girls should realize that 50 or 60 years ago these young men fought for their country. They fought beautifully and heroically."

And none of them forget that eight classmates paid the final price. The book is dedicated to them and to two others who died in the service, one of polio and the other in the 1942 Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire in Boston, which killed 492 people. "They died as they lived—fine men with bright prospects," the dedication reads.

In assembling this exceptional compilation, Murphy and his committee moved with remarkable alacrity. The foursome‹Murphy, Burns, Averback and Brad Wright—sent out a form letter in June 1999 seeking thousand-word essays. In August, receiving scant returns, Murphy divided the class into four sections, and for the next four months he and the three others phoned everyone they could reach. From the 119 living members—out of a class of 260—they came up with 87 accounts, plus another half-dozen from widows—"a heck of a yield," says Murphy. A total of 222 class members are accounted for in the book. Two were German and fought for their homeland. Another fought for the British.

Did Andover prepare the Class of ’38 for war? According to Burns, "Andover in those days was a sink-or-swim proposition. There was no mollycoddling; if you couldn't perform, goodbye. And that was what the military was like." Murphy also cites the boarding school experience of being thrown in with strangers— something that military life brought in much greater measure.

Murphy believes he and his classmates also learned responsibility at Andover. Their headmaster, Claude Moore Fuess, held before them the vision of a life lived greater than one's own.

"He used to preach to us how privileged we were to come to Andover," says Murphy, "and how we ought to get into public life and be leaders. Except for the war, we failed—most of the class stayed in private life. But in the war we measured up to his demands.

"There's a lot of pride in this thing," Murphy declares—in the book and in the war experiences it sets forth. "The war was thrust upon us, and we rose to it."

Copies of Recollections of World War II: Andover 1938 may be purchased for $25. For more information, contact Assistant Director of Alumni Affairs Patricia Gerety at (978) 749-4303.