Still, the students’ passion and patriotism were evident. They urged one another to wear the uniform with the pride expected of a Tech student. Those in the woodshop made a replica cannon used for training soldiers at Fort Gordon.

“We must face our opportunity and our duty! We must be MEN! Let us so conserve our energies; build up our minds and bodies, and strengthen our character and lives that we may be ready to perform our tasks nobly when the call shall come,” the Technique’s editors exhorted.

They kept drilling, and their efforts eventually paid off.

“The faculty, seeing that the men were in earnest, took steps to obtain a military instructor from the army and assigned a regular drill hour,” the Technique later reported.

That instructor, a retired Army officer recalled by the government to whip the Tech men into officer material, arrived in December 1917. By spring, Lieutenant Colonel Elmer Hubbard’s leadership of the newly formed Department of Military Science was paying dividends.

“Under his very efficient and thorough instruction the corps has emerged from a state of chaos into a well-organized and well-drilled regiment,” the newspaper wrote.

By then, an eight-week ground school for pilots had been operating at Tech for six months. The War Department shut that school down in January and replaced it with a supply school, which would, in turn, close in Spring 1918 amid the nation’s ever-changing war needs.

Finally, on March 30, 1918, formal orders from the War Department established ROTC at Tech. The faculty voted to make participation mandatory for freshmen and sophomores. That is the way it would stay until 1965.

World War II: “An Industry Keyed to Its Highest Pitch of Wartime Production”

The nearly quarter-century between the world wars saw ROTC flourish.

In 1926, the Navy picked Tech as one of only six universities, and the only one in the South, as a site for its new ROTC program.

The unit started with 60 freshmen, and training focused on navigation, gunnery, and seamanship, which cadets learned in part by sailing three 24-foot whaleboats around Piedmont Lake, according to a unit history.

A few years later, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill visited Atlanta and reviewed Tech’s ROTC units at Grant Field. He declared them, the Technique reported, “The best drilled reserve corps I have ever seen in America.”

He also predicted that few of the cadets would ever see war in their lifetimes. But violence broke out again in just a matter of years and great changes once more swept the Georgia Tech campus.

Tech became something of a military camp, and life on campus reflected it.

In addition to ROTC, Tech hosted other military training programs during World War II. These included specialized programs meant to channel technically trained men to the military while also keeping college enrollment up during the war.

These efforts brought thousands of military members to Tech during the war. Temporary barracks sprang up around campus. The school converted Brittain Dining Hall to a military mess hall that served 2,000 men in two hours, a commander noted at the time.

Tech became something of a military camp, and life on campus reflected it.

“Every morning we had to get up very early, I don’t remember — 5:30, 6 o’clock, and we would form up in ranks out on Techwood Drive, right in front of the stadium, and we jogged up to North Avenue and around to where the expressway is now. There was an athletic field there where we did our sitting up exercises,” recalled Georgia Tech alumnus Clayton Griffith (EE 1945) in a 1995 oral history interview.

Tech had become, the Technique said in 1943, “an industry keyed to its highest pitch of wartime production.”

1965: The End of an Era

By the time World War II ended, military training programs at Tech had graduated thousands of officers and technical experts to the war effort.

After the war, the Air Force established its own ROTC program at Georgia Tech. In addition to producing officers for the brand new U.S. Air Force, it was the first at Tech to accept women. That 1955 milestone came three years after the Board of Regents voted to allow women to attend Georgia Tech.

The 1960s brought more changes. Anti-ROTC protests roiled college campuses as anger over the Vietnam War began to grow, but Tech was an exception.

“Everybody was too busy trying to survive Tech,” recalled Navy ROTC alumnus Fred Espy, who graduated in 1966.

Still, the mandatory enrollment in ROTC was dropped in 1965. A tradition of nearly 50 years ended, seemingly without fanfare.

“There seemed to be little student reaction one way or another,” the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine noted that year.

Today’s ROTC

Today, there are fewer ROTC students at Tech — around 300 among more than 29,000 — yet, they are not hard to find around campus.

They make their way between classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays dressed in green or gray combat uniforms, or tan Navy officer outfits, blue Air Force uniforms, or Army greens.

They do physical training before the sun rises, or practice marching skills. Much of that work is led by cadet officers — an opportunity for them to practice leadership skills. Cadet corps leaders can spend as many as 20 hours a week on their ROTC duties, said Lieutenant Jake Bush, an assistant professor of naval science.

They also take courses ranging from the basics of military history, traditions, and courtesies to intensive courses focusing on topics such as naval navigation, military operations, and tactics, and freewheeling discussions of leadership and battlefield ethics.

Read More: 100 Years of ROTC at Georgia Tech — Ivan Allen College

 

Celebrate 100 Years of ROTC at Georgia Tech