LEWISTON — When Paul Mitchell received his Navy orders in June 1944, his mother cried.

Rather than go to boot camp — the first stop to fighting in World War II — the older brother of future Maine Sen. George Mitchell was going to school.

“’The Navy sent you to Lewiston?’” Paul Mitchell, now in his 80s, recalled his mother asking. In June 1944, men were fighting and dying on the beaches and hedgerows of France and on islands in the Pacific, And the kid from Waterville was going to Bates College.

For Mitchell and 781 other young men, the wartime service began here, where the Navy hoped to cultivate officers in a program known as “V-12.”

It was part of a nationwide program in which more than 100 schools helped supply the Navy with college-educated officer candidates.

The arrangement seemed to work out for everyone.

“ROTC programs couldn’t keep up with the demand,” said Carleton “Zeke” Finch, who was a Bates student when the war broke out in December 1941.

“The nation was woefully unready,” he said. The Naval Academy at Annapolis would double the size of its classes. Officer candidate schools churned out graduates every three months, described as “90-day wonders.”

Schools like Bates emptied as most men either volunteered or were drafted.

“Without the Navy, Bates would have had a hard time surviving,“ said Bill Hiss, the school’s vice president for external affairs and a school historian. “Half of the student body was gone.”

Then came the V-12 program.

On an accelerated schedule, the recruits attended classes and drilled under Navy chiefs. Some served only a semester before entering Navy schools. But for two years — from 1943 until the war’s end in 1945 — sailor suits were common at the school whose only body of water is a pond.

Bates’ V-12 alumni include lots of businessmen, teachers, lawyers, a justice on the Maine Supreme Judicial Court and even a presidential candidate: Robert Kennedy.

Since the late 1980s, when the group held its first reunion, a few of the alumni have gathered. Last week, 11 men met for lunch at the school’s Muskie Archives and told stories.

Louis Scolnik, a Lewiston native who served on Maine‘s highest court in the mid-1980s, still sounded incredulous at his luck.

“I packed a bag. I walked six blocks,“ Scolnik said. “And I was in the Navy.”

Finch and others remembered physical training that included climbing ropes hung from the old football field scoreboard.

And the men remembered a particularly tough chief, nicknamed “hot tup” for the way the phrase seemed to be repeated over and over as they marched.

For most of the men, the V-12 program lasted only a year or so. Mitchell and others never saw action, grateful for the war’s end.

Others served in combat.

Finch saw the end of the war from a weather ship in the Pacific.

Scolnik also went to the Pacific, serving aboard a small ship. In a single year, he rose from midshipman to skipper, commanding a crew of 26.

“I was 22,” Scolnik said.

dhartill@sunjournal.com

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