This month's edition of Out of Bounds discusses world affairs in the late forties and how that effected the talent level at Notre Dame. It's excerpted from the book Out of Bounds by Larry Weaver and Mike Bonifer:

Besides the predictable success of the Fighting Irish and the New York Yankees, little else was constant in postwar America. Our sworn enemies, Japan and Germany, became staunch allies. Old partners, China and Russia, were deadly adversaries in something novel, a Cold War. Winston Churchill inveighed against the Iron Curtain. The Bomb hovered over all. So did Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was always threatening to produce a list of Communists, fellow travelers, sympathizers, and assorted pinkos. This lunacy spread even to Notre Dame, where a few outspoken faculty members and priests were investigated under suspicion of being "closet reds."
 
Harry Truman promised a Fair Deal and embarrassed the Chicago Tribune. Babies boomed. Bebop bleated flatted fifths. Men started smoking filter cigarettes instead of Lucky Strikes. In Europe: the Marshall Plan, the Berlin airlift, a split between East and West.
 
At Notre Dame: building, expansion, and black faces on campus, a change wrought by the Navy's V-7 program. In the football offices, Frank Leahy enjoyed the spoils of war. From the first game of 1946 to the second game of 1950, Notre Dame did not lose: thirty-nine games without a defeat. There were two or three National Championships mixed in there, depending upon which polls you read.
 
What made it all possible was World War II. For four years the armed forces had siphoned off outstanding undergraduate football players. In 1946, they all returned, with years of eligibility, to join a team that had ranked ninth nationally the year before. Frank Leahy mustered out of the Navy to face the delightful prospect of forty-two returning lettermen. In those days of one platoon football, it amounted to almost four complete, experienced teams.