David K. Hayward was born in May 1922 in San Francisco, California. When he was three, he moved to Pasadena, California, where he grew up in a middle-class neighborhood. His father worked for Aetna Life Insurance Company. The Great Depression [Annotator's Note: The Great Depression, a global economic depression that lasted from 1929 through 1939 in the United States] made them be tight with their money. His mother died when he was three. He had one older brother. He went to school and got his A.A. degree [Annotator's Note: Associate in Arts degree]. His family looked at the newspaper every morning to see what was going on in Europe and the Far East. His father would talk about what Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] was doing in Europe and was very disappointed with the world situation. Hayward took it in as a teenager would. He did not think he would be involved though. He does not recall when he heard of the attack on Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941]. He had not thought a lot about what he wanted to do with his life. He did enjoy the movies and wanted to learn to fly an airplane. He mostly tried to live within what money they had. He was able to buy gasoline and tires for his cars and enjoyed traveling with his friends to San Francisco. It was generally a time of deprivation, but they made the best of it. They could take buses and streetcars to pass time.

David K. Hayward decided to enlist [Annotator's Note: in February 1942] and do something attractive to him instead of being drafted. He liked the idea of flying and enlisted in the Army Air Forces. It was not called the Army Air Corps then. In 1941, the name was changed but people still called it the Air Corps. He went to Los Angeles [Annotator's Note: Los Angeles, California] and signed up to be an Aviation Cadet. He took physical and written examinations. He was told there was no room for him and sent home for a month. He and another candidate went traveling all over the western United States. They went to Montana where they both had girlfriends. He reported to Santa Ana [Annotator's Note: Santa Ana Army Air Base in Santa Ana, California] in March 1942. He was put in Class 42J. They marched, got shots, did KP [Annotator's Note: kitchen patrol or kitchen police] and guard duty. From April and into May 1942, they were sent to primary flight school [Annotator's Note: at Rankin Academy at Rankin Field near Tulare, California] in Tulare, California. He loved it. They flew the Stearman biplane [Annotator's Note: Boeing-Stearman Model 75 Kaydet or PT-13 primary trainer aircraft]. He thought of his training when Sully [Annotator's Note: Chesley Burnett "Sully" Sullenberger, III] had to land an airplane [Annotator's Note: US Airways Flight 1549 after hitting birds and losing its engines] in the Hudson River [Annotator's Note: off Manhattan, New York, New York, 15 January 2009]. Sully had been through the very same training. In the war, one of the crews had to land in a river. Sully was not the first to do that. Hayward then went to basic flying school in Lemoore, California for two months. Then they had another two months of advanced flying school in Chandler, Arizona. At the end of that time, he graduated and got his wings [Annotator's Note: Aeronautical Rating Badge, also called Pilot Badge or wings] and Second Lieutenant bars [Annotator's Note: rank insignia]. During training, there was a continual fear of being washed out. People got bad colds from time to time and sometimes that got them washed out. Being washed out was terrible and he worried about it a lot. After graduating, he went to operational training in Greenville, South Carolina. He learned to fly the B-25 [Annotator's Note: North American B-25 Mitchell medium bomber]. They had a crew of five or six.

David K. Hayward loved the B-25 [Annotator's Note: North American B-25 Mitchell medium bomber]. It seemed big to him and was easy to fly. It had heaters to keep them warm. He was assigned to a crew that was not permanent nor full due to it being training. He was assigned to a full crew when going off to combat. He wondered if he would be a first pilot or copilot. Nobody wanted to be the copilot. He was young and immature and shy, so he took what came. He was down as a copilot at first but was moved over to first pilot by the time he left the United States. They left Morrison Field [Annotator's Note: now Palm Beach International Airport] in West Palm Beach, Florida about April 1943. They flew across the Caribbean and by then it was obvious they were going to India. He knew virtually nothing about the CBI Theater [Annotator's Note: China-Burma-India Theater]. His first thought upon arriving in India, was how many people there were and how poor they were. The air always smelled peculiar and was smoky. It was an entirely different environment. They landed in Karachi, which is no longer in India [Annotator's Note: now Karachi, Pakistan]. They then went to Agra [Annotator's Note: Agra, India] overnight to refuel. He went to see the Taj Mahal [Annotator's Note: ivory-white marble mausoleum on the Yamuna River, Agra, India]. They then flew to Chakulia [Annotator's Note: Chakulia, India], west of Calcutta [Annotator's Note: Kolkata, India], where Carlson became a part of the 22nd Bomb Squadron [Annotator's Note: 22nd Bombardment Squadron, 341st Bombardment Group, 10th Air Force]. The base's buildings were mud-walled with thatched roofs and open windows. Natives walked through at all hours. There were a lot of mosquitos and snakes. Carlson's crew was broken up when they arrived and were put with more experienced crews. He had to fly as a copilot again.

David K. Hayward's first mission [Annotator's Note: 8 April 1943 with the 22nd Bombardment Squadron, 341st Bombardment Group, 10th Air Force] was the scariest of them all. They went to bomb an airfield in central Burma [Annotator's Note: now Myanmar]. They dropped their bombs and turned for home. The Japanese were on a mission of their own to bomb in India. Hayward looked out and counted 21 airplanes, which were a combination of Japanese bombers and fighters going the same direction. A fighter plane flew alongside him, and he was scared. He was not close enough to shoot at. Hayward did a lot of philosophizing at that time. His airplane had been repaired after a belly landing and was slower than the others. The others had left them, and they had no support. He figured he had it and that was it. He does not know why they were not attacked. He has speculated as to why. He feels the Japanese are more regimented than Americans and were told not to attack and to stay on mission. They had also lost the element of surprise. Hayward did not know what to expect on his second mission. You are just continually tense. Before the missions, they would be told about all the fighters and antiaircraft guns. They also had to deal with the weather and being unable to see mountaintops. Their targets were exclusively enemy supply lines. They attacked railroads, bridges, airfields and warehouses. They were mainly to protect the airlift from India, over Burma, to China called The Hump [Annotator's Note: aerial supply route over the Himalayan Mountains between India and China]. The enemy had occupied all of Burma and were shooting down cargo planes. Six of theirs were shot down. If they could stop the flow of fuel and ammunition to Burma, they could stop that from happening.

It was about a five or six hour mission for David K. Hayward to fly into Burma [Annotator's Note: now Myanmar] and back [Annotator's Note: as a member of the 22nd Bombardment Squadron, 341st Bombardment Group, 10th Air Force]. They would normally begin at first daylight because the weather was bad in India. They would try to get back before the afternoon thunderstorms began, particularly in the monsoon season. He flew through thunderstorms many times. That is where the training comes in. They trained a lot in flying by the instruments and got proficient at it. He never flew with his original crew. Two had been killed. The squadron got word that an enemy cargo ship was in the Bay of Bengal [Annotator's Note: name for the northeastern part of the Indian Ocean]. They sent three planes to attack. The copilot on one was the one Hayward had flown overseas with. The ship was a cruiser and not a cargo ship. The lead plane dropped its bombs and got through. The second plane with the copilot was shot down and everyone was killed. The third plane claimed he did not see the cruiser. Hayward thinks he did not want to lose his plane and crew and flew back instead. Hayward's gunner was shot down on another mission. His flight engineer then quit. Mechanics were highly appreciated so he became that. The crews highly respected the mechanics. Hayward never got a completely permanent crew. The policy was to take advantage of any crew not in the hospital with malaria [Annotator's Note: mosquito-borne disease caused by a parasite] or on leave [Annotator's Note: an authorized absence for a short period of time], as well as whatever planes were flyable, and to keep an even ratio of the number of months spent in the area and the number of missions flown. Hayward flew 53 missions when the policy was made that anyone who had flown 50 missions could go home. That would usually be about a year in the area of India and China. Hayward had only been in India for one month, when his squadron asked for one crew to volunteer to fly single-plane bombing missions into Burma. The Japanese had fighter planes that were shooting down cargo planes. Hayward and his crew volunteered. He was only 20 years old, and life was very boring. They only flew one mission per week. They then flew five missions and they had P-40 fighter [Annotator's Note: Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighter aircraft] escorts. They flew in the clouds and there was no radar there, so that helped them a lot. They accomplished the job safely. They had to fly over The Hump [Annotator's Note: aerial supply route over the Himalayan Mountains between India and China] to move from China to India. That took three or four trips. It was about a three hour trip at 18,000 feet, which was in the clouds a lot of the time. They had to use oxygen and they had to fly with their superchargers [Annotator's Note: air compressor that increases pressure of air supply to an internal combustion engine, thereby increasing power output] on. It was a tremendous load and strain on the engines. It was beautiful when you could see. They were told not to trust the altimeters [Annotator's Note: device that measures altitude] due to updrafts and downdrafts affecting them. The tensions would be relieved when they crossed the mountains.

David K. Hayward and his outfit [Annotator's Note: 22nd Bombardment Squadron, 341st Bombardment Group, 10th Air Force] did not interact much with the locals. They would see them pumping water at a well. Gurkhas [Annotator's Note: also called Gorkha or Gorkhall, soldiers native to South Asia recruited for the British Army and Indian Army] were the guards at the airplanes. They played a flute as they marched and were well trained by the British. Locals also repaired and built the airfields. When they went to China, the supply chain was limited, and the Americans were just the necessary ones. Everything else was handled by the Chinese as much as possible. Occasionally in India, they would get a three day leave [Annotator's Note: an authorized absence for a short period of time] and go to Calcutta [Annotator's Note: Kolkata, India]. The food was good. He enjoyed just going to the bar at the Grand Hotel and would join British soldiers drinking and singing. The taxi drivers were Sikhs [Annotator's Note: an adherent of Sikhism, or Sikhi, a religion that originated in India]. Some crews got to go to Darjeeling [Annotator's Note: Darjeeling, India] in the mountains and to Tiger Mountain [Annotator's Note: Tiger Hill, Darjeeling, India] to watch the sun come up on Mount Everest [Annotator's Note: highest mountain on Earth in the Himalayas]. Hayward got along with the British. He was young, naïve, and unsophisticated. The British were very different and sophisticated. Hayward returned after one year overseas. After about four months [Annotator's Note: in China] he had his 53rd mission and was sent home. He was first sent to a rest camp which was boring. There were others with a higher priority to go home. Some were called "nervous in the service" [Annotator's Note: now called posttraumatic stress disorder] and needed to be sent home as soon as they could. He looked forward to going home from the day he arrived overseas. You just hoped you would be lucky enough. The camp was east of Kunming [Annotator's Note: Kunming, or Yunnan-Fu, China]. He returned there after the war. There is now a world class golf course there that he played. One day while at the camp, a plane [Annotator's Note: the tape skips at the description of it] came over and that was the most exciting thing that happened. Later on they brought in recreation, but then it was not set up. He flew back to the United States on a C-54 [Annotator's Note: Douglas C-54 Skymaster cargo aircraft], which in civilian times was known as a DC-4. He landed at Morrison Field [Annotator's Note: now Palm Beach International Airport] in West Palm Beach, Florida. He had forgotten a lot about the United States and was pretty tense.

After returning to the United States, David K. Hayward was sent to Santa Monica, California to be reassigned. He was asked if he wanted to be a flight instructor but said no. He went to Washington, D.C. to Bolling Field [Annotator's Note: now Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling in Washington, D.C.] to fly high level people around. He did that until the war ended. He flew as a copilot in a specially built DC-3 [Annotator's Note: Douglas DC-3 cargo and passenger aircraft] to take Secretary Stimson [Annotator's Note: Henry Lewis Stimson, American statesman and politician, Secretary of War from 1940 to 1945] to Miami [Annotator's Note: Miami, Florida] for vacation. He had to stay there in case the Secretary had to return to Washington. Hayward would go to the USO [Annotator's Note: United Services Organization] to pass time. He made a lot of trips to Cuba and had a drink at the longest bar in the world in Havana [Annotator's Note: Havana, Cuba]. He also went to Jamaica and Alaska. They flew funeral flights over Arlington Cemetery [Annotator's Note: Arlington National Cemetery, United States military cemetery in Arlington County, Virginia] and took turns flying mail to General Marshall [Annotator's Note: US Chief of Staff and General of the Army George C. Marshall] in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. They were told to learn to fly every airplane on the field that were assigned to the Generals at the Pentagon [Annotator's Note: the headquarters building of the United States Department of Defense, located in Washington D.C.]. Saturday nights in the Officers Club was the place to be. There would be officers from the Free French [Annotator's Note: French Forces of the Interior or Forces françaises de l'Intérieur; French resistance fighters in the later stages of World War 2], the Polish, the British, and Russians. It was the place for fun. They kept up with what was going on in the war. Hayward remembers FDR [Annotator's Note: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States] passing away [Annotator's Note: 12 April 1945]. He was in China at the time. It did not affect them. Hayward celebrated VJ-Day [Annotator's Note: Victory Over Japan Day, 15 August 1945] mostly over VE-Day [Annotator's Note: Victory in Europe Day, 8 May 1945] as it meant a lot to him. He went home in August 1945 as he wanted to go to college and become an engineer. He also wanted something more decentralized than the Army. The airlines were offering good salaries for pilots, and it was tempting. The G.I. Bill of Rights [Annotator's Note: the G.I. Bill, or Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, was enacted by the United States Congress to aid United States veterans of World War 2 in transitioning back to civilian life and included financial aid for education, mortgages, business starts and unemployment] was the big temptation so that is what he did. He went to Cal Tech [Annotator's Note: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California] and studied mechanical engineering. The State of California had their own G.I. Bill. He went to work for Texaco [Annotator's Note: Texaco Incorporated], and they suggested he go to night school for a petroleum engineering degree, which he did.

David K. Hayward did not continue flying after the war. He did fly once while working for Texaco [Annotator's Note: Texaco Incorporated]. Howard Hughes [Annotator's Note: Howard Robard Hughes Junior, American business magnate] sent a DC-3 [Annotator's Note: Douglas DC-3 cargo and passenger aircraft] over to get them to go to his factory in Texas and Hayward got fly it. Going to school for him was difficult after being away for so long. That, and helping his wife raise his family was time consuming so he did not fly. He did not have much of a problem adjusting to civilian life. He was tense and it took a few months to relax. If he went to a movie like "Twelve O'clock High" [Annotator's Note: 1949 American war film about the 8th Air Force based on the 1948 novel of the same name by World War 2 US Army Air Force veterans Sy Bartlett and Beirne Lay, Jr.], he would walk out a little tense. His most memorable experience was celebrating when the war was over. It is hard to say otherwise. He wrote a book called "A Young Man in the Wild Blue Yonder" about his experiences [Annotator's Note: published December 2013]. It goes into a lot of the high points of it. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Hayward what he thought at the time of the news of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, 6 and 9 August 1945.] He was in Maryland and saw the headline in the paper. He did not really understand what they meant by dropping a bomb with energy of the sun. They did not use the word "atomic" at that time. He had no concept of radioactivity. As he learned more about it, he felt it shortened the war. An awful lot of men are alive today because they were dropped. It is too bad it had to happen. The Germans would have eventually learned how to do it and would have blown up London [Annotator's Note: London, England]. At the beginning of the war, people did not have a choice but to do something for the war effort. The war matured Hayward and gave him a sense of responsibility. He got to learn how to fly a P-38 Lightning [Annotator's Note: Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter aircraft]. He cannot believe it. He flew the P-47 too [Annotator's Note: Republic P-47 Thunderbolt fighter aircraft]. He learned he could do things that he thought he could not do. Hayward is involved in three veteran's groups. One of them goes back to China. The Chinese are still very grateful that the Flying Tigers [Annotator's Note: the First American Volunteer Group of the Republic of China Air Force, or AVG for short, composed of American airmen and ground crew] were there. Once, General Chennault [Annotator's Note: US Army Air Forces Major General Claire Lee Chennault] came to Hayward's airfield and told them all they could call themselves Flying Tigers, so he does. The Hump route [Annotator's Note: aerial supply route over the Himalayan Mountains between India and China] meant a lot to the Chinese. As a member of The Freedom Committee of Orange County [Annotator's Note: a non-profit veterans' organization, Costa Mesa, California], Hayward goes to high schools and civic events to make speeches about the war. He feels that the war today means to America that it could happen again. It will be different from anything seen before. He fears what could happen in the future but not to the point of going mad over it. The Museum [Annotator's Note: The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana] is absolutely important as is the teaching of the war to future generations. The war is part of education. Historians should play a better part in future planning of actions. In China, the United States did not send its Army, other than Merrill's Marauders [Annotator's Note: 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional)], but equipped the Chinese. He is proud his squadron [Annotator's Note: 22nd Bombardment Squadron, 341st Bombardment Group, 10th Air Force] helped with that. He was fortunate in his marriage and raising a family. He has been lucky all of his life and has been well and healthy.