David L. Lehigh was born in December 1924 in York County [Annotator's Note: York County, Pennsylvania]. He grew up in the little village of Shiloh [Annotator's Note: Shiloh, Pennsylvania] in the country. Lehigh does not remember much about his time in Shiloh because he moved when he was seven. His father worked as a laborer at a feed company. When the war started, he worked as a machine operator. Lehigh has six siblings, so his mother worked in the house. Occasionally, she worked at a sewing factory. His family moved to Lehigh's grandfather's farm, then to Dover [Annotator's Note: Dover, Pennsylvania]. While in Dover, Lehigh worked on a farm and attended high school. The family he worked for liked him and he liked the mother's cooking. Whenever it was harvest time, the local farmers helped each other. Lehigh attended Dover High School. He had some time to play soccer, baseball, and ran track. Everyone enjoyed hunting in Dover. That background helped Lehigh while he was in the military. Lehigh was drafted, but enlisted into the Air Force while in basic training. He was sent to Gettysburg [Annotator's Note: Gettysburg, Pennsylvania] for training after basic training in Saint Petersburg, Florida [Annotator's Note: St. Petersburg Training Center or USAAF Basic Training Center No. 6]. He always wanted to learn how to fly. After Gettysburg, he was sent to Nashville [Annotator's Note: likely to Smyrna Army Airfield, later Sewart Air Force Base, in Smyrna, Tennessee; approximately 25 miles southeast of Nashville, Tennessee], where he tried to become a single engine pilot. Instead, he was sent to Santa Anna [Annotator's Note: Santa Ana Army Air Base near Santa Ana, California] to learn how to be a bombardier. He took gunnery courses in Las Vegas [Annotator's Note: Las Vegas Army Air Corps Gunnery School, now Nellis Air Force Base, Las Vegas, Nevada]. The air-to-air gunnery was very cold. He returned to California for advanced bombardier training. The days were very long. The book work was more difficult because he did not have college training. When he graduated, Lehigh was in the top quarter of his class. His parents could not make it to the graduation ceremony. He took a tour of California with a friend. He remained friends with that airman and flew in the same unit [Annotator's Note: 528th Bombardment Squadron, 380th Bombardment Group, 5th Air Force] as him. Lehigh learned more about Europe than the Pacific.

David Lehigh was told he would be deploying overseas, but was not told where he would be going. He departed from Mather Field, California around 15 December. He first flew to Hawaii, then to Guadalcanal [Annotator's Note: Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands], then Biak [Annotator's Note: Biak Island, Papua New Guinea], and finally at Nadzab, New Guinea. He flew commercially, instead of with his plane. Lehigh flew his first three combat missions from New Guinea. His group was nicknamed the "Flying Circus" because of how it flew during a review in Texas. Lehigh's unit [Annotator's Note: 528th Bombardment Squadron, 380th Bombardment Group, 5th Air Force] served under the Australian Air Force. He liked the Australians and knew his Australian comrades would stick by his side. He thought the country was crazy. When Lehigh flew to the Philippines, he served as the navigator because the plane's regular navigator got too drunk to do his job before they left Australia. By the time the crew was making the last leg of the journey, the navigator was back in his position. At San Jose, Mindoro [Annotator's Note: San Jose, Mindoro, Philippines], Lehigh had to dig a foxhole and live in or under his airplane while the camp was being prepared. There was no kitchen, so he lived off of dry rations, bread, and canned cherries. The strip was eventually named McGuire Airstrip. Lehigh's first combat mission out of the Philippines was to Formosa [Annotator's Note: present day Tiawan]. He flew with the 90th Bomb Group [Annotator's Note: 90th Bombardment Group, 5th Air Force] because the rest of his unit had not arrived yet. His plane was the last in the formation, which was not a good position to have because the people on the ground knew his coordinates. Lehigh was apprehensive about the flak [Annotator's Note: antiaircraft artillery fire] because he did not see much of it over New Guinea. The flak was concentrated. His first few missions did not have any close calls. He realized he could be hit like other planes, and he felt helpless. Lehigh figured out a different system for his bomb sight so he could get his coordinates right faster. Weather conditions and ack-ack [Annotator's Note: antiaircraft artillery fire] would force the planes to drop in altitude. The average they flew was between 12,000 and 15,000 feet in the air. Lehigh would have to change the altitude and speed on his bomb sights, which could be difficult. He became faster at these changes over time. The plane was turned over to the bombardier when on the bombing runs. When the bombs were dropped, it went back to the pilot. Lehigh flew in three different planes during his time in the service. The last plane he served in did not have nose art on it.

During one of his first combat missions, one of the gunners on David Lehigh's plane panicked. He found out a few missions later when another gunner told him about it. Lehigh had to talk to the gunner about it because he was the armament officer. The gunner got over his panic and never left his station again. One time, Lehigh spoke to an infantryman before the invasion of Okinawa [Annotator's Note: Okinawa, Japan]. He asked how the infantry can make it through an invasion. The soldier explained how he is able to move forward under heavy fire. Lehigh felt like he could relate through his own experiences. Occasionally Lehigh was allowed to fly the plane. He was good at flying straight, but turning gave him issues because he was short. He was told to land the plane, but he could not do it. The longest flight Lehigh took was a 2,200 mile round trip from Australia to Saigon, French Indochina [Annotator's Note: present day Vietnam] and back. The longest flight his group [Annotator's Note: Lehigh was a bombardier in the 528th Bombardment Squadron, 380th Bombardment Group, 5th Air Force] did was a 16 hour flight to Borneo. The Japanese did not expect the bombers. Lehigh destroyed an oil field on Borneo. He flew to Borneo 12 times before the invasion in 1944, including a bombing run on D-Day [Annotator's Note: 1 May 1945]. On that morning, Lehigh volunteered for the mission. His navigator was on another plane and his plane ran out of gasoline. He had to bail out of the plane and apparently read a comic book on the way down. Lehigh flew 38 missions including two volunteer missions. Flying with a different crew made Lehigh feel uneasy. He had a good crew throughout the war. Depending on the target, the planes would carry different sized bombs. Incendiary bombs were used to destroy airstrips. Lehigh never used napalm. General purpose bombs were used to destroy railroads and buildings. One of his missions was against a harbor on Carabao Island in the Philippines. The Navy had a difficult time destroying some big guns located in the caves around the harbor. Lehigh and his friend flew down and had to drop bombs right into the caves. The guns were destroyed, but the bombs could have sent shrapnel into the plane. The biggest complaint maintenance had was they could not get the parts they needed to repair planes. They would cannibalize busted planes to repair others. Lehigh thought those crews were amazing. On Mindoro, ten B-24s [Annotator's Note: Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber] were lost during take-off. A crew chief found a crewmember attaching hand grenades to landing equipment. They think he had lost his mind. One of Lehigh's friend was lost and the only reason he was able to identify his body was from a nasty scar from a surgery. [Annotator's Note: Lehigh gets emotional.] While bombing bridges, Lehigh used a special bomb and tried to aim for the legs of the bridge. They were small targets, but those missions did not have the worry of enemy fire. Because of cloud coverage, Lehigh managed to talk the pilot into getting very low for the bombing run. He managed to take out two bridges. The flight home was tough because the plane was very low on gas. The engines kept shorting out. As the plane was landing, it was down to one engine. It had to be towed in because there was not enough gas to taxi down the runway.

David Lehigh was friendly with officers and enlisted men. One of his friends was flying over Saigon [Annotator's Note: Saigon, Vietnam] when his plane went down. The crew was captured and one of Lehigh's friends was decapitated by a Japanese soldier. Lehigh found out after the crew had been released from a prison camp. Lehigh flew a rescue mission, but he never found the crew. It was difficult to see anything in the ocean from high in the air. Lehigh's navigator was rescued after he went down in a different plane. The Pacific Ocean was very cold. His crew was involved in bringing back POWs [Annotator's Note: prisoners of war]. He brought back many of his own people as well as survivors of the Bataan Death March [Annotator's Note: forced march of American and Filipino prisoners of war after the fall of the Bataan Peninsula in April 1942]. The stories he heard were horrible. Those stories enforced his feelings towards the Japanese. Years after the war, he went to Hawaii and saw many Japanese men his age and he wondered if they had been his enemies during the war. He has since let go of much of his negative feelings. He is friends with several Japanese people. He felt bad for the Japanese civilians. Lehigh thought the weather could be scarier than being over enemy targets. When he was in large Pacific storms, the plane would be thrown around. Lehigh thought it was like being in Dante's Inferno [Annotator’s Note: one of three poems by Dante Alighieri, together known as the Divine Comedy]. The most scared Lehigh got during the war was when he flew into a big storm after hitting a target in French Indochina [Annotator's Note: present day Vietnam]. When he came out of the storm, he felt great relief. During his second to last mission, Lehigh did not think he would come back. He bombed Formosa [Annotator's Note: present day Taiwan] during that mission. His plane was in the front of the formation, but the flight leader decided to change how the formation would fly. Out of the 24 planes that went to Formosa, only seven returned fully functioning. The flight leader was hit right in front of Lehigh's plane. Lehigh had to take charge, which was difficult because his quarters were leaking hydraulic fluid and gasoline. They tried to give cover to the men that bailed out of the plane. The flight officer and one of Lehigh's friends were lost in the plane wreck. Lehigh feels like that officer saved his crew's life. One of his friends bailed out of a different plane over the water. A B-17 [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber] dropped a small boat for the crew to get into. Unfortunately, the boat fell onto Lehigh's friend, killing him. Lehigh did not think he would make it out of that mission. The bombardier had the busiest job in a mission because he had to be perfectly synchronized, or else the mission would be a failure. Lehigh was in the Philippines when the atomic bomb was dropped, but he did not hear about it until the next day on Okinawa [Annotator's Note: Okinawa, Japan]. He flew over Hiroshima [Annotator's Note: Hiroshima, Japan], and did not know how anyone could have survived the blast. Lehigh could have escaped military service because he was a farmer and because of his religion. He wanted to go to the Pacific because he did not think he would have to bomb people. He was supposed to bomb Kure Harbor [Annotator's Note: Kure, Japan], which would have been his first experience bombing civilians. Many people fault Harry Truman [Annotator's Note: Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the United States] for dropping the atomic bombs, but Lehigh thinks it was the only option considering how costly an invasion would have been. Lehigh thinks the atomic bombs would not have been necessary if the Japanese had not been so stubborn.