Raymond Kaiser was born in Brooklyn [Annotator's Note: Brooklyn is one of the five boroughs in New York, New York] in February 1919. The Great Depression was extremely heartbreaking. His family lived in a four-story flat with no hot water. He did not eat anything between meals. He got one cheese sandwich to take to school. His family decided to move to Yonkers, New York, where he was raised. In Yonkers they got a heated flat. They never had money. When he was ten years old, his uncle and his father bought a Christmas tree for 75 cents. He cried because he only got a little tractor toy. He went to high school and was involved in sports. He had a 94 average in grammar school. In high school, he went out for sports and his grades sunk. He graduated and got a construction job. He started at Pace Business School [Annotator's Note: Joseph I. Lubin School of Business, Pace University in New York, New York] studying accounting. He went to work for a finance company for two years and was 20 years old. He attended night school and it was tough on him. The war started on 1 September 1939 by Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler]. Kaiser volunteered for the draft. He went in the Army at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in F Company, 39th Regiment, 9th Infantry Division [Annotator's Note: Company F, 2nd Battalion, 39th Infantry Regiment, 9th Infantry Division] as a Private. He made 21 dollars a month. By the time he paid for his laundry, he ended up with about 15 dollars. He eventually got up to 30 dollars a month.

In the middle of 1941, the draft was extended to 18 months [Annotator's Note: the amount of time to be served]. Raymond Kaiser was not happy. He was asked three times if he wanted to go to Fort Benning [Annotator's Note: Fort Benning, Georgia]. They used to laugh at the OCS [Annotator's Note: officer candidate school] guys who went to Benning. He said he did not want to go the first time. He was then asked by a Lieutenant Colonel to go as well. For his third request, he wanted to go to the Air Force to sign up as a pilot. A General was coming down the highway and Kaiser saluted. The General stopped and waved him over. They talked for a few minutes and the General asked if he wanted to go to Benning. Kaiser said he was going to the Air Corps. He took the examination and passed. He then went to Montgomery, Alabama for preflight training. Primary training was in Lafayette, Louisiana. He had his test ride in freezing weather in a PT-19 [Annotator's Note: Fairchild PT-19 primary trainer aircraft]. He was stiff on the controls. The Lieutenant pointed it out and asked why he did not dress for the weather. He told him he had no feel for the airplane with boots and gloves on. He then went to Greenwood, Mississippi for basic training. The BT-13 [Annotator's Note: Vultee BT-13 Valiant basic trainer aircraft; nicknamed the Vultee Vibrator] was a terrible airplane and he had a difficult time landing it. He graduated from there and went to Selma, Alabama to Craig Field on AT-6s [Annotator's Note: North American AT-6 Texan advanced trainer aircraft]. He was one of ten pilots chosen to fly the P-40 [Annotator's Note: Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighter aircraft]. He had no problems with that. He remembers going from the 650 horsepower AT-6 to the 1,400 horsepower P-40. He went home for his days off. He was then sent to Sarasota, Florida for acrobatics, dive-bombing, and shooting at targets for a month. Miami [Annotator's Note: Miami, Florida] was next. He did not know where they were going from there. When their plane took off, the Ambassador to China was on the plane.

[Annotator's Note: Raymond Kaiser completed his pilot training and flew out of Miami, Florida for his next assignment.] They flew to South America to Ascension Island [Annotator's Note: Ascension Island, British Overseas Territory of Saint Helena, Ascension, and Tristan da Cunha] and Africa. They did not know where they were going. Once they got to India, they knew. They had P-40 [Annotator's Note: Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighter aircraft] advanced school outside of Karachi [Annotator's Note: Karachi, India; now Karachi, Pakistan]. There were nurses there, so they had company. They lost several men to accidents. Then they flew across upper India and he saw mountains. They flew to Kunming [Annotator's Note: Kunming, China], the headquarters of the 14th Air Force Flying Tigers [Annotator's Note: nickname adopted by 14th Air Force in honor of the First American Volunteer Group, or AVG, of the Republic of China Air Force, 1941 to 1942] in China. There, they were assigned to their squadrons. He fortunately ended up with the 25th Fighter Squadron [Annotator's Note: 25th Fighter Squadron, 51st Fighter Group, 14th Air Force] in Yunnanyi, China, which was the westernmost base in China. His first mission was just two planes. He was a wingman up to Mount Dali [Annotator's Note: Dali Cangshan Mountains, Dali City, Yunnan, China]. They later discovered it was a godsend. It was 12,000 feet high and snowcapped. The monsoon winds would come through and change your direction in a hurry. He could see the mountain and land alright. They had to have four missions a month to qualify for combat pay. They were not hazardous at the start, bombing and strafing missions. There was very little air combat. Kaiser arrived at his squadron in September 1943. They had about 30 pilots and lost about 40 percent of them, none to air combat. All losses were due to bombing, strafing, or accidents. A P-38 [Annotator's Note: Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter aircraft] pilot changed to P-40s and he came zooming in low, pulled up, and flipped over hitting a P-40 that was parked. He came out of the plane and was still strapped into his seat, but dead. Kaiser wanted to feel compassion, but he was just another pilot who was killed. Another pilot was shot down, captured, and tortured by the Japanese. Kaiser heard word through the guerillas who were all over the place working for the Chinese.

[Annotator's Note: Raymond Kaiser served in the US Army Air forces as a pilot flying Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighter aircraft in Yunnanyi, China. There were a lot of guerilla fighters active in the area]. The guerillas could be Chinese, Burmese, or part of the American government. The guerillas were spotters. Two times there, Japanese planes were coming, and the guerillas were reporting their numbers and plotting their courses. On one of these, Kaiser took off and his plane sputtered out. He had a bad spark plug. He was disappointed. The next group of planes that came over was in December of 1944. Kaiser was credited for one and a half kills. He was flying the wing of his squadron commander. They ran into six Zeros [Annotator's Note: Japanese Mitsubishi A6M fighter aircraft, referred to as the Zeke or Zero] and two bombers over Tengchong, China [Annotator's Note: Tengyue, China] on the border of Burma. They were in clouds and Kaiser saw his squadron leader drop his belly tank [Annotator's Note: extra fuel tank]. Kaiser shot a Zero down and the CO [Annotator's Note: commanding officer] shot a bomber down. Kaiser dove down after his Zero. He zoomed back up and a P-38 [Annotator's Note: Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter aircraft] took a shot at him. He almost got into a fight with him later on. Kaiser flew up to the P-38s and pointed down to three Zeros in a circle. The P-38 flight leader nodded, and Kaiser dove down. When he did, one Zero went right, one went left, and one flipped upside down and started shooting at Kaiser. Kaiser shot the Zero and looked around for the P-38s. They were gone. He called the pilot a coward for not fighting. They were not supposed to do that though per General Chennault [Annotator's Note: US Army Air Forces Major General Claire Lee Chennault], who told them not to dogfight Zeros. Kaiser felt that when you had altitude on them, it was a different story.

Raymond Kaiser was taken on a mission by his CO [Annotator's Note: commanding officer]. He asked why he was taking him when he was the senior flight leader. He told him it was because he was a hotrod fighter pilot. They had rocket tubes under their wings that shot 105mm shells. They were going to Tengchong [Annotator's Note: Tengchong or Tengyue, China] to dive bomb a Japanese ammunition dump. They were going to shoot one [Annotator's Note: 105mm rocket] at a time. Kaiser thought that meant somebody was going to get shot down. Kaiser made his pass and when he pulled out, he smelled ethyl glycol [Annotator's Note: synthetic liquid used to cool the aircraft engine]. He went down and made a second pass. After that, he heard yelling [Annotator's Note: over the aircraft's radio] and still smelled ethyl glycol. He flew away and got ready to jump out. He thought he could make a nearby auxiliary field, but saw his oil pressure climbing, so he jumped. He felt the shadow of his plane as he passed under the tail. The plane was only 50 yards in front of him; he had pulled the ripcord too soon. He was about a mile away from the Japanese lines, but Chinese troops were there with American advisors. It was heavily forested there. Kaiser landed right in the middle of a rice plot. An American soldier came running down the road and told him they had to get out of there. A plane flew over and dropped them a map to go to Nushoopo [Annotator's Note: phonetic spelling; unable to locate]. They ran into an outfit of veterinarians who took care of mules. They cleared a pathway and an L-5 [Annotator's Note: Stinson L-5 Sentinel light observation aircraft] landed and flew him back to his base at Yunnanyi [Annotator's Note: Yunnanyi, China]. That was his 64th out of 116 missions.

[Annotator's Note: For pilots like Raymond Kaiser, combat tours went by time in China, instead of by number of missions.] In Europe, a combat tour was 25 missions for bombers, 50 for fighters. Kaiser was flying his missions. It was getting close to two years and he was getting homesick. In December 1944, Kaiser was flying two or three missions a day. He went to the Flight Surgeon after his 116th mission and told him he was tired and wanted to go home. He was taken off flying status. When he was shot down earlier, the doctor asked him if he wanted a Purple Heart [Annotator's Note: the Purple Heart Medal is award bestowed upon a United States service member who has been wounded as a result of combat actions against an armed enemy]; he said no. He now would have liked to have had it. Kaiser went home and spent time at the bar with the boys in Yonkers [Annotator's Note: Yonkers, New York]. He went to Atlantic City [Annotator's Note: Atlantic City, New Jersey] and was told he could go to Selma, Alabama, or to multi-engine school. He decided to go to Selma, Alabama to be an AT-6 [Annotator's Note: North American AT-6 Texan advanced trainer aircraft] instructor. He still regrets not going to the school. On his trip home from Kunming [Annotator's Note: Kunming, China], the plane had an engine quit. They were told to stand by to jump out. There were four or five of them sharing one oxygen tube. They found out the copilot had fallen asleep and kicked the engine switch, shutting it off. They landed in Cairo [Annotator's Note: Cairo, Egypt]. Joe Baglio [Annotator's Note: later US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Joseph P. Baglio] and Kaiser became good drinking buddies. Baglio woke Kaiser up, took him to the cockpit, and showed him that the pilot and copilot were sound asleep. The plane was on autopilot. The red lights started blinking because they had failed to switch the gas tank. They were near the ground when they got the plane started again. Kaiser thought "this is hell; they are going to try to kill us on the way home". They made it to Casablanca [Annotator's Note: Casablanca, Morocco] and then had to go to Newfoundland [Annotator's Note: Newfoundland, Canada]. At Casablanca, Joe Baglio and Kaiser had a little too much to drink. They met some sailors who were trying to get home. Kaiser had been waiting weeks to find a way home. They went with the sailors to their ship. The MP [Annotator's Note: military police] would not let them on the ship because it was not going home. After making it to Newfoundland, he went to La Guardia Airfield [Annotator's Note: La Guardia Airport, New York, New York]. He then went down to Selma, Alabama where he gave pilots their checkout time. He then went to Texas to Essential Instructors School. He was flying with two different instructors doing acrobatics. He returned to Selma. He got home in January 1945. He got there late at night. He saw lights on his house, and it was a thrilling feeling. The front door was locked, and nobody was in the house. There was an open window that he went through. He called his sister in Greenwich, Connecticut where he thought his mother might be. She was there and was so excited, that she drove home.

[Annotator's Note: Raymond Kaiser returned to the United States after flying 116 missions in China.] Kaiser was in the Essential Instructors course at Waco, Texas. Two guys tried to kill him. One pilot was supposed to let down the flaps, but he pulled up the landing gear instead. They were going down the field with everything flying apart. The AT-6 [Annotator's Note: North American Aviation AT-6 Texan advanced trainer aircraft] was not a strong airplane. The next week he was flying with a guy who did not want to fly. The guy started to land downwind. He put the flaps and wheels down. Kaiser rolled back his canopy. They hit the ground with a wing. They were on the ground upside down and the plane was wrecked. Kaiser went to work for a financial corporation [Annotator's Note: after being discharged from the military]. He was never involved in an accident on his own [Annotator's Note: as a fighter pilot]. He always landed the plane he took off in, except for the one time he was shot down. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks him to describe his strafing missions in China.] He strafed troops, anything on wheels, airfields, barracks buildings, ammunition dumps. The missions Kaiser is most proud of are three that he did not do anything on. The first was at Wanling [Annotator's Note: Wanling, China]. They were to strafe moving vehicles. He looked down and saw one Japanese soldier in a slit trench. Kaiser saw him digging into the side of the trench in fear and decided to just leave him alone. The second was strange. He was flying down the Burma valley and came upon a small peak with a shrine on it. Around it was a mule train. He flew at eye-level with a Japanese officer looking at him. Kaiser was going to wreck the place and then he saw kids playing among the mules. Kaiser reported this to the intelligence officer and was asked why he did not shoot them. Kaiser said he was not in the war to shoot children. On the third mission, he was flying as wingman and the other plane started shooting. Kaiser saw he was shooting a Japanese guard post. There were civilians carrying supplies and they were crawling over each other to get away. Kaiser shot into the rice paddy just to shoot something. He was sick to his stomach. He landed and made his report. He asked the pilot why he shot them. He said they were a tribe that was not friendly. Kaiser told him that if these natives did not carry the goods, the Japanese would shoot them, and if they carried the goods, they [Annotator's Note: the Americans] would shoot them. He was not into that kind of a war. He is the proudest of those three missions.

Raymond Kaiser says it was not much of a war [Annotator's Note: in the China, Burma, India Theater]; not like in Europe. There were no Divisions [Annotator's Note: infantry, armored or airborne divisions] moving around. There were not 1,000 airplanes like in England. It was little, piddly, and foolish. On his first flight, he was told to go attack a machine gun that was holding up the Chinese. Kaiser's codename was King Kong. He flew down and saw where the machine gun might be but could not find it. He thought it was a heck of a war where one machine gun was holding up the Chinese. They escorted 24 B-24s [Annotator's Note: Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber] deep into Burma. They had 24 P-40s [Annotator's Note: Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighter aircraft] overhead. They were bombing an airfield. Kaiser never saw a Jap [Annotator's Note: a period derogatory term for Japanese] plane. That was Kaiser's biggest mission. Most of them were four planes. His best mission was outside of Tengchong [Annotator's Note: Tengchong, now Tengyue, China]. There was a British Consulate building there. Two missions went out, skip-bombed and dive bombed but missed. Kaiser went out on the next one. He had talked to a photo recon man who told him how to dive-bomb. He had three 250-pound bombs on the plane. On his turn, he remembered what he was told and trimmed up the plane. [Annotator's Note: Kaiser goes into great detail about how to make the trim adjustments.] He was going way down. It is still vivid to him. He dropped his bombs and pulled back on the stick. He felt the plane wobble and saw a blue cloud behind him. He dropped his bombs down the chimney [Annotator's Note: term for hitting the target well]. He got a picture of the shattered building, but an officer took it from him. He wanted to show his mother he had destroyed the British Consulate building. His mother was from Ireland and she did not like him fighting for the British.

Raymond Kaiser never saw large concentrations of troops. The largest he saw was about 25. He was flying wingman when he saw them. He said there were Japs [Annotator's Note: a period derogatory term for Japanese] and the lead pilot just kept flying. He never looked at Kaiser. They had an air raid later and Kaiser was standing next to that pilot. The pilot said he was going to go in the opposite direction of the enemy fighters coming in. He later said he had missed seeing the Japanese planes. That convinced Kaiser that they guy was a coward. There was only one railroad. The B-25s [Annotator's Note: North American B-25 Mitchell medium bomber] would come over and bomb that. They did not receive any ground fire on their strafing mission. Once, he got out of his plane and some Chinese were laughing. The belly tank of the plane had a big hole in it. He never flew scared. He never got lost. His base was small, and they were the only White people there. It was all natives. It had an 8,000-foot runway because ATC [Annotator's Note: Air Transport Command] was flying in supplies. Everything was flown in over The Hump [Annotator's Note: aerial supply route over the Himalayan Mountains between India and China]. The ATC should have gotten all the credit. The monsoon winds would throw them off. Engines would freeze up in the cold weather. He only ever saw Japanese on two missions.

Raymond Kaiser always mocked the P-40 [Annotator's Note: Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighter aircraft] as low and slow but he loved the airplane. The P-40N was his favorite model. We [Annotator's Note: the United States] gave 100 P-40s to France before the Germans overtook them, and France did not want them and gave them to England, who did not want them either. The English sent them to North Africa and a lot of them went into China. The P-40K was a clunker. The P-40E was the first to see combat. Kaiser only flew the P-40N about 95 percent of the time. It took a lot of punishment and was good in dive-bombing. The only thing was a .22 caliber bullet in the engine could take it down due to the ethyl glycol [Annotator's Note: synthetic liquid used to cool the aircraft engine]. One pilot was shot down, captured, and killed. Another was captured and taken to Rangoon [Annotator's Note: Rangoon, Burma; now Yangon, Myanmar] and was in a prison camp for a couple of years. Kaiser liked the Chinese and China. He had the interpreters teaching him some Chinese. [Annotator's Note: Kaiser says a few words in Chinese.] He never saw any soldiers or officers. They only had planes fly over them twice and no land attacks. The Japanese planes only provided cover for the bombers. They were susceptible to going up in flames; they were very flammable.

The war did not change Raymond Kaiser a bit. He felt like he was doing his job. He was in [Annotator's Note: in the military] for five years and flew his missions. He never refused a mission; he just got tired. It is difficult to say whether the war changed the world. A few years later, there was the Korean War [Annotator's Note: Korean War, June 1950 to 1953]. A few years after that was the Vietnamese War [Annotator's Note: Vietnam War, or Second Indochina War, 1 November 1955 to 30 April 1975]. Then the Iraq War [Annotator's Note: Iraq War, 2003 to 2011]. He does not think it changed anything. It changed Germany; it became an ally. France is a half-assed ally. Italy is one. It is difficult to say if you are not a historian. America did a great job fighting the war and it brought the country closer than it had ever been before. We were attacked at Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941] and Roosevelt [Annotator's Note: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States] was a great president and made his famous speech [Annotator's Note: Infamy Speech; President Franklin D. Roosevelt to a Joint Session of the United States Congress on 8 December 1941]. When he considers what Germany and Japan did in killing our troops, and now they are our allies and still the same people, he cannot get over it. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks him about the weather at his base in China.] The weather was beautiful. They were at 6,000 feet and wore normal, summer clothes. The temperature was around 70 degrees all the time. The monsoon season kept them from flying at all. They just drank up whatever they could find. They never saw any Chinese, but they prepared their food and cleaned. The guy in the hostel Kaiser was in had fled from Burma. They had one squadron at Yunnanyi [Annotator's Note: Yunnanyi, China] with 25 to 30 planes. They had an armaments guy, a radio man, and different specialists. These enlisted men were there for over three years. Kaiser flew a C-87 Norsemen [Annotator's Note: C-64 Norseman, also called Noorduyn Norseman utility transport aircraft]. He was sent to India to pick it up and flew it back to Yunnanyi [Annotator's Note: Yunnanyi, China]. He picked up some guys who were going home. They were a happy lot. The food was horrible; they had rice for breakfast, lunch, and supper. They had a tremendous amount of eggs. The only entertainment was drinking. They called the doctor "the evil one." He gave them a few ounces each time they flew. They would mix drinks using the concentrated orange from the C-rations [Annotator's Note: prepared and canned wet combat food]. There were no women. They would hunt ducks with rifles. Kaiser missed one but one fellow was an excellent shot and he was shooting them. That was good eating. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Kaiser what he thinks the significance of The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana is but the tape stops as he starts to answer.]