Walter Bank was born in 1926 in Marlboro, Massachusetts, the youngest of three sons of immigrant parents. His father was of German descent and his mother's family came from Ireland. Bank has visited the home countries of both his parents. Bank's visit to Germany was after the war, and he met two of his cousins who fought in World War 2 for the Axis powers. Neither cousin lost his home in the Allied bombing of German cities, nor did either cousin become a Nazi.

Walter Bank's family lived on a small farm, and wasn't greatly affected by the Great Depression. They never talked about the impending war at home, and he didn't discuss it much in public until he was in high school among other young men who were eligible for the draft. He heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor while he was reading the Sunday funny papers. The news came over the radio, and Bank was surprised, in spite of the fact that the papers had been reporting the worsening political situations. He wanted to go to the military academy at West Point, and everything he did was aimed at that goal. He applied and took the tests, and got a second alternate congressional appointment, but the position was always filled before he got an opportunity to attend. When he heard about the V-12 Program [Annotator's Note: a college training program designed to supplement the force of commissioned officers in the United States Navy], he decided to take that course. He was commissioned in February 1946, and caught a troop ship to Japan, where he was assigned to the USS Collett (DD-730). He wasn't particularly disappointed at having missed most of the war because he wasn't going to be under fire.

It was Walter Bank's first time in the Pacific, and he found it "different." Few Japanese spoke English, and he had to use sign language to communicate. He looked at it as an opportunity to learn something about another country. He said he had friends who suffered at the hands of the Japanese in the Philippines, and he wasn't too happy about their treatment, but in his own experience, he found the Japanese very subservient. The USS Collett (DD-730) was based at the Yokosuka Naval Shipyard which had been heavily bombed, and Bank said the harbor had disabled ship hulls all over the place. Bank commented that the Collett was run very tightly. He was an assistant communications officer on the destroyer, which entailed making sure command radios and radar were in good order. Back then, the radios operated on tubes, and that was great for Bank, because he had been with Sylvania in the tube business back in New York. On the ship, the communications men encoded and decoded material for the captain, and Bank remembers them sitting in front of a typewriter wearing earphones and taking messages from other ships. Bank liked being on a destroyer because the ship was small, and he got to know everybody on board. At the time, the Collett was very shorthanded, and duty was extended. Bank said the crew didn't get much sleep. However, he talked about going ashore in a whale boat two or three days a week for meals and drinks. And Banks mentions taking a jeep out of the motor pool on several occasions to visit Tokyo, Kyoto and Sasebo. On one occasion, when he was aboard an aircraft carrier for a day, he was taken on a helicopter ride to see Mount Fuji. No one talked about visiting Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and Bank wasn't interested because he thought those places might still be radioactive. Bank was based in Yokosuka for almost a year.

In June 1947 Walter Bank went from Japan to the United States and joined the Navy reserves in New York for the benefits. He was working for Sylvania in the labs, learning about radio tubes, when he was called to active duty in 1950. Banks went to the Navy Department headquarters in Washington D.C. and worked on the procurement end of development of the Talos and Terrier missiles. Bank was negotiating contracts with the principal contractor, the Bendix Corporation. The big missiles were expensive and operated on a sophisticated radar system, developed mainly by the applied physics department at Johns Hopkins University. After he left the Navy, he worked with Sylvania's government relations office in Washington D.C. for 15 years until Sylvania was bought out by General Telephone. He moved through several small electronics-related companies afterward, finally retiring from DCS Corporation as vice president of business and marketing development.

Walter Bank used the G.I. Bill for graduate school at WPI [Annotator's Note: Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts] and earned his master's degree in electrical engineering in 1950. He doubts he would have been able to go to graduate school without the government's financial support. Bank's most memorable experience of the war was seeing the devastation in Japan and how subservient the defeated people had become, a real lesson on what happens when a country loses a war. Bank had more sympathy than antipathy for the Japanese, and it affected him to see all those sunken ships, and the economically strapped people. The war changed his life in many ways, and it opened up the whole world to him. Today he is proud to have been a part of it, and he believes it means a lot to America today. Coming from a beaten down country after Pearl Harbor, America overcame it all to become a world power. Bank is sure we could do it again if necessary. He asserts that President Truman [Annotator's Note: Harry S. Truman] did the right thing ordering the explosion of the atomic bombs, because it averted a direct assault and saved many lives. Bank believes it is important for institutions like The National WWII Museum to teach the lessons of the war, or else the facts will get lost, and someone could rewrite history for us. He said the real story has to be told about the people in the war, and what they did, and the fact that some of them are still around.