Water Douglas was born in January 1920 in Bradford, Pennsylvania. He grew up with two younger brothers. His father, a World War 1 veteran, was a foreman on an oil lease for the M.D. Booth Company. His father hired him and his brothers to work for the company until Douglas and his brother, Ralph, joined the service, both becoming pilots. Douglas enlisted on 11 September 1940 after his brother sent him letters home talking him into joining the service, and his dad told him to enlist before he was drafted so he would get training. He was assigned to the 301st Signal Company at Langley Field, Virginia and went through boot camp. He recalled that they would give him poisonous gas tests and teach him how to detect the smells. He was then sent to Bolling Air Base in Washington, D.C., then went to Monmouth, New Jersey for switchboard repair then returned to Bolling Air Base. In the spring of 1942, after the United States declared war on Germany and Japan, Douglas was sent to England with the advanced echelon of the 8th Air Force. He traveled by ship to get to there. They had to go to Halifax [Annotator's Note: Halifax, Nova Scotia] to form a convoy before crossing the Atlantic. They waited on the ship in the Halifax Harbor for 15 days before they headed out in a convoy. Douglas remembered that food was limited to horse meat, kippered herring, and mutton. He also remembered rats and bed bugs were everywhere. It took another 15 days to travel to England.

On 7 December 1941, Walter Douglas recalled that he was sitting in an apartment in Washington D.C. listening to the radio when he heard the news report about the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: Pearl Harbor, Hawaii]. He remarked that many of the new recruits had no training and there was an incident where a new soldier was given a .45 handgun [Annotator's Note: .45 caliber M1911 semi-automatic pistol] and accidently pulled the trigger. The bullet went across Douglas's arm and went through the wall and through a mattress with a guy sleeping on it. No one was hurt. Douglas's company [Annotator's Note: 301st Signal Company] furnished communications for the air base which included telephones, teletypes, and radios. In the spring of 1942, Douglas was sent to England by ship. His ship followed a destroyer which fought off two German submarines, one outside a harbor in New York, and the another outside of a harbor in England. He was first stationed at High Wycombe [Annotator's Note: High Wycombe, England] and lived in up tents, then transferred to London [Annotator's Note: London, England]. Douglas developed a very bad cold he could not get over. When the Germans would bomb London, he would just lay in his bunk bed and listen to all the noise while everyone else ran to the air raid shelters. While in London, he trained and managed the British telephone switchboards and mainframes, and then he was transferred to Bushy Park [Annotator's Note: Bushy Park, England], a headquarters for Eisenhower [Annotator's Note: General of the Army Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower, Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force; 34th President of the United States] where he met his future wife, who was working as a telephone operator. Douglas returned to the United States to go to fight school and once he became a pilot, he returned to London. Many of the guys he knew working in the signal corps were sent to North Africa on the front lines. He did not want that to happen to him and he decided to apply for cadet school. He had difficulty at first because they did not want to accept him due to his height. He was too tall. In January 1943, he passed his physical and was able to get his wings. When he returned to London, he married his fiancé before going on a combat mission.

In late October 1944, while flying a combat mission, Walter Douglas witnessed an air collision. Two B-17s [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber] slammed into each other in the soup [Annotator's Note: slang term for heavy clouds or fog]. When he went back to the United States to go through flight school, he met his crew in Salt Lake City [Annotator's Note: Salt Lake City, Utah] after he became a second lieutenant. When he was assigned to the 305th Bombardment Group [Annotator's Note: 364th Bombardment Squadron, 305th Bombardment Group, 8th Air Force], he recalled having to teach the first pilot of his crew how to do formation flying. In August 1944, he went on his first combat mission to bomb a French town, he saw a B-17 get shot down. Douglas goes through the names of the guys in his crew and remembered one of his gunners as a drunkard. After ten or 15 missions, he moved up from copilot to pilot. He was stationed at Chelveston Air Base in Rushden, England. He recalled that when news got out that a plane was shot down, guys would go and take things from the dead crewmen's footlockers. He remarked that some of the guys would do crazy things, like shoot bullets into a roof or blow stoves up with flares.

Walter Douglas recalled a flight surgeon okayed one of his crewmen for a mission that he was not ready for. He also remarked that he lived in a room with three other officers, while the enlisted men lived in other barracks. He only socially interacted with his crew when they could go to town and drank in the pubs. His wife moved to Rusden, and they lived in a hotel while he was stationed at the airbase and she worked in a factory. Douglas was assigned to planes [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber] that were already named, so he did not get to name any plane he flew [Annotator's Note: The interviewer stops the interview to change tapes at 0:55:17.000.] The Merseburg [Annotator's Note: Merseburg, Germany] mission was the roughest mission for Douglas and his crew. On 30 November 1944 he was briefed on 500 antiaircraft guns, but it ended up being 1,200 antiaircraft guns. As they headed for their target, he could see planes everywhere being shot down around the target. Douglas decided to attack from a different direction. As they dropped their bombs, his plane was hit, but Douglas was able to keep the plane flying. However, soon after, the lead plane of the mission was out of control and was about to collide with Douglas' plane. Douglas made a quick move and dove down 4,000 feet over the target area to avoid collision. He was able to get back to the air base but had a very difficult landing due to the damage on the plane.

Walter Douglas was on a bombardment mission near Berlin, Germany. After he dropped his bombs, he lost one of his engines. He called in a P-47 [Annotator's Note: Republic P-47 Thunderbolt fighter aircraft] to help him get out of the combat zone. The P-47 led him out over Holland [Annotator's Note: the Netherlands], but had to turn back because they were running low on fuel. Douglas had to make the remaining trip back unescorted. He was shot at multiple times by antiaircraft weapons. He eventually dived down to mimic as if he got hit, so the enemy would stop firing. They did and it allowed him to escape and get back to base safely. Another time, they were assembling to go across the English Channel and while they were waiting for other planes to make formation, he realized that one of the planes was about to collide with him, so he dropped the plane down. They climbed back up to proper altitude just in time to drop their bombs. Six to eight hours was the average mission time, and Douglas mentioned that they would not have any food or drink during missions because everything would just freeze due to the high altitude. Going to the bathroom was difficult as well. Douglas hated missions to Berlin because they had the best antiaircraft gunners. He completed 35 missions as a pilot in World War 2, and at least 30 of them, he came back with holes in the plane. No one on his crew was ever wounded or killed. He did have a gunner, Monius [Annotator's Note: unsure of spelling], that ended up have mental issues on one of his flights. After a doctor okayed him to fly on a mission, Douglas and his crew took off. Not to long after takeoff, Monius was asking for oxygen because he could not breathe. They put a mask on him, but it did not settle him. He tried to jump out the plane, but when he removed the mask, he passed out. Douglas came back to help him by putting the mask back on, Monius woke up in a fit and tried to fire off guns. Douglas had to stop him, right before they both passed out due to lack of oxygen. Monius eventually settled down, and they returned to the base.

Walter Douglas wore the same necktie for every mission he went on. He also remarked that it was freezing temperatures in the plane. He would wear gloves that he cut the finger tips off so he could feel the switchboard without having to look. During the Battle of the Bulge [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or German Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945], his crew was needed to do some bombing. The weather was so foggy that they could not see the runway so he had to do a blind take-off. He bombed the Giessen Airfield [Annotator's Note: in Hesse, Germany] and other airfields during the Battle of the Bulge. Douglas recalled one mission where he had to drop 250-pound RDX bombs [Annotator's Note: general purpose bombs] and the racks malfunctioned, and his gunners had to push the bombs out of the bomb bay.

Walter Douglas and his crew were given a choice to go on a mission as a spare. They decided to go as a spare. On their way back, the group [Annotator's Note: 364th Bombardment Squadron, 305th Bombardment Group, 8th Air Force] forgot that Douglas and his crew were flying with them, and they almost ran into geese and a tree trying to keep up with the formation. Douglas ended up just finding a place to land. Douglas remarked that flak [Annotator's Note: antiaircraft artillery fire] was sporadic, and he developed different methods of flying to avoid getting hit during his missions. Douglas never had a doubt that he would not come back from a mission. Douglas did not understand how the German people could be conditioned by a dictator [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler].

In January 1945, Walter Douglas flew his last mission which was to Paderborn [Annotator's Note: Paderborn, Germany], and he wore two flak helmets and two chest armor. After he landed, he was relieved as he stepped out of the plane knowing it was his last combat mission. He had reached the 35 mission mark, which meant he could return to the United States. Douglas recalled when crews were lost during combat missions, the military officials would come in and clear out all the rooms, which would stay vacant for a little while. After his last mission, he was sent to Miami Beach [Annotator's Note: Miami, Florida] for recuperation. He was stationed at Pine Castle Air Base in Orlando, Florida when his wife came over on a ship full of other war brides that put in at New York Harbor [Annotator's Note: New York, New York]. He got leave and met her in Bradford, Pennsylvania, Douglas' hometown, where she met his parents for the first time. While he was stationed at Pine Castle Air Base, he was doing experimental missions with various types of Razon [Annotator's Note: VB-3 Razon high-angle guided bomb], Azon [Annotator's Note: VB-1 Azon high-angle guided bomb], and million-candle-powered flare bombs. He also did B-17 [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber] formation flights at air shows. He was in Miami when Germany surrendered.

Walter Douglas was stationed at Pine Castle Air Base [Annotator's Note: Orlando, Florida] and he thought he may be deployed for the Korean War. He recalled when the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Japan. He remarked that if we did not drop the bombs, lots of people would have died on both sides. His wife, Elsie, had come over to the United States sometime between June and July 1945. He recalled when the war was over, there was no celebration or anything. Most of the military men in Orlando were surprised by this. Douglas was discharged from the military in October 1945 in Tampa [Annotator's Note: Tampa, Florida] as a first lieutenant. He returned to the military in 1946 or 1947 and worked on engines, then later flew various planes.

Walter Douglas took advantage of the G.I. Bill to go to instrument flying school in Virginia and used it to purchase a house. His transition from serviceman to civilian was smooth and he did not have any trouble. He eventually reenlisted in the military. Douglas' most memorable experience of World War 2 was when the Allies won the war. He joined the service because he did not want to be drafted and he hoped to learn a trade. The war changed him because it helped him grow up and take on responsibility. Douglas believes its important to have institutions like The National WWII Museum [Annotator's Note: in New Orleans, Louisiana] because its part of our history.