William Blackwood was born in March 1921 in Lancaster, Ohio. He was an only child, and lived in a small community near Mount Pleasant where he spent much of his childhood playing with his dog around that rocky area. He said his family had a pretty tough time during the Great Depression. His father was always a salesman of some kind, usually selling new and used cars, and his mother worked in the war industry in Columbus, Ohio. When he graduated high school in 1939, he worked part-time and went to college at Ohio State in Columbus, Ohio. He joined the ROTC [Annotator's Note: Reserve Officer Training Corps], and knew he would eventually be going into the Army. Blackwood was a college student when Pearl Harbor was attacked and remembers thinking the war would be over in "just a few months." He waited about a year to get into OCS [Annotator's Note: Officer Candidate School]. He served as a member of the Signal Corps at Ohio State, and when he was called up into the Army he remained in that designation. He did his OCS training at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. During weekends, he and his fellow candidates would go into New York City to tea dances at the Biltmore Hotel. He was aware of the political situation and was glad to think he would be an officer during the conflict.

When he finished Officer Candidate School, William Blackwood was sent to the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York for training in microfilm. His work included electronically transmitting correspondence from the United States to the front. Blackwood then went by ship to the London offices of Eastman Kodak. He recalls the journey across the Atlantic as being "very exciting," and although the ship was crowded, as a newly commissioned officer he had pretty good accommodations. By then ships were more safely traveling in convoys across the Atlantic. Generally speaking, Blackwood thought the civilians reacted to the American servicemen quite favorably. He found London interesting and entertaining. He worked in the mailroom handling and sometimes censoring correspondence. He had this same duty in London and in his next assignment, which was Paris. From there Blackwood came under the command of General Patton's [Annotator's Note: US Army Lieutenant General George S. Patton, Jr.] Third Army and spent some time in Trier, then transferred to Bastogne, Belgium, right after the Battle of the Bulge [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945]. It was cold when he arrived, and all the American dead had been cleared out of the area, but there was still a lot of German equipment around and there were the bodies of dead German soldiers remaining in some of the tanks. There was no active fighting going on in the area Blackwood worked laying and collecting communication lines. Blackwood found the German population cooperative as the Americans came through their environs. The war was coming to an end, and he said "they didn't want trouble and we didn't want trouble."

The most dangerous time William Blackwood can remember during his service was when he was in London during the V-1 and V-2 rocket blitzes. He commented that there was a warning with the V-1, it had a distinguishing noise, but the V-2 just caused a big explosion upon hitting its target. After the capitulation of Germany, Blackwood was transferred to a holding company in Marseilles, France, to await reassignment in the Far East. He took a short leave to Paris and learned there that Japan had surrendered. When he got back to Marseilles, he was shipped off to Boston, and was discharged from Camp Crowder in Missouri. Afterward, he used the G.I. Bill to get his degree in chemical engineering. Blackwood thinks the war gave those who went abroad a bigger perspective of the world.