ST. MARY’S TODAY

LEONARDTOWN -- “I am not chasing girls any more.” Robert R. Hays, 88, is full of jokes. He said his next door neighbor keeps an eye on him to ensure his abstinence from sex.

Hays looks back at World War Two, “I have enjoyed my life, and spent many good years with the navy.” Self-effacingly he adds, he does not have any major war exploits to boast about.

But working in the Camouflage Section, Hays later became an aide to Admiral Arleigh Burke, a naval war hero, and was then in the same classification for security as the president of the United States. “I was very fortunate, especially because I was raised as an orphan,” he said.

As a lieutenant, Hays was assigned to designing concepts for naval war ships. “Charts and slides are a steady diet for me,” he said.

Born in 1918 in eastern Pennsylvania, Hays is happy that any work that he did for the navy was always volunteer. “I did not wait to be called up.” He joined the navy when he was 24. “It was two years after my marriage,” Hays recalls. “We had a child, Sally.”

Hays, born and raised in eastern Pennsylvania, has been a resident of St. Mary’s for 40 years now and lives in a picture-pretty home with his daughter, and ducks and a swan, visiting his riverfront home. A graduate of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburg, Penn., now called Carnegie Mellon University, he also did graduate work at University of Pittsburg, University of Southern California and M.I.T.

Commissioned as an Ensign “the lowest officer in the navy”, Hays trained in anti-submarine warfare (ASW) and was assigned to research and standards of naval ships and finished his military status, while assigned on the staff of the prestigious National War College. In fact, Hays was among the brains that helped set up the National War College in 1946. “I trained for ASW duty but was ordered to Washington D.C. for research in the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Ships,” Hays said.

It was his professors who saved him from going overseas during the war. He said had it not been for his professors, it was only logical that he would have been sent to overseas theatres.

But his professors wrote to the navy, requesting them that he be assigned a research position. “I didn’t pull the trigger at all,” he said. “I think I was lucky as I did not have to kill anyone.”

He said as wildlife hunter he did shoot some deer, but ate whatever he killed. “I felt no joy in killing,” Hays said.

Working at the camouflage section, he worked on “D.E.” or Destroyer Escort. His specialty was visual deception.

The Bureau of Ships where Hays worked was formed in 1940 to supervise the design, construction, conversion, procurement, maintenance, and repair of ships and other craft for the U.S. Navy.

The bureau managed shipyards, repair facilities, laboratories, and shore stations. After 1947, purchased ships for the Departments of the Army and the Air Force, coordinated Department of Defense (DOD) shipbuilding activities, and coordinated navy repair and conversion programs with other federal agencies

Hays said he handled “unusual projects, anything touchy” all of which were classified. Visiting sensitive naval installations, Hays recalled he would be checked once on entering and the second time on leaving those premises “to ensure everything was okay.”

Both in uniform and later as a civilian working for the navy, he was a troubleshooter working on classified projects. “I had experience with surface, sub-surface, and air unite afloat in the capacity of a technical observer,” he said. The classified nature of his job, saw him work closely with medical research labs, technical schools and naval training groups throughout the nation.

Hays look back at Pearl Harbor and said he was very upset on hearing news about it. “We were seriously attacked, as if invaded.”

In fact it was in the aftermath of the bombing of Pearl Harbor that the United States Navy set up a Midshipman Training School at the Chicago campus where nearly 26,000 college-age men received accelerated training to become officers in the navy.

Hays, a graduate from Abbott Hall, Northwestern University, Chicago, participated in what was called V-7 program underwent a rigorous four month regimen. He was then sent to the ASW in Miami Florida.

Many of the men commissioned during the latter stages of the war were assigned to the landing craft that were so crucial for invading Japanese held islands.

Hays immersed himself into work to avoid “distractions.” He remembers one of his seniors Lt. Cdr Dean Farnsworth who was a workaholic and chain smoker. “There was no reason to go to the bar, working with him. Our wives were happy neither one of us was cruising around,” Hays said. To cope with the stress, many veterans recall some of their peers engaged in unsafe sex and put themselves into harm’s way.

After the war, Hays worked directly with the chief and vice chief of naval operations to prepare research materials.

To this day, Hays fondly misses his wife Barbara Jeanne, who he said died too soon, 27 years after their marriage. “The trouble is I never felt she died. I always felt she was with me.”

Hays recall his wife was a senior at his college and they met at a fraternity dance. “She was a darn fool, but I loved her,” he said.

An artistic genius in his own right, Hays designed the wedding ring of his wife and during the war was asked to draw sketches of fellow navy men “on the side.”

He is proud of his son and daughter, Garold Robert Hays and Sally Jeane, both of whom are retired. Gary was an officer with Montgomery Police Department. Sally now assists her dad at home.