A ST. MARY'S
TODAY interview with Durwood Wiley in June 2005.
Wiley died on
Sunday, October 9, 2005.
ST. MARY'S TODAY
RIDGE --- At 19 years old, Durwood Wiley, of Ridge, steamed across the pacific on the Battleship Idaho from
Long Beach, Calif., to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. It was April 1940, and Wiley was
only a few months out of boot camp.
When he arrived, it was one
of the most breath-taking sights this North Carolina boy had ever seen.
“It was beautiful, I
couldn’t believe it. The Hawaiian girls came out to greet the ship, they were
doing their dance on the beach for us,” Wiley, now 83, remembered during an
interview in June with ST. MARY’S TODAY.
When Wiley returned, in
December 1941, he was greeted with another breathtaking sight. This time it was
the picture of death and destruction, for it was only 16 days after the Japanese
navy launched a massive 335-warplane sneak attack that sent major parts of the
American fleet to the bottom of the ocean. The action ruthlessly dragged the
United States into World War II, at a time when some historians say some South
American countries had a larger military than this county.
World War I was only two
decades in the past, and still fresh on the minds of American’s.
“Isolationists” had major
influence in the U.S. government and culture, but that all changed when
American’s stateside heard the news of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
The two-hour attack of Pearl
Harbor took the base by complete surprise, starting when the first wave of 183
Japanese warplanes started dropping bombs and machine gun fire on parked ships
and planes.
Arguments on who is to blame
for not realizing the attack was coming are still being wielded.
Radar operators on lookout
spotted a large mass of objects on their screen heading toward the island,
according to accounts by historian Winston Groom. The two Army privates manning
the station reported this sighting an hour before the strike started, but the
information was not acted on in time.
The all-out attack from the
Japanese fleet that attacked Hawaii included 24 major warships and six aircraft
carrier and submarines.
Nearly two-dozen major U.S.
ships were sunk, or destroyed, floating nearly sideways and on fire. Near 350
American war planes were destroyed, mostly parked on runways. 2,345 military
personnel were killed and 60 civilians. Japan turned and sailed toward home
without losing a single ship and only near 30 planes.
Groom reports in the novel
1942, the situation on the island was frantic, while Japanese planes
completely filled the sky above (some at tree top height) shooting at anything
that moved, including crowds of running people.
The USS Arizona at harbor
was quickly sunk with more than 1,000 men still aboard. Many were rescued from
the harbor and sunken ships, many weren’t. Groom reports that some men trapped in
ships underwater tapped on the hulls of the ships for two weeks after the
attacks, trying to signal to rescuers.
Sixteen days later, Wiley’s VP54
patrol squadron arrived on the island to help recover the dead.
At the time, Wiley’s job was
a gunner on a PBY patrol plane, and the units were busy dropping depth charges
on Nazi Germany’s U-boat submarines in the Atlantic Ocean. Hundred of U-boats
were crawling the depths of the ocean floor, right off the United State’s east
coast. With the outdated technology of the U.S. military, these U-boat sunk
hundreds of non-military cargo ships with little opposition.
Wiley recalls the American
torpedoes at the time, Mark-24’s, were slow and “weren’t that good … some times
they went this way, some that way.”
Wiley’s unit was quickly
shuffled together from Bermuda to California, and the men hopped on a flight to
Pearl Harbor, which took 19 hours. (The big cargo planes flew near 150 miles per
hour, Wiley estimated).
“My biggest disappointment
was when we got back to Pearl Harbor. When we left it was so beautiful, and then
all those body parts, feet and arms,” Wiley said.
His unit helped clean up
after the attack, he recalls finding boots with legs still in them. Areas were
still on fire, he remembers, and soot and oil covered everything. Some areas on
shore, the oil was “six inches deep.”
“That’s really made me sick,
after leaving there so pretty before,” he said.
A few months after his Pearl
Harbor mission, Wiley found himself on Midway Island, a tiny island in the
middle of the Pacific Ocean 1,000 miles from anything, to help defend against a
Japanese air and navel assault there. The Battle of Midway would become the
first U.S. battle “victory” against the Japanese in June 1942, after another
crushing assault on the tiny Wake Island outpost in the Pacific Ocean. The U.S.
lost an aircraft carrier at Midway, but also sent four Japanese carriers three
miles deep.
“So much was going on back
then it’s really hard to remember,” Wiley said, adding that he didn’t really put
all the pieces together of what was occurring in World War II until years after.
“I never thought about dying
or nothing,” Wiley said. “I was only 18, full of piss and vinegar.”
“There were so damn many of
them I can’t remember,” Wiley said of the Navy’s string of setbacks at the start
of the war.
“They had their s--t
together,” he said of the Japanese navy. “We are pretty lucky they didn’t get on
that West Coast”
On Midway and after, Wiley’s
job was a crewman board the Army’s big B-24s, in the VPB-101 division. They
patrolled the air near military installations, keeping an eye out for invading
Japanese, and fighting submarines or enemy aircraft they came across.
For the remainder of Wiley’s
34 months in combat he island-hopped in the south Pacific’s Solomon Island
chain, just north of Australia.
While on the island of
Espiritu Santo, Wiley was busy switching out the bombs on B-24s from torpedoes
to depth charges, when a young crewman offered to take Wiley’s patrol mission.
“And that was the last time
I ever saw him,” Wiley said. “The fact that he died in place of me stayed on my
mind for 50-60 years. I’m living on borrowed time.”
While in the Solomon's chain,
one of the missions of Wiley’s squad was to deliver mail to the Marines on
Guadalcanal, which was the setting of one of the bloodiest battles in Marine
history.
“We had eight minutes to get
in and land, 12 to get out,” he said, due to a Japanese gunner hidden on a hill
who would pour down antiaircraft fire on Henderson Field, the airstrip there.
After the Marines secured
Guadalcanal, Wiley’s unit was transferred there. Here he continued as a
crewmember of flying missions, and helped defend the island as an antiaircraft
gunner.
He recalled one Sunday in
1943, when 150 Japanese warplanes attacked the island. “We pointed those guns
and they said we must have took out 75 of those planes.”
Wiley said a few times his
B-24 came under fire from Japanese planes. “We knocked a few out of the air,” he
said.
But he never knew who fired
the fatal shots, as B-24 had about six guns on it, “a belly gunner, a tail
gunner, two turrets.”
On Guadalcanal, (dubbed
Cactus by the men there) he recalled the Japanese conducted bombing missions
over the island every night. “Just to keep us awake, so we wouldn’t feel like
working the next day.”
The men called the invading
Japanese planes “washing machine Charlies” because of the sounds they made.
He recalled the brutal
tactics of the Japanese military. They never surrendered, Marines had to find
and kill every one, or they would not stop attacking.
“They were raised to commit
suicide and die for their country,” Wiley said.
Wiley recalled several good
times in the service, forging friendships he still maintains today. One time, a
buddy of his brought back a 70-gallon barrel of wine from Australia, and they
buried it with pumps attached to keep it cool and hidden.
After a time the
commissioned officers caught wind of the cache and ordered it dumped. Wiley said
some guys were having the dark teeth-staining wine for breakfast.
“It took the prime of my
life from me,” Wiley said. “But I enjoyed it very much and if I had to do it all
over again I would.”
During the war, Wiley’s
three brothers served at the same time. One brother, Woodrow Wiley, served in
the same unit as Durwood. Another brother drove a tank on the beach at Normandy.
“My mother was one of the
only four-star mothers around,” he said.
“We were a lucky family, we
all came through without a scratch,” he said.
Wiley did a full 20 years in
the Navy. After the war he moved to and from several bases, in Florida, New York
and eventually in 1947 he moved to Patuxent River Naval Air Station in St. Mary’s
County, where he met his wife in 1950.
Chief Petty Officer Wiley
moved again, then returned to the Pax base to finish up his career from 1956 to
1959. He has been an American Legion member now for 51 years, a Veterans of
Foreign Wars member for 38, and serves on Congressman Steny Hoyer’s (D. Md. 5th)
veteran’s affairs committee.
Last June, Wiley traveled to
New York again to watch his son, Merchant Marine Michael Wiley
christen the liner “Pride of America,” before a cruise to Hawaii.
Decades after the war, Wiley
decided to do something for the 97 guys in his unit that were killed over there.
He arranged for a memorial plaque at Arlington Cemetery’s tomb of the Unknown
Soldier.
“I figured let’s bring back
part of their souls,” he proudly said.
