Remembering D-Day: Carson City man recalls his father’s service as paratrooper

Col. James M. Gavin, U.S. Army, commanding officer, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, with his men before Operation Husky, on July 9, 1943. Alfred Pawley, whose son lives in Carson City, served in that unit. (U.S. Army photo)

By Steve Ranson

Sunday, June 6, 2021

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Gonna take a sentimental journey
Gonna set my heart at ease
Gonna make a sentimental journey
To renew old memories
Got my bag, got my reservation
Spent each dime I could afford
Like a child in wild anticipation
Long to hear that, “All aboard!"
Seven, that's the time we leave, at seven
I'll be waitin' up at heaven
Countin' every mile of railroad track
That takes me back
Never thought my heart could be so yearny
Why did I decide to roam?
Gonna take that sentimental journey
Sentimental journey home

After spending 14 months in Europe, Army veteran and paratrooper Alfred Pawley knew he was going home, but the song “Sentimental Journey” sung by Doris Day resonated with the California native after Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945.
“That was his favorite song,” recalled his son Robin Pawley of Carson City. “He heard that on the ship back to the United States.”

Alfred Pawley served in the U.S. Army during World War II and was a paratrooper on D-Day.

The elder Pawley died in 2007, but during World War II, he served with the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne and was part of the world’s greatest invasion — airborne and amphibious — on June 6, 1944. Generals and their staffs had planned for Operation Overload to be the definitive drive into Normandy by putting the Germans on the defensive while the Allies stormed across northwest France toward Paris.The invasion along five Normandy beaches on a cloudy June day involved 56,115 U.S., British and Canadian troops, 6,939 ships and landing vessels, and 2,395 aircraft and 867 gliders.
Alfred Pawley didn’t see much of the fighting on that June day. He, along with other paratroopers, veered off course and were captured by the Germans after they landed. Consequently, he became a prisoner of war with other Allied soldiers at a camp deep inside Germany’s heartland. As Russian troops began to descend into the area in April 1945, the German officers and guards — many of whom were older men and some teenagers — vacated their positions, thus leaving the prisoners on their own.
Many of the prisoners moved out on their own, and according to Robin, the men eventually traveled more than 1,300 miles to Turkey when they boarded a boat to Cairo and then home to the United States.
“They arrived on the east coast at Boston where they quarantined, and then they were sent to New Orleans where my dad was discharged,” Pawley said.
Pawley said his father rarely discussed his war experience, except he told his wife some of the details of his experience including his time spent at three POW camps. Overall, his father said the POWs were treated well.
“Mom said he (his father) lost about 10 pounds,” Robin Pawley recounted. “They (POWs) were allowed to do gardening and plant potatoes. Once in a great while, they had meat.”
Before the D-Day invasion, Alfred Pawley had been in northern Africa and Italy.
The California native was born on Sept. 17, 1918, in San Francisco and was considered to be an adventurous youth. Robin Pawley said his father rode the rails as a pre-teen and once jumped on a train going from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Eventually, his family moved to Los Angeles. He left high school as a sophomore to help his grandfather, who served the U.S. Merchant Marines during World War I.
After the war, Robin Pawley said father returned to Southern California his parents lived in Fullerton, Calif., where orange groves behind their property dotted the landscape, and the Pacific Ocean touched the beaches 25 miles away.

Alfred Pawley’s POW photo.

At the age of 24, Alfred Pawley enlisted in December 1942. Along with other recruits, they boarded a train and headed to Fort Benning, Ga., for their basic training. While at Fort Benning, the Army’s home for the airborne school, the Army asked Pawley if he wanted to join the 82nd Airborne become a paratrooper.“He said OK, but he didn’t know he was going to be an assassin,” Robin Pawley said of his father’s response. “He told my brother but he didn’t tell me they taught him everything to do hand to hand and close quarter with piano wire and stuff like that.”
To receive their basic parachutist badge, the paratroopers boarded a Douglas C-47 Skytrain and completed a minimum of five jumps somewhere over the sprawling base. The paratroopers jumped from an elevation of 700 to 1,000 feet. Nothing has drastically changed from the World War II paratroopers to today’s Army, and according to Fort Benning, paratroopers now complete five jumps from a C-130 at an altitude of 1,250 feet during their Jump Week.
Accounts from 1943, though, indicated the soldiers had to pack their own parachutes and once they finished the course, they headed to their new units. The Army assigned Alfred Pawley to the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment at Fort Bragg, N.C., one of four regiments assigned to the 82d Airborne Division. The men were required to undergo more intensive training before leaving stateside to Morocco on the northern African coast. Eventually, the units traveled east to Tunisia where paratroopers were loaded into planes for the three-and-a-half hour flight.
“They trained in Tunisia after Rommel left,” Robin Pawley said of the paratroopers, adding the Allies began to force Rommel and his Afrika Korps from the area by May 1943.
Robin Pawley said his father, a rifle NCO (noncommissioned officer), told him the Allies were using Tunisia as a “jumping off point” for the paratroopers to initiate their first combat jump into Sicily before a massive amphibious assault began. The paratroopers from different units were assigned to capture a number of crossroads leading to the landing beaches. Operation Husky commenced in July, but the Germans fought more intensely than they thought. One month later, though, Sicily fell after the Allied troops overran numerous German positions. His next jump came later into Italy, but in the meantime, Robin Pawley said his father, a buck sergeant, drove a mechanized vehicle among other duties.
According to his separation record, Alfred Pawley “worked most of the time at Company Headquarters operating radio by voice only. Made three combat jumps. Received and transmitted messages using voice code. Drove Army vehicles up to two and a half tons. Carried personnel, cargo, ammunition. Made minor repairs.”
Robin Pawley said his father, like the other soldiers, had the will to keep fighting to knock out any resistance.
“He broke his ankle either in Sicily or Italy on a jump,” Robin Pawley remembers his father telling him. “He wrapped it up and kept marching.”
The Allies turned their attention to Italy in early September and an invasion at Salerno on the southwestern coast and southeast of Naples. The Allies, though, encountered strong resistance from the Germans and six Italian divisions. Within two weeks, though, Italy fell to both the Americans and British.
The fighting in both Sicily and Italy affected Alfred Pawley.
“He was in a foxhole with a buddy, but the buddy took a mortar, he didn’t,” Robin Pawley said.
Robin Pawley said his father may have suffered some PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) as a result of the fighting.
“He said the noise didn’t bother him, but the visual did,” Robin Pawley added.
Yet, war brought some levity with the American soldiers liberating one Italian town after another.
“It was kind of funny, but there’s a picture that my mother has of him in a trench coat,” said Robin Pawley. “We knew he was 122, 125 pounds, but he looked very heavy. He had four bottles of wine (inside the trench coat) because the ladies were so happy they were giving the soldiers wine.”
The 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment regrouped during the early autumn and flew to Ireland in mid-to-late November along with other units for training. Several months later, the regiment transferred to England to train at RAF (Royal Air Force) bases in the country’s central and southern regions. Any plans for an invasion on the Normandy coast were kept secret until the paratroopers boarded hundreds of C-47s on June 5 and 6 and flew to France wrapped in the sky’s darkness.
Fully packed and briefed on their assignments, Pawley and his comrades boarded a C-47 shortly after midnight on June 8. Within two hours, thousands of paratroopers jumped out of the planes like swarms of locust nosediving for the crops below them. Units from the 82nd Airborne had been tasked with destroying two bridges each over the Douve and the Merdert rivers past Utah Beach. Other units encountering heavy losses captured the crossroads at Sainte-Mère-Église, a small commune on the Cotentin peninsula.
Alfred Pawley, though, was one of many paratroopers who fell into the hands of German soldiers.
“They were supposed to land at Sainte-Mère-Église, but he was off. He was picked up (by the Germans) where he landed,” Robin Pawley said. “He was initially listed as MIA (missing in action) but then they initially reported him as a POW.”
Robin Pawley said his father was about 40 miles off his target.
In his later years, Alfred Pawley, who was an assistant vice president for a financial institution in Lake Elsinore, Calif., said movies such as “The Longest Day” and “Band of Brothers” were fairly accurate in their portray of the D-Day events.
Alfred Pawley earned an European-African-Middle Eastern Theater ribbon with 3 Bronze Stars, a Distinguished Unit Badge (82nd Airborne) and a First U.S. Army award.
The Army veteran received his discharge on Oct. 18, 1945. After three years in the Army and fighting in Europe, he was happy to be on American soil and ready to return to the West Coast.
“He didn’t want to be a lifer,” Robin Pawley said of his father. “He did his service and was done.”
Editor’s note —The end of World War II in both Europe and the Pacific occurred 76 years ago beginning with Victory Europe Day in May, followed by the Japanese unconditional surrender in August and the Instrument of Surrender on Sept. 2, 1945. The Lahontan Valley News and Nevada Appeal continue to feature articles on our veterans who served during World War II.

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Remembering D-Day: Carson City man recalls his father’s service as paratrooper

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