Durwood Wiley

  One of the most well-known and well-liked men in Southern Maryland, World War II veteran Durwood Wiley, died at his home in Ridge on Sunday evening. He would have turned 84 in two weeks time.

   A 51-year member of the American Legion, Durwood saw action in the South Pacific during World War II that defined his life. A native of North Carolina, his career in the United States Navy brought him to the Pax Base in 1950 where him met his wife, Teresa, and settled down and had four boys, Mike, Tom, Wayne and Tim  “T-Bird” Wiley.

   After a career in the Navy, Durwood went on to run the Hickory House Bar in Lexington Park, and later owned Wiley’s Angler’s Inn in Ridge. He also ran a cross-country trucking business for about five years, before essentially being run out of business by trucking giant JB Hunt.

   At 20-years-old, Durwood was on Pearl Harbor 16-days after the Japanese 335-warplane sneak-attack that sent much of the American fleet to the ocean bottom. In a recent interview, he recalled the images of death and destruction that stayed with him the rest of his life.

 
Chief Petty Officer Durwood Wiley, right, 
with a buddy in Guadalcanal during WWII 

   At the time, Durwood was a gunner on a PBY patrol plane in the VP54 patrol squadron. Before the Pearl Harbor clean-up mission, Durwoods’ unit was dropping depth charges on Nazi Germany’s U-boat submarines in the Atlantic Ocean.

   “My biggest disappointment was when we got back to Pearl Harbor,” Durwood said.

   He recalls finding boots with legs still in them and areas that were still on fire. He remembered soot and oil covered everything, in some area the oil was six inches deep.

   A few months later, Durwood was on Midway Island, a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean 1,000 miles from nowhere.

   After the U.S. Marines secured Guadalcanal, the location of some of the most brutal battles of the war, Durwood’s unit was transferred there. He helped defend the island as an antiaircraft gunner.

  Durwood said he never thought about dying in the war, “I was only 18, full of piss and vinegar.”

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