RAY MARLEY
Age: 91
Born: Sept. 26, 1918
Hometown: Wichita, Kan.
Residence: Desert Hot Springs
Military branch: U.S. Army Air Corps; 8th Air Force
Years served: 1942-1945
Rank: Private first class/sergeant
Family: Wife Betty (deceased); three children, Rodney Marley of Vancouver, Wash., Russell Marley (deceased) and Larry Marley of Henderson, Nev.; five grandchildren; three great-grandchildren.
About this series
Staff writer Denise Goolsby will profile desert veterans from World War II Wednesday through Sunday through the end of 2010 — the 65th anniversary of the end of the war. Contact her at (760) 778-4587 or via e-mail at denise.goolsby@thedesertsun.com
Coming tomorrow
U.S. Army Air Corps veteran Norman Cohen of Palm Desert.
More
U.S. Army Air Corps veteran Ray Marley, who served in the National Guard from 1937 to 1939, was drafted in 1942 at age 24. The married man, living in Kansas, had recently started a family.
“I left a wife and a 2-month-old son on the platform” at the train station in Wichita, he recalled.
He might have caught a break because of his National Guard experience and his family status, he said.
“I had the best duty in the service,” he said.
Marley wasn't required to take basic training and was assigned to Independence Army Airfield in Kansas.
The new airfield opened in 1942 as a training base for pilots.
Marley, who was a city bus driver in civilian life, was assigned transportation duty.
“I became the colonel's chauffeur for a year,” Marley said. “I lived next-door to him in town. I never did live on the base.”
The colonel was just getting set up at the airfield, and Marley — driving the officer around in a four-door staff car — went to other air bases to pick up supplies.
“Anything it took to open his office on the base,” he said. “Telephones, desks.”
When the colonel was eventually shipped to another base, Marley also was shipped, but this time he would soon be headed overseas.
After a stint at Punta Gorda Army Airfield in Florida, Marley was sent to New York, where he'd embark on his transatlantic crossing.
Marley, again acknowledging his good fortune, got to ride the waves on a fast and formidable vessel.
“They shipped me out on the Queen Mary,” Marley said.
During the voyage, the ship had to pick up its pace to outrun a submarine.
“We raced across and made it in four days,” Marley said.
The ship landed in Scotland and the 5,000 men aboard had to wait a day to catch a train to the east coast of England.
Marley, who was with the 8th Air Force, was bound for Martlesham Heath airfield.
“The Royal Air Force gave us this base. They got bombed off of it,” he said.
A fighter group of P-51 Mustangs were stationed there. Marley and the enlisted men lived in duplexes next-door.
“I stayed right there for two years,” he said. “We were the support for the base. We had a fighter base to maintain.”
Marley was assigned a truck and a driver and was responsible for taking laundry, dry cleaning and equipment that needed repair back and forth from the base to London — about 70 to 75 miles away.
Twice a week, Marley and his driver would make the 10-hour trip.
It took that long because of fog, they were driving “on the wrong side of the street,” and the slow traffic that was impassable, he said.
Coal carts being drawn by mules traveled the same route.
Marley, who arrived on Thanksgiving Day in 1943, headed back to the States on Thanksgiving Day in 1945.
He sailed across the Atlantic on the USS Enterprise, an aircraft carrier that had seen extensive action in the Pacific.
It had been damaged in battle, sent back to the United States for repairs and was put back into action carrying servicemen from the battlefields to the U.S.
“The war was winding down,” Marley said. “They took out the hangar deck and converted it to a troop ship.”
Marley, who said he considers himself very fortunate to have such “cushy” jobs during the war, gives all of the credit to the men who served in combat.
“They really fought and won the war,” he said.
