By BILL WELCH
Morning News city editor
Like the
thousands of GIs hitting the beaches of Normandy June 6, 1944, Gladys Davey could field strip an M-1 rifle.
The young wife was "Pug'' Davey to those who knew her - the wife of 1st Lt. Donald Davey.
She had been
with her husband as often as possible since since their marriage Oct. 14, 1942. In his stateside training, she had been there, off-base, at Fort Bragg, N.C., and then at Fort Jackson, S.C.
Just 19 years old, she
had felt like a big shot when she ordered drinks and sandwiches at the officers' club pool at Fort Jackson. She had put up with the godawful smell her husband brought back with him after he had spent three months
of field exercises in the woods of Tennessee. She had driven 21 hours with him from South Carolina to Erie.
She learned alongside him the parts and the workings of the American infantryman's basic weapon - the
M-1 Garand rifle.
Pug had been at Don's side nearly every possible moment, right up until New York. In fact, except for the war, Mrs. Davey has been at her husband's side for 51 years, making possible, he
stresses, the success he made out of a dental career. Together they brought into the world a son and daughter, ""two beautiful children.''
In 1944, Don had a pre-arranged code with his blond wife. If the
sentence, ""Come visit Glenna'' was in a letter, she should go to New York City. They would be together one more time before he was shipped overseas.
""For four or five days, we would visit
at night. He would have to go back to the camp in the morning,'' Pug recalled from the Nevada Drive home she and her retired dentist husband live in now.
""He would tell me, "If I'm not back tomorrow night, it means we left.'
""I never knew from one day to the next if he would show up that night or not.
""Then one day, he didn't,'' she said, swallowing hard.
Mail from servicemen was heavily censored to make sure the wrong reader didn't learn too much. Davey couldn't say much in the letters he would send
home from the U.S. base in England.
So when the news came that Allied troops had landed in France, young Mrs. Davey could only listen to the radio reports and check the newspapers as extra editions were printed and
put on the street.
""I knew he was over there in England, but I didn't know what he was doing.''
In England, Lt. Davey watched the armada of American and British aircraft fly wave after wave for France
that first morning. He was among the hundreds of thousands of American troops marked for a later arrival in France that summer.
""I saw all those planes and I knew something had to be up. It was such a
mass of planes. It had to be for D-Day,'' he said.
Davey would cross Omaha beach July 1, his 24th birthday and exactly three years after he had registered for the draft.
His time in France would be short - three weeks and five days.
We'll explain why in a later story.
