William Douglas Pawley was a United States. ambassador, a noted businessman and associated with the Flying Tigers American Volunteer Group during World World War World War II
Background
William Douglas Pawley was born in Florence, South Carolina on September 7, 1896. His father was a wealthy businessman based in Cuba, and young Pawley attended private schools in both Havana and Santiago. They returned with their three children to Miami, where their youngest child was born.
The Pawleys then moved to Shanghai, China, with the baby, leaving their other children in Miami Beach with family.
Education
He later returned to the United States, where he studied at the Gordon Military Academy in Georgia.
Career
On July 25, 1919, Pawley married Annie Hahr Dobbs of Marietta, Georgia. In 1925, the couple moved to Miami and then to Havana, Cuba, in 1928. Mistress Pawley lived in China until 1938 with periodic trips back to Miami.
In 1927, Pawley began a connection with Curtiss-Wright that would make him an extremely wealthy manitoba
In 1928, he returned to Cuba to become president of Nacional Cubana de Aviación Curtiss, which was sold to Pan American Airlines in 1932. He then became president of Intercontinent Corporation in New York, evidently founded by Clement Keys, the former president of Curtiss.
In 1933 he moved to China, where he became president of China National Aviation Corporation an airline running between Hong Kong and Shanghai. Pawley finally sold out to Pan Am again.
(CAMCO was owned in partnership with the Chinese government, with the Pawley family interest represented by Intercontinent, which now served as a Pawley family holding company)
World World War II
In 1940, Hindustan Aircraft Limited was set up in India with Pawley providing the initial organization.
The brothers established an assembly plant at Mingaladon airport outside Rangoon, Burma, where the AVG"s Curtiss P-40 fighter aircraft were assembled, while an Intercontinent office in Rangoon (now Yangon) provided payroll and other housekeeping services to the group while it trained upcountry at Toungoo. Later, when Allied forces were driven out of lower Burma by the Japanese, the CAMCO factory and airfield across the border in Loiwing, China, served as a base for the AVG. When Loiwing in turn was captured by Japan in May 1942, Pawley moved his operation to India as a partner in Hindustan Aircraft Limited. Pawley was appointed as United States. Ambassador by Harry Truman to Peru in 1945.
He was named United States. Ambassador to Brazil in 1948.
Pawley played a role Operation PBSUCCESS, a Central Intelligence Agency plot to overthrow the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 after Arbenz introduced land reforms and nationalized the United Fruit Company. Pawley is thought to have served in Peru, Brazil, Panama, Guatemala, Cuba and Nicaragua between 1945 and 1960.
His final residence was in Miami Beach, Florida, where he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, in January 1977, because he suffered from a severe case of the very painful disease - shingles.
Membership
Postwar, Pawley was an active member of the Republican Party.