The Boston Globe
June 9, 2005, Thursday THIRD EDITION
BERGE AVADANIAN; HERO KEPT FELLOW SOLDIERS IN HIS HEART
By Tom Long, Globe Staff
Berge Avadanian was a World War II hero who threw out the opening
ball for the Red Sox fifth-game victory over the Yankees in last
year’s American League Championship Series. He was 86.
Mr. Avadanian, who was born on Flag Day 1918, the year of the Red Sox
World Series victory, died in his Watertown home on June 6, the 61st
anniversary of the day he parachuted into France during the D-day
invasion of France.
“I wonder if he was just waiting for the anniversary of D-day. It
was a wonderful thing in some ways,” Mr. Avadanian’s daughter, Sandra
A. Starck of Watertown, said yesterday.
Although he worked for the Coast Guard and later dealt in antiques,
Mr. Avadanian never forgot his fellow soldiers. Each year in the days
before Memorial Day he would visit cemeteries in Belmont, Newton,
Watertown, and Waltham and place a flag and a personal letter on the
graves of about 150 veterans.
“Dear old friend Tom,” read one of the notes, according to
American Veteran magazine. “I will always remember you. Your
great-grandchildren visited me last week. They are beautiful.”
A native of Lynn, who grew up on a farm in Bellingham, Mr.
Avadanian joined the Army shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor. As a sergeant in the 82d Airborne Division, he participated
in seven major campaigns, including the invasion of Italy, the Battle
of the Bulge, and the D-day invasion of France.
Mr. Avadanian remembered D-day in a story published in the spring
2003 issue of American Veteran: “Enemy antiaircraft fire was
intense,” he said of his jump into France with 150 pounds of
equipment strapped to his body. “And I could see cows but at first,
no people and no Germans. That changed in a hurry. I can recall a
fine young lieutenant who had gotten a haircut from our company
barber a couple of days prior to D-day, just as I had done. The next
time I saw him he was still in his parachute hanging from a tree near
the churchyard at St. Mere Eglise with his throat cut. The Germans
who had bivouacked in and around the town were merciless.”
During the 34 days of intense combat that followed, the 82d Airborne
suffered heavy casualties. “Wherever we fought, those once-quiet
little Norman towns became intense rubble within days, sometime
hours,” Mr. Avadanian recalled. “The airborne division spearheaded
inland of those beaches with almost 13,000 men and returned to
England with only 5,800 all the rest were missing, wounded, or dead.”
Mr. Avadanian was wounded twice. He was awarded a number of
decorations, including the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Croix de
Guerre.
After the war he was a procurement officer for the Veterans
Administration in Boston for several years and principal contracting
officer of the US Coast Guard’s North Atlantic Region for decades.
Mr. Avadanian held a number of posts in AMVETS and was the national
commander of the service organization in 1973 and 1974.
He never regretted his military service and said he would be happy to
do it all over again.
“If God would allow me to be born again, I would pray to God to put
me on that same road to Normandy,” Mr. Avadanian said in a story
published in the Boston Herald in 2004. “It was the most gratifying
thing I have ever done. I was so proud to be fighting for my
country.”
Mr. Avadanian was also a lifelong Red Sox fan.
“I listened to them on one of those homemade radios on the farm
when I was a little boy,” he said in a story published in The New
York Times in 2004. “I was in Paris listening to them on a shortwave
radio when they played the World Series in 1946. And when I jumped
out of a plane in Normandy, one of the last things I said before I
went out the door was, ‘I wonder what the Red Sox are doing,’ and a
wise guy from New York said, ‘They probably lost as usual.’ ”
When Mr. Avadanian threw out the first ball for the fifth game of the
championship series last October at Fenway Park, it was like a dream
come true. “He had a wonderful time,” said his daughter. “They picked
him up in a limousine.”
In addition to his daughter, Mr. Avadanian leaves his wife, Rose
Marie (Bazarian); a son, Paul B. of Waltham; a sister, Mary
Kachichian of Stoneham; and two grandchildren.
A funeral service will be held at 11 a.m. tomorrow in St. James
Armenian Apostolic Church in Watertown. Burial will be in Mount
Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.