Destroying the Lead SS Panther Tanks at the Battle of the Bulge | Harry Miller

our guest this week on veterans chronicles is harry miller he's a veteran of the u.s army and the u.s air force he's also a combat veteran of world war ii and he served during the korean and vietnam wars he served a total of 22 years in uniform and harry thanks so much for being with us thank you very much for having me appreciate it well let's start with the early part of your life i know you had a difficult childhood describe that a little bit and and where you grew up well okay i was born in columbus ohio uh at the start of the depression and uh spent my first 10 years involved with that and my mother died when i was three my dad died when i was 12. and i always wanted to be in the army ever since i was a little kid and so i got a chance to go in and i went through my line about my age when i was 15. how'd that work well it was difficult the army had started a program called the enlisted reserve corps i don't think it lasted very long but a man told me about it and he knew i wanted to go in the army and so he told me about it and i went down and checked into it and said yeah you can join i told him i was 18 and i was getting ready for the draft and he says yeah you can join him so you have to have a birth certificate so i went to get a birth certificate in those days they had a a ledger and somebody with beautiful handwriting would write the information in there well they couldn't find my birth certificate so i went back and i told them i said they can't find my birth certificate and he said well that's all right we can let you in anyway so i went in and took my basic training at fort knox kentucky and there was a lieutenant there i think his name was miller as well and he tried to get me to go into ocs after basic training and i thought oh boy that's all i need you know being 15 years old get caught so i had to put him off and uh so i put him off and and when the basic training was over why i went to uh fort ord california to an an amphibious tank battalion and there they used what they called lvt's landing craft vehicle landing half landing craft tracked that's what they call lvts and why they didn't turn around say track landing vehicle i don't know but anyway i got all my shots to go to the pacific and i thought i really thought that i was going to go to the pacific i got shots for elephantitis and sleeping sickness all kinds of things i never heard of got through the shot line they called my name and said you're supposed to go see this man so i went to see him and he said don't unpack you're going on a trip so a bunch of them a bunch of us took these lvts to to europe well you may recall to hit if you know about your history eisenhower had a lot of trouble getting general montgomery the british general to get the port of antwerp well he finally got to town but he couldn't use the port because the germans were holding the the walking island and the uh north south baveland island or it was a peninsula that one and so he used these things to send the canadians in to take the germans out of there so that they could run ships in and out of the port well after that why they finally opened the port and by that time why they sent us to what they called rebel depots at the time replacement depots they had three army camps at uh lahar france named for cigarettes old gold lucky strike and pelham i were in the phillip moors i went to old gold and from there i was assigned to my unit and i my unit was the 740th tank battalion which was a separate tank battalion and uh they were at the town of new chateau uh in belgium a town of neuf chateau about 15 miles east of liege belgium well the funny part of it was when the battalion got to europe they were they were uh in a special top secret program called canal defense light which or cdl this was a real strange setup that they had the british had planned this thing and it didn't work too well anywhere except in the desert and of course the desert war was over so they went to europe and had to retrain again as a medium tank battalion which they did and the colonel got tired of training so he wanted to go fight so he finagled away for the unit to get to europe and no tanks were assigned even when they got to new chateau so he reported in the first army headquarters and they'd shoot him out good because he wasn't supposed to be there and he said we would we would send for you if we needed you so he said well we want to fight so he said well they told us well you take over the town of newfoundl and keep law and order there and uh keep training we'll get you a couple tanks you can work training schedule out with a couple of tanks which they did well one one night if a guy was patrolling the town uh curfew was fairly early and uh he saw a lady walking down down the road he says madam you're supposed to be home after curfew and says i have to go to the hospital and he said well i'm sorry but you have to go home she says i have to go to the hospital she opened up she's very pregnant so he took her to the hospital well later on fast forward to 1999 when we went over to set up our monument that we put in this lady stopped me and asked me if this particular guy was there and i said yeah i'll get him for you he's i don't know any women in belgium i said well she knows you so he went over and met her and come find out the guy that was standing next to her was her son and she had named him after this guy in our outfit really and uh luckily the guy didn't have his wife with him or it would have been very hard to explain but anyway we we stayed there and then the battle of the bulge started on the 16th of december and the 17th of december they realized that this was getting serious so they told us to go to this ordinance depot and take anything we wanted and get ready to go in for the fight well we went to the ordnance depot and everything that was there was junk it had been beat up already had holes in it and everything else anything that was usable was pretty much in bad shape so anyway we put together three tanks and that's all we could put together from there so they right away they ordered ordered these three tanks down to the railroad station at the town of stewmot belgium and meanwhile the rest of the battalion was going around searching for other vehicles that we could get for the battalion so anyway they went down there was a curved road going down by the train station and as they came around we always went around a curve very slow because you didn't know what was around there so they went around our first tank saw the lead first german tank of the ss first ss panzer division which was hitler's elite and they were a mean bunch of guys they were anyway our first tank fired and shell ricocheted off the road went underneath the tank and hit the soft part of the tank which is the bottom part and knocked him out and then he reloaded our man reloaded and the round got stuck so he motioned for the next tank to come around the second tank came around he faced the second german tank he fired and knocked the muzzle brake off the the main gun the muzzle brake courses out on the end you know it has keeps the keeps the smoke from going straight out it blows it to the side anyway uh he hit that tank and it stopped he was useless from there on and then the third tank came around in back of him and he caught the the third tank and he fired three rounds into him and knocked him out and that was in the first half hour of our unit being in the combat in the battle of the balls which was quite spectacular and we got credit for stop they called us the the cork to the in the bottle you know that stopped them later on of course we we had more battle in in the town of stumont at a sanatorium there called saint edwards and we went in there and uh found after we got the germans out of it we found something like 50 belgian civilians and children in this in the basement with a catholic priest that was keeping them quiet you know because the germans were in the building they didn't know these people were in the basement so we liberated them and oh god were they thankful oh they were really thankful because they were scared to death anyway we went on to the next town of the glees and ran the germans out of there and uh from then on it was oh that was with the 30th infantry division we were we were a separate battalion they could attach us to any any infantry division that was with the 30th division well about that time at christmas 82nd airborne came up 101st went to bastogne 82nd came up to our our area in the north and uh there's there were three thrusts in the bat in the battle of the bullets there's north ross the central and the southern thrust well bastogne sat right here on the tip we were right here on this northern shoulder and so anyway we went with the 82nd airborne and then we really had some tough fights they those guys were fabulous they they were just great guys and it just not only was a unit fabulous but they they the guys themselves were just individuals great and we were with them through the rest of the mulch then we went into across the siegfried line had a hell of a battle in the siegfried line the 82nd said it was the worst battle they had ever been in so we had to take their word for it because they've got around a lot so anyway we wiped out the area there very difficult each each foot was a fight each foot in the area and we got them cleaned out that that area now is no longer there it's a it's a it's a mine a surface mine whatever they call them and the town was never rebuilt it they just towered all the rest of it down and left it that way and then after the uh after the uh siegfried lion fight where they we went into the to the town of durham uh on the west side of the roher river roars where we stopped because the germans had flooded the aurora river they had ruined the uh the dam up up the river and the water flew flow down there and for a two mile stretch we couldn't get across there because it was so many so we had an artillery duel there and all we did continually every all day long pump artillery rounds into it the air force came over and bombed it but we finally got across the river the river went down so we could get a bridge in there and we got into durham and the funny thing there there was a statue there of bismarck otto von bismarck and in the old days he he was pointing like this to the west with his arm down here like this well all this bombing and the shelling had actually vibrated this thing so it was completely turned around this time he was pointing to the east well when i went by that thing i said i bet you some gi is going to knock the finger off of that statue well i never knew what happened in fact i had forgotten about it one day just a few months ago i was reading a magazine or something and i saw a picture of this statue but it was taken from this side and i noticed that the arm wasn't there either somebody knocked the whole arm off of it big souvenir yeah but explain what it takes to get the upper hand is it just about superior firepower or is there a lot of tactical ingenuity needed here well at our level of course at battalion level we took orders from the infantry if they wanted to push we pushed and with the 82nd airborne it was continually pushed and they they were great guys and and uh we were always on the push continually push push push we had a hell of a battle in the town of saint vince which was equally as bad as the one at bastogne but at least we never got encircled and we always liked a kid that went over first about we never were encircled we always did the encircling but anyway we had a terrible battle there and i was in the assault gun platoon of our battalion and we were used for that very things knocking down buildings and and knocking down church steeples where where snipers were and they would they would stop the infantry completely so we'd get into town and say you see that church over there there's a sniper up in the in the belfry uh can you knock that off so we'd get it adjusted we'd put a round up there and knock the top of the church off and we'd get the sniper that was the only way you could get them out now the first ss panzer division that we faced was a mean division they had been in russia and they were called the blowtorch division because everything they saw they burnt down and they loved to cause fires they were responsible for the nominee massacre you might have heard of that something like 90 some gi's were captured and shot down in cold blood the first ss had a bad habit of doing that they'd just go through a towel and people were just standing there watching them but they'd turn a machine gun on them and shoot them down like dogs and that's the kind of guys they were so my particular part of it was was shooting these these uh assault guns at the at the ss and the ss were we never felt sorry for any of them now they're very mocked we they were different they were just draftees like everybody else but but the ss they were just mean people and that was kind of the thing that that i personally ran into but you know it was it was a continual push i mean you never got a chance to sleep unless you were lucky if you could if your tank stopped you'd be surprised how everybody would sit there and all of a sudden like that and then somebody would have to stay awake to make sure that they can't take any radio messages for us to move and so it was strictly push push push and sleep when you can and if you can and eating was something else i mean you didn't never know whether you're gonna eat or not and it was uh that kind of a situation always one thing we didn't talk about when we were talking about the battle of the bulge yeah the cold oh god yes it was very cold it was the coldest winter that they had ever recorded in belgium at that time and uh it was terribly cold and a lot of a lot of the fellas especially the 82nd airborne when they came up a lot of them didn't even have winter clothing they had just come out of holland you know the bridge too far thing they had just come back from there and they were refitting in france when they were called up they got there and uh some of them were dressed just like this they just had a shirt and pants on and some of them had overcoat some did not most some of them didn't even have rifles or weapons so they had to pick them up where they could get them but they came in and filled in real well and it was so cold i i remember one time i counted the number of different coats that i remember seeing at that time and i had something like 20 military coats that people were wearing different jackets and coats to keep warm did you have shelter no the only shelter we had was inside of a tank and when it was moving we had to keep the hatches open because you couldn't see very well by looking through the periscopes you know and if you could keep your hatches open you could you could make sure nobody was uh watching you that was going to shoot at you and it was dangerous but it had to be done to keep from being knocked out because the tank was very vulnerable in our tanks especially because the germans had such a good gun on their tanks that you know we were we were really sitting ducks for them did your gases gasoline freeze at any point never had gasoline freeze uh i suppose because we kept the engines running as much as we could not only for warmth but because we had to be on the go i don't know the germans had that problem or not but they had diesel engines on their tanks we didn't get diesels until later on we captured a uh tiger royal a mark vi tank the only the only intact tiger six that uh we ever got in in europe and they brought it back to the states and that's a separate story by itself and i i wish i had the time to go through that that that is something that's still classified no it's not classified not at all uh that cdl thing that i told you about earlier that was a classified thing for years and when we had our first reunion about uh 50 years ago the guys thought it was still classified and wouldn't talk about it even at the reunion and i had to convince them i said look that thing has been a long time unclassified you can say anything you want to well i don't know [Laughter] well well okay it was a german tiger royal which is the biggest tank that the germans had over there at that time they had one other that there was only one or two of those there but this was the biggest problem that we had there uh a buddy of mine was riding down the road in his tank he was a tank commander and this was in some fire break in the ardennes forest i don't know where it was actually but he was riding along and he came face to face with his tiger royal now this thing's got a 88 millimeter gun on it you know and it can blow a sherman tank out of so anyway he saw this thing and nothing happened they thought well maybe the crew is asleep in there so he fired a star shell above the german tank and when it lit well the germans bailed out so i guess they thought it was on fire so fortunately he was up in the turret and he had a 50 caliber machine gun and he killed three of them wounded one and one got away and so he radioed back and he told the battalion commander he says i got this tire royal and he said i'm going to drive this thing around here and the colonel said no get out of the thing he said something i'll see you and he'll try to knock you out he said no i'm going to drive this thing all the way to berlin he said no don't do that get out of it well he did it he stayed in it until he ran out of fuel so anyway he radioed back told the battalion commander where it was located near the town of ku belgium i like that name c-o-o and uh so the battalion commander told him he says well i'm gonna have ordinance come up and uh and uh take this thing and bring it back to aberdeen for for testing because it's too good of a tank not to so they went up the next day at the ordinance when it came up this is where i get mad first thing they did they painted their name four two three ordinance evacuation company on the on about that wide on the tank and they immediately uh went over and had to kind of get the tank loose well it was frozen to the ground because they had steel tracks so they poured gasoline around the track got it loose they brought up a flatbed tank retriever trailer for a sherman tank and winched this german tank up on it well of course it stuck out on both sides about like that because their tracks were something like this and ours were about like that and so they got it up there and they hauled it back to spa belgium to the train station and gave it to our colonel and he says no i want to send it on onto the porch so that they can send it back to the states so there it was had that marking on there our unit actually captured it but here they had their name on it see well years passed and that tank sat at the aberdeen proving ground and one day they decided they were all through testing it and everything about 30 years later and they sent it to fort knox kentucky and fort knox kentucky got it and they cleaned it up painted it beautifully looked like it's right off the assembly line they sawed off half of it so you could see inside and they had a plaque sitting in front of it and it said it was captured by the 423rd ordnance evacuation company and i saw that and i about had a fifth so i ran into the office of the curator of the museum and i told him i said you got a mistake out there i said that that tank was not captured it was number it was three three two i've never forgotten tank number three three two i said 332 was captured by the 740th tank battalion and i gave him the whole story and i gave him the name of the guy that captured it oh well he said these ordnance people said that they captured it i said were you ever in the army and he says no i said ordinance never i should probably shouldn't say this but i said ordinance people never captured anything but a dose of vd in a rear area of brothel and i don't know whether that'll go over big on your radio or not but that's actually what i said to him and so he said well if you can prove it to me i'll i'll change it so i got a hold of the guy that actually captured it and uh i asked him to repeat the story so that i'd have it in his voice and i plugged him in so he could say it on telephone you know and i could record it so he did it and i gave the cassette to the curator there and he finally changed it but he had already written an article and gave them credit for it and the article went all over the world so that was never corrected so that's been my my sole duty in life to get that straightened out fascinating story i love that story and i'm glad it got corrected one of the things people most people know if they if they know history pretty well is that the cold war started pretty soon after the end of the war in the european theater but there's a part to your story that shows just how soon it started as soon as victory was declared in europe you were sent to denmark explain why we were we were sent to uh to the baltic to stop the russians from coming through to take denmark we were at the town of guys well it's up right on the right on the baldi there's a castle there i've got it in my paperwork there but i can't even remember the name of it anyway we we stopped there and that blocked the russians from taking denmark and we didn't know why they had sent us up there for the longest time and it was just oh probably 10 years 10 15 years ago that we found out that we were there to stop the russians from going over there now while we were there in this town there's a lake there and uh the russians were on the other side of the lake we were on the west side and a couple of guys went over there and the russians were pretty nasty to us but there was some german that that begged these two guys to let them hide on the boat that he had they would roll it over and they took him back over and set him free he was very thankful he wanted to get away from the russians but anyway uh yes from then on we went down to the americans occupation zone and took up our stations for occupation duty and we were attached to the third infantry division at that time and our people had to cl crawl up to the uh guard post because the russians were taking pot shots at them as they crawled up but and so that started it for us and then of course it went from there on up and you of course you heard about winston churchill in 1947 or eight where he said from stephen on the baltic to trieste on the adriatic iron curtain has descended well it had descended actually before that but i like the way he said it it was sure true and we had nothing but problems with him continually and then of course uh i was here when when the wall went up and i was well there before that uh when just the fences were up but they had mine minefields on the east side they were pretty pretty nasty people and if you got caught over there you were in real trouble so anyway uh thank god i was able to get back over there when the wall came down to and that made me very happy to see that it worked germans were very happy about the whole thing and we we had a lot we have a lot of friends that are germans now that we never would have had otherwise it's interesting young people who don't remember what it was like with the wall have a hard time realizing just how big of an event that that really was we had people fly over they built airplanes and flew over how they ever got off the ground we never could figure it out but they just flew over the fence that's all they wanted to do to get out of there and one one family uh took their little car that they had and put a bunch of sheet iron on it and drove through the fence it made it look like a tank and they they drew through drove through the fence before the wall went up but after the wall went up there was a lot of people that were killed trying to get up over it it was a very sad thing and i remember one time in vienna there was a gi that passed a russian officer's club and there was a russian guard there and yeah i didn't know any better he said hi roosky and this guy dropped his submachine gun on he shot him right there and he died right there in the in the gutter they wouldn't let let the mps or the medics or anybody come over to him until he died that never hit the newspapers in this country because i asked my sister to watch for it and she said she never saw it that's the kind of stuff and a lot of a lot of this kind of stuff had happened it was never reached back home i don't know whether they didn't want the people to know about it i i like to think that that was not the reason but it might have been i don't know it's hard to know uh i i did promise our listeners that we would uh get to your service in in the other conflicts so you served in europe until 1948 at which point you were sent to the far east yeah i went to uh i went to japan and i got there in 48 and i said i'm supposed to go to the first cavalry division and they asked me if i would want to go to macarthur's headquarters and i thought oh boy i won't have to sleep on the ground anymore and might get some decent meals and have sheets to sleep in so i said yeah i'd like to go there so i went to macarthur's headquarters in tokyo daiichi building which is still there and i was in the communication center i had a portion of the communication center there that i was in charge of and so they anyway they needed to set up a uh alert what they call an alert crew in case macarthur ever wanted to go forward which we kind of laughed because most people knew that macarthur never went forward but anyway we had to set this up and i was in charge of it so meanwhile we had to go and learn to take off and load take off and landing gliders which we did and i got my glider pins and that's a big hit with the 82nd airborne the fact that i've got that because not many have it that weren't in an airborne unit but anyway i took the training and then when the korean war started why uh it was some time before macarthur went over to korea but we had to go over a day or two in advance and set up communications and he would come in and do his thing and when he'd leave while we'd tear down communications and go back to japan well they had declared the gladders obsolete right after our training so we never had to use gliders thank god but we had to go in by airplane and that wasn't too bad and i never knew where we went because you know we would land at an air base in korea and would set up somewhere wherever they told us to go and we never really knew where we were except that we were in korea people have asked me what what town were you in what area were you in i have no idea i really didn't want to know at that time anyway because i didn't think a whole lot of that country a lot of i love the people now and then too i had nothing against them at all but it was it was quite different it was quite a different war all together i heard you did try to get sent back there though i i went back uh yeah i tried to go back later on i was put into the army security agency and i wanted out of it i just i just wanted out of it i happened to be in an outfit that was about the sorriest art outfit i'd ever been in my life and uh i had a lot of personnel problems there mostly with the officers the troops didn't have any problems but i was in charge of the troops and of course the officers were supposed to set the example and they didn't set a very good example so anyway i wanted out that for that reason so my hitch came up and i oh i had volunteered to go back to korea and the tanks oh i was too essential and i volunteered for the infantry i was too essential what it was was they had so much money put into my security clearances that they just didn't want to turn me loose i found that out but you know anyway that's the reason i got out of the army i went back home got out of the army went to the air force and asked them if they could use me and they asked me what i did in the army and i told them that in my communications work they said we'll take you and i said yeah well let's talk frank and they said what was your rank in the army that's a tech sergeant and they said we'll give you tech sergeant but we can't give you the time and grade so i said i'll take it and i spent the rest of my years in in the air force best move i ever made what uh we've just got a couple minutes left here what were your main responsibilities with the air force i was at the sac headquarters and uh my duties were codes for the for the aircraft uh every every new mission had to have different codes because they didn't for instance they didn't want a code used going to vietnam uh that you also used to to alert the force or to to launch the force to go to say russia or china or somebody like that you know or cuba or whatever and uh so we had to establish new codes for each each type of new new program that they had and also i was in on some of the joint targeting stuff for uh for sac but my main thing was was the codes for the for the bombers going to vietnam and i was mighty glad to see what some of the results were that they did over there because they did a good job i've heard a lot of infantrymen saying they loved them the way they did that because we went in and just tore up a lot of real estate you know it changed some of the just a couple of units that changed over from atomic bomb racks in the airplanes to heart what we called iron bombs and boy when they went over and dropped these iron bombs i mean it looked like they were never going to stop coming out and the gi's on the ground loved that and i was kind of kind of happy for them that i was able to help somewhat do that i don't tell a whole tell them a whole lot about it because i figured they had it rougher than i did in that than that war but i was very proud of it harry just a minute or so left in our conversation i've read where you've said even more than 50 years after leaving the military that you don't regret it for a moment and that you absolutely loved serving our country so what are you most proud of that's very very very true and i as a matter of fact when the iraq storm iraq war started when the desert storm uh i was walking down the street i went by an air force recruiting office and i walked in and i walked up and i said i do and the guy looked at me and he said i'm sorry he said but you're going to have to get a facelift before i can thank you i said you're dirty [Laughter] but anyway that i i really was serious i would have gone back in in a minute and i would have stayed in the service uh longer than i did but uh i had two boys and uh they were getting of age that i had to had to have them back home i had had be able to get be back there with them because they were just starting to get of an age that i was worried about them so that's the reason i got out and i would i've been involved with the military as much as i could be ever since i i just love the military and the people in it i think we've got the best harry you are one of the best thank you well thank you i appreciate that thank you for your service mostly and thank you for being with us today as well thank you for having me i appreciate it very much harry miller veteran of the u.s army and the u.s air force combat veteran of world war ii also served during the korean and vietnam wars 22 years total in uniform i'm greg corumbus this is veterans chronicles you

Channel: American Veterans Center

Views: 499,555

Keywords: AVC, American Veterans Center, harry miller, wwii, wwii veteran, korea, vietnam, korea veteran, vietnam veteran, battle of the bulge, belgium, 740th tank battalion, us army

Id: yNzrVtUWiBc

Length: 35min 4sec (2104 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 06 2018