Tank-On-Tank Combat: Destroying Hitler's Panzer Division | Battle of the Bulge | Harry Miller

Well, as it happened, our first tank came around the corner, and he came face-to-face with the first German tank. He fired, and he knocked it out. So he started to reload, and the round got stuck in the breech. And so he waved for the second tank to come around. He came around the corner and face-to-face with the second German tank and knocked it out. The third vehicle was a tank destroyer, and it came around the corner, and he put three rounds of 90-millimeter ammunition into this third tank and blew it apart, practically. So what happened was, in our first half hour of combat, we had knocked out the lead elements of the 1st SS Panzer Division. You are about to embark upon the great crusade to meet this mounting aggression. And make no mistake about it, good will prevail. Well, I was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. And, of course, during the Depression, we really struggled. Very, very little food. There were six of us, six kids, three boys, three girls. One girl was killed very early, about five years old. She got hit by a car and killed. And I was the youngest of the whole bunch. And, of course, I always wanted to go into the service because I'd go to the parades. We had nice parades in the hometown then. And I remember they had Civil War veterans in the parades, like 1936. You know, that was like the 80th anniversary of the Civil War ending. And I just always wanted to be part of the military. I went in, went into basic training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, as a tank crewman. At that time, the people in Europe were saying, well, I think the war is going to end because the Germans are really slowing down. They told the people who trained us in those days to stop training so many tank crews and infantrymen, which was unusual because they always needed infantrymen. Well, then the next day they would say, well, we do need more. And then we don't need more. And it went back and forth. So anyway, they put me through a basic training, which I did not get as much training as most people got, and put me in the 788th Amphibious Tank Battalion. Well, the 788th had these, what they called LVTs, or Landing Vehicles Track. And there were four versions of them. And so we had to take just the ones that had a main gun on them and we put them on flatbed railroad cars and took them to Brooklyn Army Base. And they loaded them on the ships, and we got on the ships, and they took us over to Europe. And we landed in Le Havre, France. And Le Havre was a flat town. It was just on the north side of Normandy. And it had been really beat up from all the ammunition that was fired in from the ships and the bombing from the airplanes. People there did not like us too well. They were giving us the finger and the whole arm, as a matter of fact. But we put all these LVTs on the flatbeds again and took them up to Antwerp, Belgium. So anyway, we left them off at Antwerp and went back to Le Havre. And at Le Havre they had what they called the cigarette camps. We were there for a week or so, and a truck came up and they took some of us and took us up to our units that we were going to be in. So they took me up to the 740th Tank Battalion, which was in the town of Neufchateau, Belgium. And I got there, and the 740th Tank Battalion had just gotten there about a week or two before I did. When they got there, the 1st Army told them, we probably won't need you because we think the German Army's finished. They said, well, if we need you, you stay in that town and we'll notify you if and when we need you. So they said, just keep law and order there, and that's what we did until the Battle of the Bulge started. On the 16th of December, we could hear artillery in the distance, and we were wondering what was going on, and nobody knew. Finally, on the 17th, we got the word from the 1st Army that we were supposed to join the 30th Division when we got some vehicles. They said, well, we don't have any vehicles, no tanks. They had to be turned in in England. And so they said, well, go to these two or three ordnance depots that they gave us the name of. We went there and we had to find one tank that we could take parts off another one and put it together so that we came up with two tanks and one tank destroyer that were just piecemeal to bits. All the radios were off of them. All the gun sights were off of them. So we got the word to proceed down to the town of Stuma with whatever we had. So we sent these two tanks and tank destroyer into the town. It was a train station just outside of town about two kilometers, something like that. And there was a big curve going into the train station. And our first tank went around very slowly, and he came face to face with the first German tank of the 1st SS Panzer Division. Adolf Hitler was the name of it. And this was the same outfit that had caused the Malmedy Massacre just the day before. The Germans killed 90 sub-GIs that had surrendered. And the word got out after we heard about that that no more SS prisoners would be taken. They'd be shot and caught. The 30th Division was there at the train station, and they were seeing these German tanks coming toward them, and they were getting worried when we showed up. Well, as it happened, our first tank came around the corner, and he came face to face with the first German tank. He fired, and he knocked it out. So he started to reload, and the round got stuck in the breech. And so he waved for the second tank to come around. He came around the corner face to face with the second German tank and knocked it out. The third vehicle was a tank destroyer, and it came around the corner, and he put three rounds of 90-millimeter ammunition into this third tank and blew it apart practically. And thank God, the Germans turned around and left. So what happened was in our first half hour of combat, we had knocked out the lead elements of the 1st SS Panzer Division. They were a mean bunch of bastards. That's the only name we could ever give them was just plain bastards. And they would kill people without even thinking. We found many Belgian civilians that were just, you know, they were watching tanks come through, and Germans come by, and they'd just shoot them down like dogs. So they were real nasty, and the word went out, don't take any SS prisoners. So that ended our first day, and then the next day the Germans came back into the town proper of Stuma. And they had a pretty good infantry fight in back of this one house, and then there's a very small hospital in the center of town on a hill. And it's set up here on this hill, and the main drag was like down here through town. But the trouble was this hill came up like this, and we came there and we tried to knock this tank out, but we couldn't get our guns high enough to hit them. So we decided we were going to have to wait until nighttime and build a corridor road up this hill so that we could get our tanks up there. Six o'clock in the morning we reached the top, and there was a Panther tank sitting at the end of the hospital, a long, narrow hospital, and the tank had its main gun poked through the window. We found out that there were some 30th Infantry guys that were holed up in the hospital, and every time they'd try to get out, this tank would fire around down through the hole and change their minds for them. So when we finally knocked that German tank out, we freed these American GIs, and we went down in the basement of the building of the hospital, and there were something like 92 old folks and kids down there with a Catholic priest that was trying to keep them quiet because they knew that they would be killed instantly if the Germans knew that they were down there. After we took that, well, then we had to go into the next town, which is the town of Leglise, and the first SS had come from that. When they retreated, they had come back in, and they took the town of Leglise, which is the next one next to Stumont. So we had to kick them out of there, and when we finally did kick them out, well, we opened up fire with all the guns we had, and we obliterated the town, but we knocked out a lot of German equipment, and they ran out of gas, so they retreated again. So then we had a little fight here and a little fight there for different villages. We came on to the Siegfried Line, which is the demarcation line between Belgium and Germany, and by that time we were changed over to the 82nd Airborne Division, which was the greatest thing that ever happened as far as we were concerned because they were a bunch of real good guys. Had a hell of a fight there in the Siegfried Line because they had so many bunkers that were concrete, three to eight feet thick, each wall and their ceiling, the roof, and then they had one gun sticking out the front, and then they have maybe one here, and then they have another one sitting back here like this, and another one over here, and then the same thing all the way back for about two miles. So we had to defeat each one of these bunkers as we went along. It was a real hell of a fight, and the 82nd Airborne told us that it was one of the toughest fights they had been in, and of course they started out in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and Normandy, and Holland, and so we considered that pretty nice that they would tell us. So anyway, after we got through the Siegfried Line, we went through the area of the Cologne Plain. The Cologne Plain is just a flat area from the Ruhr River, R-O-E-R River, as opposed to the R-U-H-R River, which is pronounced the same way. At the beginning, there's the town of Durand. Durand was, unfortunately, the Germans had left. When they did, there was a dam upriver, and after they opened up all the water so it would flow out, then they destroyed the work so that you couldn't turn it off. So they flooded this plain across on the side of this town of Durand, and we had to sit there for two weeks and do nothing but fire artillery back and forth over the river, and they were firing back, and we had airplanes attack the town, and everybody was shooting at everybody. Finally, the water went down, and we got on the plane again toward Cologne, and there was little towns every so many kilometers away, all the way into Cologne. So we got to Cologne, and we were on the south side of the town. The 3rd Armored Division was in the center, and another infantry division was north of them. So we helped take Cologne, and after that, they sent us down to the 7th Army area. They had a unit down there that was trying to get across the Siegfried Line. So they sent our track vehicles on flatbed trains down to the area of Saarbrücken, Germany, and all our wheeled vehicles had to drive down. So we got down there, and the unit that they wanted us to help across the Siegfried Line again was already across, so they sent us to the next one down, which was the 63rd Division. So we crossed there, another hellacious fight going across the Siegfried Line. At the end of that, we helped take a town of Hamburg, which was H-O-M-B-U-R-G as opposed to Hamburg, and we took the town, and then they sent us back to the Rhine River, and they told us to go up to the town of Bam, which later became the capital for the western part of Germany during the occupation. So we crossed the Rhine River at Bam, which was just below the town of Remagen, which had been taken already, and we entered into what became the Ruhr Pocket Battle. So we had two weeks where we stayed in the town of Dusseldorf and got to clean up ourselves and our vehicles, and then they sent us up to a town of Lekita, which was on the Elbe River. We were with the 82nd Airborne and the 8th Infantry Division then. We crossed the bridge that they were building. We had a big, big hurry. We have to get up north. They want us to go up and help the British. We couldn't understand why we had to help the British, but that's what they wanted us to do, so we were ordered to get up there as fast as we could. Came to the town of Ludwigslust, and the 82nd Airborne dropped off, and they took Ludwigslust. Right next to that town, there was another small town called Wobelin, and there was a concentration camp there. So the 82nd didn't have any heavy equipment that they could tear down fences or anything, so we broke down some of the fencing around the concentration camp, and then we got back on the road and headed north again. Found some holdout SS people that had the 88 millimeter guns, and they didn't fire until they ran out of ammunition and put their hands up, and of course, that just made us mad and had to wipe them out. So we made it up north, and sure enough, we got there, and the British greeted us. Found out many years later the reason they sent us up there was to have a show of force to the Russians, because they figured the Russians would probably bypass the British and take the country of Denmark, which they couldn't do then because we were joined together. So that's where the war ended, and of course, everybody was dog-tired and hungry, and everybody just wanted to sleep. After the war, Eisenhower put the word out and said to let as many people as you can go to the nearest concentration camps and see what we were fighting for. I got to go to Dachau, and Dachau was the oldest concentration camp. It was the first one, and of course, Dachau was pretty ugly and dirty and smelly. I can't describe it, how the hell you can be asleep at night and smell dead bodies, and kids ask me all the time, well, what did it smell like? The only way I can describe it is I just tell them, well, you think of everything you hate the smell of, everything, and put them all together, and you still don't have it. It was just something that horrible to see that human people, human beings, I shouldn't say human people, human beings treated like that, and laying there dying, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it, except they want to touch you. First, they were afraid of us because we had uniforms, and the only ones that had uniforms in those days were Germans. These people, once they found out that we were not going to kill them, that we were going to help them, they tried to smile, and they didn't even know how to smile anymore. They didn't know what a smile was, and they'd lay there and pray. God, it still gets to me to talk about it, and I really shouldn't talk about it because it just bothers me still. Like I say, I used to dream about it, and I finally kicked out. About three years ago, I think, was the last time I dreamt about them. I wish there was some way you could describe it, but they show them in the movies, and they have people looking pretty scroungy, but it still doesn't do it. It still doesn't get near it. There's no way you can show it because it's so inhuman. It's impossible to show it. Anybody could treat people the way they did. I don't know. As it ended up, we ended up right across the center of Germany, and we had one company in Rüdesheim on the Rhine River, and then the rest of them were spread across over to the town of Limburg, Germany, where I was. We stayed there until the 23rd of July of 1946, and they deactivated our unit. So then we were all transferred out to different places. I went down south to Bavaria to the town of Bad Tölz and was put in the 9th Infantry Division. We were there until the 9th Division was deactivated in December of 1946. I stayed there until 1948. I was put in the Constabulary, which was a police organization that would take the place of the German state police. We just kept law and order along the border of the American and Russian zones, and we had horses and motorcycles that we could use up in the Alps. So I stayed there until July of 1948. I came back to the States and reenlisted to go to Japan. I was supposed to go to the 1st Cavalry Division, and I got to Japan in November or December of 1948. But when I got there in 1948, they called me out and they said, Are you supposed to go to the 1st Cavalry? And I said, Yeah. And they said, How would you like to go to MacArthur's headquarters? General MacArthur, who was head man at that time in the Pacific. And I thought, Oh boy, no more digging holes and sleeping on the ground and not eating meals. And when you do eat, you had tablecloths, all this. I said, I'll take it. I went up to Tokyo, reported them, and they said they'd like to make me a crew chief. I said, What the heck is a crew chief? I said, I know what they were in the airplanes, but I don't know what they were in the Army. And they said, Well, what it is is you'll be in charge of all the communications people that go ahead of General MacArthur. If he wants to go somewhere, you go ahead of him, and he'll set up radios so that he can communicate with Tokyo and the Pentagon. So I thought, That sounds like a piece of cake. I can do that. So I headed for the door, and as I got to the knob, the door knob, they said, Oh, by the way, here it comes. You have to go take glider training. Oh my God, you mean we're going to have to go in by glider? And he says, Yeah, you might have to. So we took glider training, and the day we graduated, I got my wings. The day we graduated, they said, Oh, good news. The Army just declared gliders as obsolete. They will never use them again. Everybody was so thankful because they were horrible things to ride in. They scared the devil out of everybody. The Korean War started, of course, in 1950, and every time MacArthur wanted to go someplace, well, we had to go ahead of him. And the funny part of it was, people asked me, Well, where were you at in Korea? And I said, Well, I don't know. What do you mean you don't know? Well, we landed in an air base that would take us all the way down to the end of the runway, and we'd unload off of C-47s, four-engine airplanes, and we'd set up our tents and put the equipment in it and get operating. And we'd stay there until MacArthur left. When he left, we'd start closing it back up and go back to Tokyo. But the name of the air bases were not named like they are here in this country. They were just numbered. And this went on until he was fired. He was fired by Truman. They had extended the tour of duty over there for everybody for one year. Since I got there in 1948, I had that extra year. So when he left, I left just about the same time. Came back to the States and was assigned to the Army Security Agency. I didn't want to go into it, but they put me in it, and that's where I had to go. So then they sent me overseas again, back to Germany. And I got there, and they said, Why did they send you here? We don't need you. I said, Well, send me home. Oh, we can't do that. So they said, Well, we're going to send you to the garden spot of Germany. Well, yeah, sure. Another foot fell, another shoe fell, I should say. And I ended up in this place down in Germany, just north of Munich, about 30 miles out in the middle of nowhere, just at a crossroad town. And it was the most screwed-up organization I had ever been in in my life. I mean, everything about it was screwed up. And I volunteered to go back to Korea in the infantry or in armor. They wouldn't let me go because of my security clearances. I had all kinds of clearances for the work we were doing. And so I told them, I said, Well, if you don't let me go, I'm going to get out of the Army at the end of my hitch. They said, Well, we just can't do it. We're not allowed to do it. So sure enough, when my hitch came up, I went back to the States, got out of the Army, went down to the Air Force recruiter, walked in and said, Here I am. Can you use me? They said, What did you do in the Army? I told them, and they said, I'm going to take you. Well, I had a tour first at Stewart Field in New York, and then I got a year's tour in Alaska at a remote radar site. Then when I went back, they sent me to the Pentagon. And I had three months to go until my hitch was up. When I got there, I said, Where are you going to have me work? And they said, At the Pentagon in the communications center. And I said, Well, you're making a mistake, because I only have three months to go, and I'm getting out of the service, so I have to go there. And they said, Well, no problem. Just lay around, and if we need you for anything, we'll let you know. But just go ahead and just check in once a day. The next thing I did when that hitch was up, I reenlisted, and they sent me to Strategic Air Command out in Omaha. And when I got there, the Vietnam War had just started, and I got involved in having to go to Vietnam for short trips. It was classified stuff, so I never talked too much about it. I never was there long enough to get a ribbon. You had to be in country, I think, 30 days straight to get a ribbon, so I didn't even get the ribbon for Vietnam. But that was all right. So anyway, I retired in January of 1966. Having entered at 15 and staying in until I was 37, 38 years old, whatever it was, I learned so much. Had I not gone in, I think I would have been starving for information because I learned so much. Every time I had a chance to get away after the war, of course you couldn't do it during the war, but any time I got a chance to go to another town, I would go. During the occupation, there was free train rides all the time. So on weekends, or if I got a three-day pass, I'd get on a train and go to some town and just walk around and look it over. I think everybody should go into the service for at least two years, if nothing else, just to find out what they want to do in later life.