Father's Day: In Memory of My Father, Master Sergeant Miller, Combat Veteran, World War II
One embattled G I at Bastogne epitomized the courage of all with something he said, when told that he and his fellows were surrounded during the Battle of the Bulge. Matter of factly that G I remarked at the news: "They've got us surrounded, the poor bastards." And encircled those members, principally of the 101st Airborne remained, until General George S. Patton's lead elements of the 4th Armored relieved them. Such veterans must never be forgotten.
So too with my father, who fought in five major battles with a medal with the stars to memorialize the fact. The 329th Regiment of the 83 "Thunderbolt" Division landed on a Normandy beachhead on 19 June 1944. Within a very few days, and during some savage fighting against the Germans in hedgerows to the south, my father suffered a terrible wound. It happened this way. From a prone position he had lifted himself to help a comrade, when a shell fragment ripped across his upper back between the shoulder blades.
An ambulance was dispatched. German machine gunners, contrary to the mandates of the Geneva Convention, shot the tires off twice, before my father could be transported to a makeshift hospital behind the front lines. The medics placed him, stomach to the bed, in a tent from the seriously wounded. In fact so gravely hurt the chances of living slight, meaning that the doctors, hard-pressed as they were with a mounting casualty rate to save what lives they could, had to make a Draconian decision--administer to those men first with the best odds of living.
And, they were almost right to a man. By morning the only person still alive in that tent was my father. Medics and probably a doctor or two had monitored his vital signs during that awful night, but nothing much could be done for him. So badly wounded was he that in opening the slash across his back, one could see his heart beating on the other side!
According to my mother, from what she learned a month or so later by letter, one circumstance (other than an act of God) prevented his death. The penicillin injected into him for his hoped-for recovery had a better effect because of a massive intake of water he had drunk shortly before being hit.
Did my father shirk his duty? By no means! After his rehabilitation, he returned to his outfit in their lightning dash (for infantry anyway) to the Elbe River, which they reached and then crossed on 13 April 1945. That took place one day then after the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 12 April 1945. So, the 329th Regiment, in a thoughtful gesture to honor the new chief of state, put up a wooden sign at the Elbe, which was denoted the "Truman Bridge."
After the war, as with millions of other veterans, my father took advantage of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, as amended in 1945, better known as the G I Bill. My dad used it for an education (1948-1952) at Bethel College, a Tennessee school run by the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. He received a $90 a month living allowance with no charges for books or tuition. Prior to those four productive years, my father had cleansed his mind, so to speak, of the horrors of combat by tilling an 80-acre farm with a Farmall tractor. He sometimes let me steer, while sitting on his lap.
The end came during the early months of 1954, when I was but eleven years old, having been born in Middletown, Ohio, on 29 May 1942. My father, working on his master's degree at Murray State, had been sent home one morning, excused for crying at his desk. We should have known he was sick, I guess, because he scarcely said a word. Shortly after my mother, sister, his parents, and myself sat down with him for lunch at noon, my father suddenly slumped over the table (obviously in great pain), then straightened up, having lost his mind.
By morning, after a sleepless night for us all, my mother managed to slip out the front door in order to call for medical assistance. Disturbed and no doubt afraid, my father had not allowed her to seek help during the late evening or throughtout the night. Never getting better, or at least not much, he died about a month later in March, the ultimate cause (diagnosed by x-rays) as being from minute remains, lodged in his lower spine, of the shell fragments from the terrible wound about a month after D-Day 1944.
Spared ten years then from death, my father lived long enough to be vividly remembered by me. On the day he died my mother stood at the entrance to the living room of our second-floor apartment at McKenzie, Tennessee, and said: "Jim has gone to heaven." When my sister Cathy began to weep, I turned to her, then told her not to worry. Knowing how troubled I had been by my father's erratic behavior for a day or so, mother did not have me attend the funeral or the burial. Instead she sent me to her parents for a restful visit at Fairfield, Illinois, where I always had a wonderful time. So, my father "went unto his rest" with several of his ancestors, all interred in a family plot of a cemetery in Bucyrus, Ohio, just a mile or so north of the family farm, where my dad had a rewarding respite from the battles of World War II.
What I remember with particular fondness even yet would have to be his hours of singing to me in the farmhouse--songs, such as the "Big Rock Candy Mountain" for hobos and "Red River Valley" for cowboys. But the song, which I think we both loved the best, was "I've Been Working on the Railroad" with the lines that always thrilled me, as he sung them too so well: "Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah, strummin' on the old banjo." So, for you readers out there, who may have lost a father, or perhaps some other relative to World War Two, just remember to keep on singing. That is, we should never give way to grief, not anyway if we truly love life!