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    Aaron Elson: When did General McAuliffe get the ultimatum to surrender [to which his reply was the famous "Nuts."]?

    Frank Miller: The 22nd. I looked it up because this guy had asked me for Newsday about it and I said, uhh, he caught me unaware, so I said, "It was just before Christmas, but I don't remember the date." So I checked it out in one of the books, and, you know, he had given out that letter that day.

    Len Goodgal: Yeah, "It's Christmastime, and we've got to be thankful for..."

    Frank Miller: The 22nd was the day they gave it to him, and the Germans, you know, they had a typed version of what the Germans said, "Vas ist das?" What does it mean?

    John Miller: He asked the guy, he said...

    Frank Miller: What does it mean? In those days I spoke German pretty good. My grandfather was German.

    Len Goodgal: He [McAuliffe] asked the guy, what should I tell him? He says, "Well, your answer before, 'Nuts.' And that's what he gave him. He said, "Aw, nuts." He said (to Kinard), "Well, what should I answer him?" He said, "You've got it. Nuts."

    Aaron Elson: And that was Kinard?

    Len Goodgal: Kinard was there with him. They were pretty good guys. McAuliffe was always a nice guy. If he met you, if I'm here and you were in the bar, he'd pick the tab, man, he wouldn't let you.

    John Miller: He was gentleman, he was a real nice guy. All the time.

    Aaron Elson: After he made that response, and the Germans started shelling, what were those next two days like?

    John Miller: A lot of shelling. A lot of bombs.

    Frank Miller: Constant firing, and noise.

    John Miller: Constantly. Constantly.

    Frank Miller: I mean, you couldn't listen to a radio if you wanted to, if you had one. But it was constant shooting, it was like they were trying to do what they said they were going to do, obliterate everybody.

    John Miller: What they said they were gonna do, they were gonna destroy the whole thing.

    Frank Miller: And they had an awful lot of equipment around us.

    Aaron Elson: What goes through your mind at a time like that?

    Frank Miller: What the hell am I doing here?

    John Miller: That's for certain.

    Aaron Elson: Did you see anybody crack under the strain?

    Len Goodgal: I never saw a guy crack at any time. At any time. Although I heard stories. Good ones. I heard a story of a guy freezing in a foxhole during the damn siege. But I never saw a guy freeze. I never saw a guy chicken. I never saw a guy do anything dishonorable all the time I was in this outfit. We were talking about guys doing things. But they're always secondhand stories of guys doing something dishonorable. Did you see anybody do anything dishonorable? No. He didn't either.

    Aaron Elson: How about the food? Maurice said that, by the way, did Maurice have a nickname? You wouldn't call somebody Maurice in combat. My father's name was Maurice.

    John Miller: We called him Tydor. Everybody called him by his last name. People very seldom called anybody by their first name. You called everybody by their last name.

    Len Goodgal: Unless you had a nickname.

    John Miller: Because, if you answered a roll call, they wouldn't say, "John Miller." They would say, "Miller, John."

    Frank Miller: We had so many Millers in my company, there were about five of us named Miller, so they used to call me F.J. Then Freddie Haddock, Fritz Haddock was killed in Bastogne, this is a guy that was really something, he was a machine gunner, and he used to call me Kid, all the time. At one point where they wrote something about him in "Rendezvous With Destiny," there's a page that says, they said he did this, he did this, you know, like clips from different people, a lot of names. And there's one listing, that's the only place I was mentioned in the book, they said he used to say to me, "Stick with me, Kid, and I'll get you home." We were in the same platoon. And Fritzie was one heck of a guy. And when he got killed, one guy went crazy, oh, what's his name, Ball?. One of his closest buddies. Freddie got hit in the back of the neck, the head, a downward shot, it was from a sniper, and it was at a quiet point, we were someplace in the Bastogne area there, on a hill or something, and I don't know, he got hit, and when he got hit Yurecic, he was a medic, tried to patch him up, and when they carried him down the hill, Captain Cody wouldn't leave him up there because he was that kind of a guy that he wouldn’t leave anybody out in the field, they brought Fritzie down to the C.P., and they claim he died on the way down the hill and Yurecic used to think that it was hill fault because he didn't bandage him right. But you know, it was nobody's fault, in those days, it's just like Frank, you know, Frank Wasenda, when we left him somewhere after January, we were in a rough area and Frank got shot in the shoulder. We thought he got a million-dollar wound, he'll go home. The medics didn't pick him up for a few days. But when I saw him in 1967 in Chicago, the first time I saw him since the war, since we left him, and he was without an arm. He got gangrene. But he was one that went into a shell after, for the longest time, didn't go anywhere, or tell anybody about anything, you talk about people who wouldn't talk. Frank was like that. He felt, you know, not complete I guess, he lost an arm. Who knows why. But there's so many guys that have had this happen, and we can't even talk for them because we never had that much of a, you know, we've all been shot up but are fortunate enough to have all our extremities and still capable. But some guys really had it bad. I never saw anybody crack up, though, to answer your question. Not per se. When we were getting shelled, I remember guys in the hole, you know, we'd get together sometimes, two guys would get together, you'd try to keep warm at the same time because it was still freezing, and we were out in the open because if you were in a building they dropped it on your head. If you were under trees you could get killed by the branches. So the safest place was sort of if you found a ditch or a low spot because you couldn't dig a hole it was so frozen, so it was a combination of just surviving. And where were you gonna go, there isn't a bus on the corner to take, what are you gonna panic and run for?

    Aaron Elson: When you were wounded in Bastogne, how were you wounded?

    Len Goodgal: The first time, I lifted my head up. We were making an attack on Foy. We were gonna take the town back. And I lifted my head up, a kid named Cross was next to me and Raymond Crouch was right in front of me, and there was machine gun fire across the field, I wanted to see where it came from. I just lifted my head up a couple of inches and it went right across my face like that and it hit the kid next to me, Cross, up the side. I saw him wince, that's all, he was laying there.

    Frank Miller: Did it kill him?

    Len Goodgal: I pulled his shirt up, and he had holes right up the side. Oh, Christ. And that's when I saw the medic. We had just broke through to the second battalion which was surrounded, that's what we were attacking for, to break through to them. The jeep came down the road, a medical jeep had four stretchers on it, two on each side, and I saw one was empty, and I stopped that jeep. I ran across the road and I came and I got Cross, and we dragged him and put him on the jeep. A guy looked at me and he says, "Christ, you're bleeding like hell." It was all down me, I didn't realize it. It didn't hurt. It hurt, you know, like just, you figured you scraped yourself, you don't care. Then I wiped my finger over it, and there was blood all over me.

    I caught up to the rest of the guys. It was all over at that point. The sergeant says, "What happened to you? Where the hell have you been?"

    I says, "I don't know, I got hit in the face."

    So he forgot about it. He thought I took off or something, which I didn't do. I was with Crouch. We took this guy, dragged him up there. But he died in the convent, what I call the monastery, but it was a convent.

    John Miller: Yeah, it was a convent. There was a monastery around there, but right across the street from St. Peter's Church, there's a walled compound.

    Len Goodgal: We were inside that wall, he died in there. I saw, he died about a day or so later. But what could they do for him? They didn't have anybody to take care of him at that time.

    Aaron Elson: What was his full name?

    Len Goodgal: His name was Cross, he was from Iowa. Idaho or Iowa. The reason I can remember him so well is that incident, but he got off a truck with Joe Chivas, all the C's got off in Holland when they came to my outfit, and Chivas said to me when I was out in Colorado Springs, he says, "You know, I wonder whatever happened to that guy Cross." I guess he knew him from getting off the truck in Holland when they came up as replacements.

    I said, "He got killed right next to me." The guy practically died in my arms. I felt bad. I was a kid myself. The guys looked out for me, and I was looking out for him. To me, he was just a kid because he just came to the outfit. He couldn't have been more than 18, 19 years old.

    John Miller: We were all the same age.

    Frank Miller: Except the old guys like ... I was 19 the day we jumped in Holland. That was my birthday, the 17th of September.

    Len Goodgal: The 17th of September. It was a beautiful day.

    Frank Miller: Remember they were singing Happy Birthday to me on the tour bus? You know, that's an important date in Holland, so when they found out it was my birthday they're all singing Happy Birthday in Dutch and English.

    Len Goodgal: The sun was shining. You could see the fields, we just jumped in the field, there was no artillery at us, no fire or anything.

    John Miller: That day was a beautiful day that Sunday we jumped in Holland.

    Frank Miller: I had a leg pack with a bazooka, and my rifle was in three pieces in a case.

    Len Goodgal: I hated that leg pack, man, you'd break your leg with those things.

    Frank Miller: Well, you were supposed to pull the wire and let it drop below.

    Len Goodgal: I can only say that we went over the bridge at night, I think I talked to you, you didn't go over...

    John Miller: I went over the next day.

    Len Goodgal: So the bridge was blown, we went over on boats. Slept in the fields alongside that road, part of my company was on the right and part was on the left. We went down the road. Captain Kylie, who was Lieutenant Kylie, he became a company commander after Normandy, he got killed, a sniper got him out of the church steeple, and that's when they decided to blow every church steeple that they saw. Whenever they came to a town if we were having any kind of fighting at all, whoom, the church steeple.

    John Miller: That's something that amazed me, this last trip to Holland, all of these church steeples, fifty years ago every one had a hole right square in the middle. Now they patched them all up. No more holes in church steeples.

    Frank Miller: Yeah, it was different. Did you notice all the steeples that look new on top, like an ice cream cone?

    Len Goodgal: You know, in Holland, I remember the brick factory out in the flats that we were in.

    Aaron Elson: Now John, were you with Tydor when he was wounded in Holland?

    John Miller: Not in Holland. Me and Maurice were in a room in Bastogne of a building, and a shell came through the wall, and he maintains that we went out that hole at the same time. I don't know if the shell came in first or made the hole as we were going out, but we wound up in a hole outside, so Mickey calls me and Maurice foxhole buddies. I still don't know who landed on the top.

    Frank Miller: That's a fact, sometimes, when something happens. We were on the Moder River, it was like a static front, and I had a .30-caliber machine gun that I inherited for that period. We went from one thing to another. And there was a point across the river and you could see the Germans in the trees moving back and forth, it was quiet, and they were doing things, and this one guy, I don't know what he was doing but it looked like he was doing laundry, hanging stuff. So I take the machine gun, and I put the sight on, I'm figuring how far that is and everything, this thing is on the other side, so I set the sight on the machine gun. It was a light caliber .30 gun, it was like a pistol grip, the one with the serrated barrel. So I figure I'm gonna try one shot and see what happens. So I pull the trigger and fire one shot. And there were five of us there, we had a dugout that belonged to the Germans when they pulled out, it was like a mound with a doorway that was maybe 22 inches, maybe two feet wide, and just about three feet high. And it was myself, Wylie J. Myers, Krupp, Connors, there were five of us. And these guys, we couldn't even light a fire in those days, you couldn't do anything, the Germans would drop a mortar on you. They were good, they were so damn good. So, I take one shot, ding, and I see the branch shudder, a couple of leaves come down. And this maybe 150 yards across the river. And the minute that happened, say 30 seconds went by and you hear, "pop." I knew what the pop was, the mortar going into the tube.

    Well, I'm not exaggerating, five of us went through at the same time into that dugout. From outside I wish we had a picture, it must have been just stacked. And Wylie's on the bottom. "Get off me! Get off me!" We're all on top of one another. We come out and the damn thing didn't wreck the gun but it knocked it over. It landed in between that dugout and where the gun was in like a little enclosure of logs. And Wylie says, "Don't you do that anymore."

    Len Goodgal: The thing about a mortar is this, when they go off, you could hear them go off, you hear a pop. When you hear that pop, you'd better move, because it's got a high angle trajectory.

    Frank Miller: It doesn't shoot at you. It goes up in an arc.

    Len Goodgal: And when you hear it coming in, it's all over. Forget it. So when you hear it go off, you've got to take action right away.

    Frank Miller: When we heard that pop, we knew that was for us. I mean, the funny parts, you laugh afterwards but at the time...

    Aaron Elson: Could you tell if you hit the German?

    Frank Miller: Oh, I didn't hit him. I hit the branches above his head, I was a little high.

    Aaron Elson: What would you aim for, would you aim for the head or the body?

    Len Goodgal: Anything you could hit, probably.

    Frank Miller: Usually you aimed for the heavy mass. You always aimed for the heaviest, because it's not like, I do competitive shooting, I still have a national membership, and when we fire, I've fired at 600 yards, in Jersey as a matter of fact I took second place in an open at 600 yards firing across water in Cape May, in 1968 or ‘69, way back, and, you know, you're firing at something you can't even see, you're firing at a 4-by-8 frame with a 14-inch bullseye. Well, it's not that kind of target shooting in a war. Unless a sniper that is pinpointing, you don't have time to set your sights. You know, you don't get five sighters like you did in practice.

    Len Goodgal: You've got to also realize, they had a 60-millimeter mortar -- 50-millimeter mortar -- and they also had a light machine gun. Their guns were lighter than ours. They could take that barrel out and change that barrel quicker than we could possibly change our barrels, and they didn't have that heavy mesh like they had metal on the outside to frame the bore. They could change the barrel rapidly.

    John Miller: All they did was turn it a quarter turn. A quarter turn and pull it out.

    Len Goodgal: They had a pair of gloves, they'd pull the thing, zoop, put one back in there. And the other thing was that 50-millimeter mortar had a smaller shell. You don't have to have just as many increments as we had to put on the mortar. They couldn't go as far as we could, we could go one mile. They had a 50, it was light, the shells were light and they could hang them down on the sides, three or four of them, on their bodies. If you take three or four mortar shells and carry them, they get heavy. And the mortar itself had a bipod and a plate, and the mortar, if you carried it all together, man, the pain, it's heavy, and everything else. You couldn't run with it at all.

    Frank Miller: You usually had two, three guys. It's too heavy for one guy.

    Len Goodgal: But the point is that it took three or four guys to be in a mortar squad, half a dozen guys in a mortar squad, whereas they could have one guy, he could take that tube and put it in the base of a tree or anything, it wasn't that heavy equipment. And they could set it up very accurately. Ours was set up, you needed sights and everything...

    John Miller: You had to level the damn thing.

    Len Goodgal: Level it, everything else. They had a very movable, quick way of operating.

    Frank Miller: They had more practice.

    Len Goodgal: Even their canteen was lighter than ours. You know, they had a bolt action gun, but they used their bolt action in Africa and anyplace there was sand or anything. We got into Africa, they had to replace the M-1 with bolt-action O-3s because the sand and stuff in the desert, they get clogged up. Were you ever in a sandy area, with the M-1, did you try it and see what happens to it?

    Frank Miller: Well, you had to keep it clean.

    Len Goodgal: They clog up, and it clogged right away with a little bit of sand. In Africa they reissued the guys O-3s, were you aware of that?

    Aaron Elson: Tydor said he had a folding stock carbine.

    John Miller: When they came out with the M-1 carbine, it had a wood stock. It had about a 20-inch barrel on it, and it was designed primarily to do away with the .45 Colt pistols. And we were gonna get, anybody who carried a .45 was supposed to get longer range, it had a 15-shot magazine, so it was supposed to do the same thing, and it was gas-operated, too. So when they did it, originally the same was with an M-1, if you jump with that you're jumping with something long, right? And I always thought it would make a real nice deer rifle, but after a while, well, instead of jumping with it across your body or anything, they were gonna put it in a scabbard. Well, they did the same thing with the M-1, they put it in a scabbard and that went from your shoulder all the way down to your ankles, so when you landed you couldn't bend your knees. So people wound up with broken legs on account of that scabbard.

    Frank Miller: In those days, like today they could pull a brake and stop it, and walk away, but in those days you couldn't.

    John Miller: So then they decide, okay, they'll take the same carbine, and for our gang, they put a metal folding stock on it.

    Len Goodgal: It had just two ribs.

    John Miller: All it was was an open frame. And it used to fold, so that you didn't have to worry about it coming to the shoulder, it would attach to the belt and go down, and if you jump with it, you didn't have to attach it to your leg down here. So when you landed, then you were in much less danger of breaking your leg.

    Aaron Elson: Why would Tydor say he could have done more damage if he threw it a German than if he aimed it?

    Len Goodgal: I just think it's just talk, because we really didn't use the carbine in action. The guys had 'em and they used to shear the pin off of them, they'd be automatic.

    John Miller: They made them automatic instead of semi-automatic. When you file the seer down. When you carried a 15-round clip, and it operates the same as an M-1 on a semi-automatic. It was a .30-caliber. It didn't have nowhere near the range of an M-1. As I say, it was designed especially to do away with the Colt .45. The sights on it weren't as good as anything, but it was strictly a short-range thing. It had a much longer range than a tommy gun, but it had a lot shorter range than an M-1. Now when these guys, they used to take two clips, two 15-round clips and tape them together upside down, right, and then they would file the seers off, and they'd use it automatically. You could only do that a very short time before you burned the damn barrel out. Now, if Maurice said he would do more damage by throwing it at them, that's because he wasn't that great a shot. He wasn't an expert marksman, let's put it that way.

    Len Goodgal: When we first were being outfitted, they didn't know what the hell to give a paratrooper. They gave us, everybody had a tommy gun at one time, an M-1, a .45.

    John Miller: I carried a tommy gun into Normandy. I carried an M-1 into Holland.

    Len Goodgal: They issued us tommy guns, M-1, carbines, and .45s. I had all this artillery with me and it's heavy. And they didn't know what we were gonna keep and who was gonna keep it. As our outfit developed, we had squads, and the squad leader had a tommy gun, and I think the assistant, or corporal, had a tommy gun in the back.

    John Miller: Sometimes.

    Len Goodgal: Okay. And you had a machine gun in each squad, and you had a B.A.R. in each squad. And the third squad, you had two squads, or three squads, and then you had a mortar squad and platoon headquarters. So you had 48 men in a platoon, something like that. So each platoon had three squads and a mortar squad and a platoon headquarters, which is six guys, so it worked out even.

    Now, finally they took away the carbines, those long carbines, they gave us the short ones. They took those away and they only gave those to a guy that was a machine gunner. Then I think they took them away and he had a .45, and then he wound up with something else. He had to have another weapon, see.

    John Miller: It probably was supposed to replace the .45. They gave them to a lot of the officers instead of a .45, a lot of the officers were carrying carbines, in some cases, like in communications, wire teams would carry carbines because it was much lighter than an M-1 and it wouldn't get in their way.

    Aaron Elson: Were you on a wire team?

    John Miller: A wire team? No. I used to go with them as a bodyguard a lot of the time.

    Aaron Elson: When you would do that, as a bodyguard, did you ever get into a firefight?

    John Miller: Oh yeah, depending on where you were stringing wire. Because the wire teams would go sometimes from company headquarters back to battalion, or from battalion back to, like, they would string wire from our guys in the artillery battalion back to divarty [division artillery], or from the different batteries into battalion, stuff like that. Or from the regiments back to the battalion. They were all over the damn country. And they were good map readers, because they had to go out, and sometimes it would be one guy by himself, sometimes maybe two guys, depending on the length, and if somebody wanted to go as a bodyguard or to help them out. So maybe you would have one, two or three people in a team. And they could string a goddamn wire sometimes a couple of miles.

    Aaron Elson: What was your rank, John?

    John Miller: When I came out I was a T-4. I went in as a private. Then I was a T-5, and I came out as a T-4.

    Aaron Elson: And how old are you?

    John Miller: When I jumped in Normandy I was, let's see, that was '44, I was 20 years old. When I jumped in Holland I was 21.

    Aaron Elson: And where were you from originally?

    John Miller: New Jersey. Bayonne, Jersey City.

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Contents                  Chapter 4, Interview With a Tank Driver