This is the remarkable story of my father, Herbert Henry Miller, who was drafted into the army in August 1942. Dad was twenty-one in February 1944 when he boarded the S.S. Argentina in Boston Harbor with the 30th Infantry Division bound for the European war. He left behind his parents, his brother, two sisters, and the lovely young woman, Eleanore Kurowski, he had fallen in love with only months before. A photo of Eleanore taped to his undershirt sustained him throughout the ordeals to come.

Dad landed on Omaha Beach on June 11, five days after the mass assault of       D-Day. The 30th moved inland, suffering horrific casualties in three major operations, including the gruesome battles of St LO and Operation Cobra. Captured by the Germans at Mortain, France, on August 6, Dad endured a punishing fifty-four-day march to Moosburg, Germany, where he survived for nine months in Stalag VIIA, the largest POW camp in Nazi Germany. Originally designed to hold 10,000 prisoners, the camp was bursting at the seams by spring 1945, with over 70,000 human souls. The overcrowded conditions led to an increase in dysentery, a mass outbreak of typhus, and wide-spread death. Stalag VIIA bore no resemblance to the fun-loving place depicted in the 1970’s American TV show Hogan’s Heroes.

While a prisoner of Nazi Germany, Dad was starved and forced to participate in work details in the city of Munich. Placed on trains and locked in for the three-hour ride, the men experienced frostbite, unsanitary conditions, and almost constant strafing by friendly fire. Early in his time at Stalag VIIA, the work-detail train took a direct hit from American bombs and my father narrowly escaped death. Several of his buddies were not so lucky.

During his stay at the prison camp, my father became good friends with a Nazi guard named Heinz. Ironically, Heinz had been the German soldier who’d originally taken him captive in France. One day near the end of the war Heinz disappeared from the camp. My father and his friends never saw him again. They came to believe that Heinz had been murdered by his fellow Nazis. My father’s friendship with this kind and decent German man haunted him for the rest of his life.

Twice my father planned an escape from Stalag VIIA with his close friend and fellow West Virginian Bert Cottrell. After their first escape both were recaptured in short order, landing in solitary confinement for two weeks with no food and just enough water to survive. Their second escape involved seven other POWS and it too was a failure. Recaptured by the Nazis, my father’s group included two Soviet prisoners who were promptly executed in cold blood. My dad, along with the others, was immediately transferred to another camp south of Salzburg, Austria, called Stalag XVIIIC. Bent on revenge, the Nazis placed their captives back in solitary confinement, this time putting each man in his own hole in the ground lined with sharp-pointed branches. The POWs were forced to stand in place for twenty-four hours while deprived of food and water.

Shaken but not broken, Dad endured six more grueling weeks of captivity.  Finally, on May 12, 1945, he and the others were liberated by American soldiers, becoming free men once again.

Copyright 2008-2009 Robert H Miller

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