Arizona Daily Star from Tucson, Arizona • Page 18

Eighteen QLfje Artama Hailn Star Tucson, Sunday, May 28, 1995 MUM DDD it W( Hit in the leg on Saipan, George Miller pulled through Memorial Day events Today American Legion John P. Burns Post 36, 5845 E. 22nd will hold a Post Everlasting Ceremony at 2 p.m. to honor members who died since last Memorial Day. Members of the post will place flags on veteran graves tomorrow at East Lawn Palms Mortuary and Cemetery, 5801 E.

Grant Road, at sunrise and will remove the flags at sunset. The Tucson VA Medical Center, 3601 S. Sixth will host a Memorial Day ceremony at 11 a.m. in the R.E. Lindsey, Jr.

Auditorium. The keynote speaker is Fritz Fossdal, past department commander of the state Marine Corps League. Tomorrow Holy Hope Cemetery and Mausoleum, 3555 N. Oracle Road, will hold a memorial Mass at 7:30 a.m. Bishop Manuel D.

Moreno will preside. A traditional flag ceremony will be held after the Mass. Our Lady of the Desert Cemetery and Mausoleum, 2151 S. Avenida Los Reyes, will hold a Mass at 7:30 a.m. Bishop Francis Quinn, retired Bishop of Sacramento, will preside.

A traditional flag ceremony will be held after the Mass. East Lawn, 5801 E. Grant Road, will hold a memorial service at 9 a.m. Tucson Police Chief Douglas Smith is the speaker. South Lawn Cemetery, 5401 S.

Park will hold a memorial service at 9 a.m. Congressman Ed Pastor is the speaker. Green Valley Mortuary and Cemetery will hold a memorial service in the Memorial Gardens, 2200 N. La Canada Drive, in Green Valley at 9 a.m. American Legion Post 7 will host a ceremony at Evergreen Mortuary Cemetery and Memorial Park, 3015 N.

Oracle Road, at 9 a.m. American Legion Post 59 will host a ceremony at Holy Hope Cemetery, 3555 N. Oracle Road, at 7:30 a.m. By Bonnie Henry The Arizona Daily Star Just about everyone agrees it was a just war. A war that had to be fought.

"We were fighting for democracy in the truest says Tucson Mayor George Miller, who picked up a bullet and a Purple Heart while fighting in the Pacific during World War II. Yet less than a decade later, Miller's patriotism would be severely questioned, his life shattered. In the fall of '53, and again the following spring, the House Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed Miller on the basis of his participation in Henry Wallace's 1948 Progressive Party campaign for president. "They said, 'We want you to give up some deep, dark secrets about your friends in Miller refused to answer to Sen. Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist witch hunt and was immediately fired from his teaching job outside Detroit.

"It just blew up in my face," says Miller, who returned to Tucson and hired on as a painter's apprentice. "I was crushed. I had lost my ability to make a living. Those were bad times." In time, he became a painting contractor and made a new life outside the classroom. When the Vietnam War came along, he opposed it, campaigning for anti-war presidential candidates Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern.

"But I never felt disdain for the men who went to Vietnam," says Miller. He knew, after all, what it was like in the fox hole. "Combat is about as glamorous as an outhouse in the summertime," says Miller today. Yet despite having his patriotism called into question, he harbors neither bitterness nor second thoughts about the war his generation fought and won. "We were fighting something that needed to be fought.

As a Jew, I would have been dead if Germany had won." Originally from Detroit, Miller, 72, came to Tucson for his health in 1939, enrolling for his last year of high school at Tucson High. "By 1943, they were taking anybody who was 98.6 degrees," says Miller, who became part of the 8th Regiment, 2nd Marine Division. "We were replacements for the troops lost at Tarawa," says Miller, who trained for five months on the Big Island of Hawaii. As a private first class, Miller was assigned to the job of BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) man. "We were like machine gunners." In the spring of '44, his ship, an LST (Landing Ship, Tanks) left as part of a convoy heading toward Saipan and an all-out invasion.

Perhaps a thousand men were aboard the LST when it was hit by a typhoon, not long out of Hawaii. "A lot of the guys were sleeping on the deck and were washed overboard," says Miller. One hundred fifty-eight men drowned, he says. In mid-June, the convoy pulled up next to Saipan's shores. "There were ships as far as you could see, and a couple of gigantic battleships firing their big guns," says Miller.

"We thought nothing could possibly be alive." Just before the dawn of June 15, 1944, he and the other Marines began clambering into the amphibious tractors that would take them to the beaches. That morning, 8,000 Marines landed in 20 minutes under heavy fire. "We were in the first assault wave," says Miller. "We didn't volunteer for this, I can assure you." The tractor that was supposed to carry him and the others a mUe and a half up the beach never made it out of the water. CV--' rLCD A.

KIV Paris A A E. Araiza, The Arizona Dally Star A Higgins boat, a cigar-shaped landing craft, took him to a supply ship that couldn't land because the beach was still under fire. "They got me up on the ship with nets and put me where the sailors ordinarily sleep." The next day, the ship withstood a kamikaze attack. "I was lying in the top bunk wondering what in the the hell I was going to do if the plane hit the ship." By then, his leg had swollen so much he could no longer see his knee. After several days, the ship headed toward Pearl Harbor, where Miller wound up in a military hospital.

There, the bullet was finally removed from his leg. Not long after, President Franklin D. Roosevelt came through. "They wheeled him right by my bed," says Miller. "He was the color of cardboard.

The guy next to me had a leg cut off and an eye missing. What must the president have thought to see all these men like that?" Not until July 9 would Saipan be secured at a cost of 3,100 American lives, as well as 300 Chamorro natives and 30,000 Japanese defenders. After Guam was won later that summer, a Purple Heart ceremony was held on the hospital grounds. By then-Miller was able to walk. "They lined us up to give us our Pur-; pie Hearts.

The other guys were in the wards, with the windows open, so they could hear the ceremony." Three three-star generals were on hand to do the pinning, says Miller. And there to give the speech was none other than Adm. William "Bull" Halsey, com- mander of the Pacific Third Fleet. "He said the usual stuff about how proud they were of us. And then he; said, 'And we want you boys to all get well so you can all go out to war "Up oft the third floor, I could hear this voice coming down, saying, 'Oh After the war, Miller resumed his studies at the UA and taught at Amphitheater High School from 1948 to 1951.

Fifty years past the war that had to be fought, he still savors memories of becoming a civilian once more, Thanksgiving 1945. "I had the taxi driver drop me off a block from the house my folks were waiting up and I ran all the way It was the happiest day of my life." weather in which he and Robert Hale had flown their bombers, sometimes barely able to see through the ice on the windshields. And Nunenkamp gave her a key piece of new information: Her father had served an earlier tour of duty, flying B-17s out of England. So when the Pima Air Museum offered her a B-17 ride last month as part of a World War II commemoration, Trachta went flying. Seated in the navigator's area, she imagined she was over the English Channel.

She thought about the deep fear that her father had recalled from his first tour of duty as he and others flew from England toward Nazi targets. "He told (my mother) there were men who lost bowel control, they were so scared," Trachta says. Her father had flown 50 such missions on his first tour of duty. He died on the 13th mission of his second tour. Her search for his life is not over.

She calls herself driven by the yearning for identity that pushes many adopted children to look up long-lost parents. As she puts it, her father was "a part of me." She also has been driven by this year's 50th anniversary of the end of the war. Trachta may try to find survivors of her father's earlier B-17 crew. And she plans someday to visit his grave in Belgium. History, she says, "has come alive for me." A An old photograph, a War Department telegram and a Purple Heart are among the memorabilia Mayor George Miller has from the Saipan campaign in 1944.

Miller, right, recently retold the harrowing story of his World War II action. "The two Army guys who were driving it were hit, and the thing stopped in the water." Luckily, it stopped not too far from shore. "We jumped into waist-deep water and waded ashore. Some of the Marines froze. Our platoon sergeant had to give them a kick in the butt to get them off." The beach, he says, was "total chaos.

Marines were just sitting there, stunned." Miller's squad of 13 quickly separated. Only one, Snuffy Hoffrichter, was still close by. "Every BAR man had an assistant. Mine was Snuffy," says Miller. "When I saw what was happening, I opened my pack and dumped my gas mask, my shovel, my machete knife.

I saved my rifle, my canteen, a candy bar and a pair of socks and told Snuffy, 'Let's get the hell out of By then, the two were scampering around craterlike bomb holes, dodging Japanese fire raining down from the trees. "I was only 21 years old, but somehow I was able to think how this was like a gigantic insane asylum," says Miller. He and Snuffy came across a sugar cane field and stumbled upon some cows, peacefully mooing. "It was surreal." Finally they spotted the rest of their outfit on the other side of a bog. "We ran through it with the Japanese firing." He's not sure what time it was by then maybe noon.

Flier Continued from Page One crewmen) bailing out the waist window. I knew then that we had to get out quick and did so as fast as I could with one arm." Trent radioed Capt. Hale to report the crew was hitting the silk. There was no answer from the cockpit, already ripped open by enemy fire. "As I floated to Earth, I watched the burning plane going down in a half spin.

It crashed in a field and burned," Trent recalled. Germans retrieved the captain's dog tags from the crash site and delivered them to three surviving crewmates in a small prison in the German town of Gronau. Trachta learned her father was not supposed to have flown that day. In a fatal schedule change, he had taken over for another pilot. She finished talking with the former tail gunner, hung up the phone and burst into tears.

Later she phoned the pilot who had not flown that day, Victor Nunenkamb. Receiving that call after half a century "was a tremendous shock and very emotional," says Xunenkamp. now a retired lieutenant colonel in Oregon. "It brought back many memories that are 1. "We were 500 yards from the beach.

Finally our captain got us all together and we dug in. The shells were coming so hard, you could feel the concussions in the fox holes." That night, he nibbled on his candy bar and took turns doing guard duty. "We could hear the Japanese soldiers moving around. The big battleships would throw spotlights on the island, and sometimes shoot off mortar shells to light up everything." The next morning, the Japanese began their counterattack. "There were people living on the island, Chamorro natives.

The Japanese shoved them in front of them and started firing at us. "We didn't fire back. We wouldn't hit civilians. They did this twice. The third time the Japanese fired on us, I got hit with a ricochet." The bullet tore into Miller's right thigh, cracking but not breaking the bone.

"It felt like a hot poker. I was scared to look down at my leg. I was afraid it had blown off." A Navy corpsman came through fire to render aid. "Finally a couple of Marines came, and I put my arms around each of their shoulders and got out of there," says Miller. Some 25 to 50 yards beliind the front lines, they laid him on a stretcher.

Four men carried him to the beach. "But the Japanese were still firing at us. Every once in awhile they'd drop me and hit the ground. Luckily, I was on morphine." Photo courtesy of Pamela Trachta CapL Robert Armstrong Hale with his plane, "The Sack Queen," In 1944. awfully hard to talk about." But talk he did.

recalling how he and Trachta father had been "tent mates" in France. Nunenkamp sent her a copy of his war diary detailing the bad i i Ml Sim -t! 1 1 1 I rrr mm i FRANCE i ITALY spainn: AJy Mor gobs The.