Harold V. Miller

Harold was born in Springfield, Illinois on December 21, 1919 to parents John Albert Miller and Mattie Irene (Lindsay) Miller. Harold spent his youth on a farm near Loami, Illinois, some 15 miles southwest of Springfield and graduated from New Berlin Township High School during the Great Depression and high unemployment in 1937. He was fortunate to get a job in the home office of the Franklin Life Insurance Company, where he successfully completed the life office management courses, with little hope of ever being able to afford a college education. However, after a merger of Franklin Life and Great American Life, he decided that he could never expect to achieve his goals without a college degree. So, after four years, he decided that he would quit his job and work his way through the University of Illinois. In the middle of his first semester, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He was sure that nearly every male student on campus would have enlisted the following day had the Armed Services been able to train a sudden increase of new men. He was already in the ROTC program at Illinois, and he was told to continue his studies, and continue checking with the local draft board before registering for his next semester. By enrolling for the summer semester in 1942, he was able to complete the first semester of his junior year in the spring of 1943, before the draft board told him that he would be called up for service in July.

Being extremely nearsighted without glasses, he often joked that the Army was afraid to trust him with a gun, so they sent him to Camp Grant in Rockford, Illinois for basic training as a combat medic. Upon completion of basic training and a brief furlough, he was sent to Camp Reynolds, Pennsylvania near Youngstown, Ohio to begin staging for shipment overseas, then to Port Arthur, just north of New York City, to await available transport. He boarded the Queen Elizabeth on December 14, a ship designed for 2,000 passengers but ended up carrying 21,000 troops. The Queen Elizabeth was too fast to travel in a convoy so they sailed alone, on a zigzag course to make it more difficult for the Nazi subs to hit the ship with their torpedoes. After he arrived in Scotland a day late, on his 24th birthday, he was told that allied observation planes had spotted Nazi subs on their planned course and that they had gone far out of the way to avoid them.

As he arrived in Great Britain as a casual, he fully expected to be attached to an infantry unit as a combat medic. However, he had the extreme good fortune to be assigned to work as a clerk in the ETO Chief Surgeons office, were they were feverishly preparing for the D-day. He moved to Normandy in August, and shortly after arrival, the Nazis found that they could not keep their western army supplied due to disruption of their rail and road transport by allied planes in the French underground. The Nazis decided to withdraw all of its western troops from France. Within a week after Paris was liberated, they moved the ETO theater headquarters into the city where he remained until he returned to the U.S. in April 1946, after 28 straight months overseas.

Harold returned to the University of Illinois for the summer session 1946, and graduated with honors in business administration in May of 1947. He went to work immediately for General Electric in Bridgeport Connecticut on it’s Financial Management Program and married his college sweetheart on August 31, 1947. After 33 years with General Electric, he retired on April 1, 1980, and enjoyed many years of retirement, volunteering, traveling, playing lots of golf, and tracing his genealogy.

Harold moved from Michigan to Florida and lived in Clearwater until he passed. Harold was inducted into the Clearwater Chapter of Sons of the American Revolution in May of 2015 and actively participated in the chapter for the last 6 years.

Harold is preceded in death by his loving wife Caroline.

He was survived by a son, daughter, six grandchildren and ten great grandchildren.

A visitation and Funeral Ceremony: Family will receive friends from 12:00 p.m. until 12:45 p.m. on Saturday, August 28, 2021, at Butler Funeral Home, 714 East Gibson Street., New Berlin, IL. A Funeral Ceremony will follow at 1:00 p.m.

Burial will follow at Oak Ridge Cemetery where military honors will be rendered.