Nearly a year to the day later, he said he manned a 3-inch, .50 caliber gun on the deck of a Navy warship shelling German gun emplacements over Utah Beach in the first salvoes of the invasion of Normandy — June 6, 1944.
This week, the government of France honored the 89-year-old veteran and three other Ohioans wartime service in a ceremony at the Statehouse in Columbus.
“I tell everybody: I don’t know if I deserve the medal or not, but I’m not going to give it back,” he joked Thursday. The French first presented the medal to him when he returned to Normandy last year to mark the 70th anniversary of the invasion to liberate the European country from the grip of the Nazi regime, the former sailor said.
“American veterans who risked their lives during World War II and who fought on French territory qualify to be decorated as Knights of the Legion of Honor,” Vincent Floreani, consul general of France in Chicago said in an email. “For more than a decade, the government of France has presented the Legion of Honor to them.”
They must have fought in one of four major campaigns in Normandy, Provence, Ardennes or northern France in the push to liberate the nation, he said. The French consul in Chicago awards about 100 Legion of Honor medals every year to World War II veterans in 13 Midwestern states.
Others who received the medal at the ceremony were World War II Army veterans Neal W. Burdette, 90, of Lancaster; Bernard M. Eshelman, 91, of Columbus; and George Zwahlen, 94, of Hopewell.
On the launch of D-Day, thousands of ships and even more soldiers poured in off the coast of France to begin the bloody battle to an Allied victory.
From Miller’s view on deck, the sea was filled with an endless line of warships. “Boy, it was just one ship after the other,” he said.
The sailor served as a boatswain mate aboard the USS Cincinnati, which escorted convoys of troops and equipment across the Atlantic between New York and Belfast, Ireland.
Two older brothers joined the Navy before he did. He said he decided to enlist before he graduated high school to earn more money for his family living in Old North Dayton.
“Back then, money wasn’t plentiful,” he said.
The ranks of more than 16 million Americans in the military were filled with youth who won the war, Miller remembered. “As long as somebody showed us what to do, we’d do it, and that was a big exclamation point of the war,” he said.
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