WASHINGTON — Harry Miller said he was always fascinated by the World War I veterans he watched marching at parades in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio.

Orphaned as a child, he said the veterans offered a role model and a sense of purpose he lacked.

“I grew up in the [Great] Depression. Life was very tough. I remember my sisters and I eating a can of beans or whatever we could get,” Miller said. “But the military veterans had a certain respect and dignity. From early on, I wanted to join the Army.”

Miller dropped out of elementary school to pick up odd jobs and help his family. But his focus was on becoming a soldier. And as the Second World War raged on, the 15-year-old lied about his age to enlist in the Army and was sent immediately to basic training at Fort Knox, Ky.

“We trained with as many infantry weapons we possibly could be involved with,” Miller said. “They told us to get through training as fast as we could. The military needed people. I ended up as a tank crewman and was sent overseas.”

By late fall 1944, Miller joined the 740th Tank Battalion in Belgium, east of where one of World War II’s most famous battles soon would be waged near the border of Germany — the Battle of the Bulge, one of the largest and bloodiest fights of the war.

“In the first half hour of combat for us, we stopped the 1st SS Panzer Division. These guys had been [Adolf] Hitler’s bodyguard and massacred a lot of people,” he said. “We were told: ‘Don’t take no prisoners.’ Our names became known all over the area.”

Now at 96, Miller is among the last surviving soldiers from the battle, which was Germany’s final offensive on the war’s western front, a battle fought in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium and Luxembourg, a world away from his Midwest home.

“The Battle of the Bulge was most significant for me,” he said. “The Bulge made me the man I am. It was when I grew up. I learned real fast how to fight, to persist and to survive. That battle made my character — that is the best way to say it.”

With the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge a month away, Miller and another Army veteran of the battle Frank Cohn, 99, will take center stage Nov. 13 at a small theater in the nation’s capital to share eyewitness accounts of the five-week fight. The event is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. in the William G. McGowan Theater of the National Archives Building in Washington. Moderating is Alex Kershaw, author of “The Longest Winter: The Battle of the Bulge and the Epic Story of World War II’s Most Decorated Platoon.”

Kershaw described the battle as Hitler’s “last gamble,” fought across 85 miles of heavily forested land with heavy snow drifts, freezing rain and severe cold.

“These firsthand stories are invaluable. Fundamentally, World War II was a GI’s war, and it’s the GI’s stories that help us understand,” said Leon Reed, a World War II historian and editor of The Bulge Bugle, a magazine published by the Battle of the Bulge Association.

Like Miller, Cohn was a teenager when he was drafted in September 1943.

“They needed people real badly to serve,” said Cohn, who had just graduated from high school in New York and was starting college. “Within a month after turning 18, I got a notice in the mail to report to a bus stop in front of a movie theater where we were picked up and taken to Fort Dix, N.J.”

The military initially delayed his deployment for three months as a background check was done to confirm he was not an “enemy alien,” said Cohn, who was born in Germany. His family was Jewish and had fled to the U.S. as the Nazis came to power in the 1930s. They sought permanent visa status after Kristallnacht in November 1938, when Nazis in Germany vandalized and torched Jewish businesses, schools and homes.

“We would have been sent to concentration camps and certain death if we had been deported,” Cohn said. “I wanted to show my appreciation and allegiance to the U.S. through my military service.”

Cohn, who lives in Virginia, went to federal district court and was sworn in as a U.S. citizen. He then was transferred to Fort Benning — now Fort Moore — in Georgia for basic training in the Army and onto Fort Jackson, S.C., for advanced training in the 8th infantry.

He was quickly tapped for Army intelligence work after his commander realized he was a native German speaker. Cohn said he spoke English without an accent by listening to radio shows in the U.S. and adopting the cadence and tone of the speakers.

No one is certain how many Battle of the Bulge veterans — now in their late 90s and early 100s — are alive today and can recall their experiences during the fierce fighting from December 1944 into January 1945.

The fighting started Dec. 16, 1944, as a surprise attack by the Germans against Allied forces. The German strategy was to isolate and contain British and U.S. troops and then recapture the Belgium port at Antwerp, a key supply hub for the Allies, Miller said.

“I awoke to gun flashes on the horizon,” he said. “We weren’t sure at first what was going on.”

His battalion managed to knock out three German tanks from the 1st SS Panzer Division near a train station at Stoumont in Belgium.

“The 30th infantry was in the ditches and sweating blood around the road leading to the train station. They were overrun pretty fast,” Miller recounted. “The 1st SS Panzer Division was coming down the road with no one to support” the Allied troops.

Miller said his tank battalion came “face to face with the first German tank. We fired and knocked it out.”

That tank was followed by two more, which the Americans hit and destroyed. The Germans turned and retreated, he said.

Miller, then a 16-year-old private, worked as a tank crewman. His job was to load the artillery shells for the gunner. But the battalion was operating refurbished tanks pieced together from junked parts at an ordnance depot after arriving in Belgium. The guns had no sights. The gunners looked through tubes, Miller said.

But the restored M-1 Sherman tanks destroyed the first two German Panther tanks. An M36 tank destroyer fired on the third German tank, Miller said.

“That third tank sent three rounds — boom, boom, boom — like that. The Germans turned and retreated,” Miller said. “We had some darn good gunners. We were instant heroes. The 82nd Airborne general said that you just had to point to what you wanted hit, and we hit it.”

From there, his battalion liberated a nearby hospital where they discovered a priest hiding with dozens of children and elderly people in the basement.

“The priest was trying to keep these people quiet. As you can imagine, he was having a helluva time. The Germans were mean. They would kill people for no reason,” Miller said.

Cohn, who was sent to France for two weeks in the fall of 1944 to learn how to serve as a linguist and interrogate captured German troops, recalled entering Belgium as an Army intelligence agent as the Battle of the Bulge broke out.

“There was a total blackout that first night,” he said. “At midnight, we were driving in a Jeep with the windshield down. We did not intercept anyone. It was snowing and sleeting too hard to see much of anything. I was lucky being a Pfc. in the backseat. My captain took the brunt of it.”

Cohn and another interpreter were attached to the 12th Army Group. They were sent to Belgium just a week before the Battle of the Bulge started. One of Cohn’s jobs was to ferret out German soldiers who had infiltrated Allied troops and were posing as Americans.

“We never intercepted anyone,” he said.

During that first night of the battle, Cohn said he was assigned to guard duty and had to stop trucks approaching his installation to determine if they were carrying German troops. But his primary job was gathering intelligence from captured troops before they were sent to prisoner of war camps.

Cohn said his own German ancestry led to a difficult encounter in Belgium in later 1944. While traveling with another German-speaking interpreter, the men were stopped by U.S. troops looking for Germans in American uniforms. The pair were placed under arrest and held at a farmhouse until their identities were confirmed.

“They thought we were infiltrators,” Cohn said. “I suddenly had an M1 rifle in my belly. We were POWs of the Americans for seven hours in miserable weather.”

Approximately 600,000 American soldiers fought in the battle, according to the Battle of the Bulge Association in Gettysburg, Pa. More than 80,000 were captured or killed. But the Germans suffered heavier losses, estimated at 100,000.

The Battle of the Bulge ended Jan. 25, 1945, with Allied troops forcing the Germans into retreat.

Cohn, a staff sergeant, was offered a regular Army commission at the end of the war. He finished college and stayed in the military for 35 years. He worked as a military police officer and retired as a colonel in 1978.

His work after the war involved developing documentation for prosecuting German military leaders of war crimes.

“I am proud of my career. This was my payback to the Americans for rescuing me and my family,” he said. “It was a very satisfying experience. The Bulge was my first combat experience. It was pretty frightening in the beginning, especially with the bad weather. We just knew the enemy had attacked, and we had to get ahead of it.”

Miller, who now lives in Washington, D.C., also stayed in the military after World War II and served in the Korean War.

In 1957, he left the Army for the Air Force, retaining his rank as sergeant. Miller was deployed to Vietnam twice on special assignments in the early 1960s and retired from the military in January 1966 as a senior master sergeant.

“I gave 22 years of service,” Miller said. “I think it was the right thing to do. I would do it again, all things being equal.”

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