By Dave Ryan
MILLS TOWNSHIP – Mills Township resident Haskell Harold Gray is a veteran of WWII.
Gray said he was born July 14,1920. Times were hard when he was young.
“My mother died when I was 9 and my grandfather took over to raise me,” Gray said.
After school he tried to get into General Motors (GM), but they were reluctant to hire him. Apparently, they had hired young men in the past and when they were called up by the draft, GM had to honor their seniority while they were gone. GM did agree to hire him if he joined the service for a year.
Off he went, joining the Army as a cook at first. A year later while stationed in Oahu, it was announced that the Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor.
“We could hear it in the distance. Then all of us knew none of us would be going home,” Gray said.
He was reassigned to an artillery unit that landed on the tip of Italy with a 16-ton, 155 MM gun. Gray was assigned to drive the tractor to haul that huge gun.
“We could stop, get ready, and be shooting in 5 minutes,” Gray said. “That was no small feat considering just the shell weighed 95 pounds, with 60 pounds of powder to propel it.
“As the infantry advanced, we shelled the ground in front of them. As we advanced, our gun was too heavy to cross the bridges.
“We had to find places to ford the rivers. The water would sometimes be coming up to my chest as I drove the tractor. The scariest crossing, we ever did was at night when we could see nothing and had not scouted the spot. We had no choice but to cross and we made it.”
Gray said the Italians he met seemed to like Americans for the most part but hated the Germans.
“Italian civilians brought us wine and food. One time I crossed a creek with five gallons of wine in my tractor,” he recalled.
However, not everyone was friendly.
“One time, a lady walked from her house and brought us some wine to our gun position. She seemed friendly but had paced off the distance from her house to our gun. Then she left and didn’t return to her house. Our officers figured it out and moved our guns. Later the spot where we had been was shelled. We never saw her again, but if we had we were told to deal with her.”
By the time the Germans had surrendered the gun crew had carted that huge gun from one end of Italy to within 15 miles of the Austrian border.
After the war Gray returned to the United States and got the long-awaited job with GM. He worked there until he retired.
