News

A veteran salutes his war hero

Jerry Reiser

By Bill Moss, Published: May 24, 2015

Ten years old when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Jerry Reiser watched World War II unfold from the family farm in Michigan. In the young boy’s eyes, Uncle Bob was a war hero. He hit the beach at Normandy on D-Day and fought in the pivotal Battle of the Bulge.

After his service in the 300th Combat Engineer Battalion, Bob Mieden left the Army and returned to Carlton, Mich., a tiny farming community.
“He came home — as did my brother Jim and brother Jack — and he went back to the farm for a short time,” Reiser said. “He built a little house — I actually helped him build that house. He was my favorite uncle — just a wonderful man. I remember digging his basement. He had a team of horses and scoop. We didn’t have backhoes in those days.”
Reiser’s house was “was about a mile through the woods from Grandpa Meiden’s farm, where Uncle Bob resided,” he said. The family raised cattle, pigs and chickens, kept horses “and grew most everything.”
Mieden landed at Utah Beach on D-Day. Six months later, serving in the Battle of the Bulge, he “fought his way all the way into Berlin,” he said. “The combat engineers are the ones that went behind enemy lines and blew up the bridges so that the Germans couldn’t advance any further. That’s sketchy information from my own research. I’m kind of a World War II buff.”
Mieden and his wife, Maxine, moved from Michigan to California to train as missionaries.
Although he didn’t enlist in the Navy until 1950, Reiser is a World War II veteran, too, by virtue of his service aboard ship as part of the occupying force in the Mediterranean. Reiser only talks about his own service so he can tell the story of Uncle Bob.
Bob Mieden is shown in a family portrait. [PHOTO COURTESY OF JERRY REISER]In 1953, while serving in a NATO operation off Iceland, Reiser’s ship ran into gale forces in a “very powerful storm.”
When the ship docked in Scotland, “the mail caught up with us. I had a letter from my mother that told me that Uncle Bob was killed. He had gone back to California with his missionary group and he volunteered to fight the forest fire.”
The fire in Grindstone Canyon in Mendocino National Forest was known as the Rattlesnake Fire. It killed a forest ranger and 14 volunteers from the New Tribes Mission.
“They were separated. He and 22 others went downhill and the rest went uphill," Resier said. "They were saved.” Eight men from Mieden’s crew scaled a canyon wall and scrambled to safety. “The fire was almost out but it backflashed and trapped them. They huddled together in a group and they were burned to death. The only reason they could identify him was his belt buckle.”
Reiser thinks about his uncle often, how he made it home from so many high-casualty battles only to perish fighting an arson fire.

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Reiser is grateful that his own service after World War II and during the Korean War helped launch a successful career in manufacturing.
After volunteering for the Navy at age 18, Reiser enrolled in electronics school at Great Lakes naval base. When he graduated at the top of his class, the Navy let him pick his assignment. He chose a repair ship.
Jerry Reiser at the helm of the USS Tutuila.“I wanted to learn something and because it’s a repair ship I thought that’s going to be good duty,” he said. A “plank owner,” he joined the crew of the USS Tutuila, which had been mothballed and then recommissioned at Orange, Texas. The repair ship had a machine shop and a foundry.
“It was a floating factory, if you would,” Reiser said. “We could pull the engines out of a destroyer escort and do a complete overhaul.”
In his office at his home in Dana, he points to the medals he won during his four-year Navy career. There’s one for his duty during WWII occupation force, another for serving during the Korean War. “And that, believe it or not, is my Good Conduct” medal, he adds with a chuckle.
Discharged in 1954 as a petty officer first class, he “spent about 18 years in night school” as he advanced during his career as an electronics technician and design engineer. Working for General Electric, he was on the team that developed the trigger mechanism for nuclear warheads and helped set up a manufacturing plant for them in Clearwater, Fla. After turning down a transfer to Boston, Reiser caught the break of his professional life. A friend had started a small company in Milwaukee called Marquette Electronics.
“So they hired me as design engineer,” he said. “I was employee no. 12. When I retired in ’93 we had over 3,000 employees. Two years later it was sold to General Electric and it’s now G.E. medical and they have 4,000 employees.”

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When Reiser signed up for an HonorAir flight out of Greenville, S.C., on April 21, his daughters Sherry and Debbie cooked up a surprise.
“When I got off the plane, there they were standing at the gate greeting me, quite unbeknownst to me, holding that poster,” he said. “That was quite a flight. That was just amazing.”
Reiser still keeps up with his shipmates. Attendance at USS Tutuila reunions drops every year. A photo from last year’s gathering at Myrtle Beach shows “the last men standing from World War II,” including a sailor who served on board the ship during World War and went on to become its captain during the Vietnam War. “Our ranks are fading.”

On his iMac monitor, he pulls up another photo from seven years earlier and points to more old friends. “He’s gone. He’s gone. I don’t know about the rest of them because there weren’t that many at the last reunion,” he says.

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On Memorial Day, Reiser will remember shipmates, high school friends and Bob Mieden.
“I think quite a bit about it because I enlisted before the Korean War started and the fellows that asked me ‘Why are you doing that’ — they stayed behind and they got drafted and ended up in Korea and were killed in Korea,” he said. “I just thank God that I’m here. It’s really a huge blessing.”
When he thinks of his favorite uncle, he’ll marvel at how he survived two of the most perilous and crucial battles of the war in Europe only to perish as a volunteer firefighter.
Reiser’s daughters Debbie and Sherrie surprised him at Reagan National Airport when he traveled to Washington on an HonorAir trip.Combat engineers “were blowing up mines and barbed wire” on the beaches at Normandy, he said. In the Battle of the Bulge, Meiden “was behind the enemy lines. Go through all that and then get killed by an arsonist’s match. That’s the whole gist of the story.”
He counts his blessings too.
“I’ve gone through a lot. I’m a cancer survivor,” he said.
Last year surgeons performed open-heart surgery to replace an aorta valve.
“The doctor said I was lucky to be here,” he said. “I think it’s through the blessing of God that I’m here for some reason.”
He thinks maybe the reason is to serve as a caregiver for his wife, Shirley, and her sister, who is suffering from cancer.
“I think even that’s a blessing, that I met her,” he said.
Their meat counter romance blossomed 15 years ago. A deli manager at Bi-Lo, Shirley, a native of Transylvania County, waited on Reiser when he came in to buy lunchmeat for his cocker spaniel, Buffy.
“We just chatted chatted chatted,” Reiser said. “We said let’s go ahead and have lunch, and that lunch ended up instead of being 30 minutes more like three hours. We just kind of decided we were meant for each other.”