Harry Snyder was born in August 1921 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was an only child who lived with his mother and her parents. He never knew his father. He went to school in Philadelphia, taking industrial classes in high school because he knew he would never go to college. When he graduated, work was scarce, and he took a job in a dye factory. Later, he became a machinist. As the sole support of his mother, he was initially deferred from the draft, but in 1943 the Army called him up. He was inducted in Philadelphia then sent to Fort Knox, Kentucky, where he was put into an armor school to learn how to repair tank engines. But Snyder had to be hospitalized for an attack of appendicitis. When he returned from a 30 day recuperation furlough [Annotator's Note: an authorized absence for a short period of time], he couldn't catch up with his class, and was relegated to a group of "misfits." He learned to drive a half-track [Annotator's Note: M3 half-track; a vehicle with front wheels and rear tracks] and a tank, and resumed "battle training." He then went to Newport News, Virginia to await deployment. There, he was issued a beautiful pair of golden gloves and told he would be joining the 1st Cavalry [Annotator's Note: 1st Cavalry Division], all of which Snyder found interesting. But he received no further contacts from the cavalry, and was eventually shipped to Bermuda with no idea of where he was going or what he would be doing. Once again underway, he sailed to the Azores, and on to Scotland. Then, traveling by train, he arrived in southern England in March 1944, and resumed training. On D-Day in Normandy [Annotator's Note: Allied invasion of Normandy, France on 6 June 1944], he was among assorted personnel waiting in a replacement compound. He was issued an "Eisenhower book," French money, a Tommy gun [Annotator's Note: .45 caliber Thompson submachine gun], which he had never before fired, and ammunition. Snyder went to France on D-Day plus 6 [Annotator's Note: six days after the Normandy invasion; 12 June 1944].

According to Harry Snyder, anyone entering combat in Normandy between D-Day [Annotator's Note: Allied invasion of Normandy, France on 6 June 1944] and D-Day plus 6 [Annotator's Note: six days after D-Day; 12 June 1944] was considered by the Supreme Allied Command as being part of the initial invasion of mainland Europe. He said he was not disappointed about having to wait to cross the Channel [Annotator's Note: English Channel], because he didn't know what to expect, and what he encountered on his arrival was "pretty horrible." He crossed on what seemed to him to be a ferryboat, and saw reconnaissance balloons in the air and oil on the surface of the water, and could hear artillery firing. He boarded a landing ship, and was deposited in very shallow water on Omaha beach, where he found "broken-up, bombed out vehicles," although the bodies were gone. Among a "bunch of disorganized guys," he was marched up the hill and relieved of all unessential items from his person. Snyder thought it very unfair that a small chess set was taken from him. While the soldiers waited on the rise, bombs were sailing over their heads. He was chosen to go down to the beach to load tank and mortar ammunition onto a six-by-six truck, the best vehicle in the war, in Snyder's opinion. He and another man had to sit on top of the loaded truck to keep things from falling off when it climbed the hill. Snyder spotted a German plane, and saw it strafe an oil truck traveling the road just ahead of him. The oil truck exploded, but the ammunition truck Snyder was riding on veered off the road and evaded the potentially devastating fire. It was his first combat experience, and Snyder said he was scared. He got safely back to the collection point, and spent some time doing "menial jobs," like digging foxholes for officers, guard duty and kitchen patrol, until the breakout.

Operation Cobra was the big breakout, and Harry Snyder said there were "thousands" of big bombers filling the skies and killing everything in a designated area just ahead of where he was positioned. He estimates he was a mile from the front, and the soldiers at his level had not been informed about the raid ahead of time. They were moved out as soon as the bombing stopped. Snyder said it was "fun, a little bit," to move through the villages where the people were happy to see them. Locals offered the soldiers apples, Calvados and kisses. But there were dead animals all over, and structures still burning. Snyder states that at the beginning of the war, the Germans might have been a highly organized, mechanized army, but by the time he got into it, they were running low on gasoline, and they were using thousands of horses. Snyder found it "real sad" to see dead Belgian draft horses along the roadsides, many of them shot up from strafings. It was a lot of death for a young man to deal with. Another unhappy event Snyder witnessed were carts full of girls and women, some of them with babies in their arms, who had collaborated with the Germans; their heads had been shaved, and people were bombarding them with rubbish. The soldiers also came upon Free French soldiers, and heard their stories about their dangerous activities during the German occupation. Snyder said he was always treated well by the liberated French. At the end of this section, Snyder relates several anecdotes of encounters he had with the citizenry during his march through the French countryside. Snyder started out as a half-track [Annotator's Note: M3 half-track; a vehicle with front wheels and rear tracks] driver with Headquarters Company [Annotator's Note: Headquarters Company, 67th Armored Regiment, 2nd Armored Division] but rarely drove a half track, and was usually occupied with odd jobs. He then volunteered to join the I&R [Annotator's Note: Intelligence and Reconnaissance] Platoon. His duties included finding options for travel, directing traffic, and collecting surrendering Germans. There was not much fighting involved, and Snyder considered it "a good job."

In September 1944, Harry Snyders division [Annotator's Note: Snyder was a member of I&R Platoon, Headquarters Company, 67th Armored Regiment, 2nd Armored Division] was awarded an honor for being the first American troops to enter Belgium. They continued into Holland and stopped at a farm where the weather was dreadful, and the mud was deep. He remembered the GIs [Annotator's Note: government issue; also a slang term for an American soldier] asking a young resident if he wanted to go to America when the war was over, to which he replied, "Why would I want to do that; this is my home." Snyder remembers that the breakthrough was "utter confusion," and though there was not much fighting, the troops had to keep moving through uncertain terrain. Once, while he was still riding with the half-tracks [Annotator's Note: M3 half-track; a vehicle with front wheels and rear tracks] of a mortar platoon through Saint-Denis-le-Gast [Annotator's Note: Saint-Denis-le-Gast, France], they traveled around an orchard, one field away from a German Panzer division. When shooting began, half-tracks and trucks were blown up. Snyder remembers crawling to a ditch, and seeing a mortar explode on the other side of the road. His sergeant yelled, "form a skirmish line," and he was shooting at flashes in the forest until the firing "petered out and stopped." They spent a quiet night, with only the sounds of their vehicles burning. The next day the Germans moved out, and were wiped out down the road. Among the most fearful things was mortar fire; he said it took a long time for him to identify the sound of a mortar firing, and instinctively take cover, because the shell didn't make a noise when it came in. Artillery was bad too, and sometime the ground troops got strafed by their own planes, notwithstanding clear markings on the advancing vehicles. Once, when he was sleeping in a chicken house, he was called to go into a town and bring telegraph poles to a new headquarters site. The Germans started shooting from the nearby woods, and he jumped into a deep foxhole to wait. When it got dark, he heard an aircraft dropping canister bombs full of grenades. The explosions got closer and closer, making a "hell of a noise," but stopped right before they reached his foxhole. When he went back to the chicken house, he saw that a piece of shrapnel had come through the wall and hit the spot where he had been sleeping. Snyder had several close calls, and tells the stories of several friends who weren't so lucky.

When the Battle of the Bulge [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or German Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945] started, Harry Snyder was at the Siegfried Line in northern Germany. It was snowing and bitter cold as his outfit [Annotator's Note: I&R Platoon, Headquarters Company, 67th Armored Regiment, 2nd Armored Division] was moved, on foot, toward the action. He remembered going through numerous villages, and seeing two dead Germans who were casualties of tank fire lying in the window of a storefront. Traversing alongside a forest full of enemy troops, they came under attack by "screaming Mimies" [Annotator's Note: German Nebelwerfer rocket artillery] that made a terrible racket. Coming to a clearing, Snyder approached a house that had wires leading to the basement. Suspecting it to be an enemy headquarters, he readied a grenade, and called down the stairs for the occupants to come out, but got no reply. He waited a little longer, and a woman and child emerged. A little further down the road, they passed a major's tank that was engulfed in flames, with all its crew inside. That night he and a buddy slept in a storage room on sacks of potatoes. There he found a gold watch, which he traded for a P-51 pistol [Annotator's Note: unable to verify pistol make and model] that he brought home. Close to Christmas [Annotator's Note: Christmas 1944], he was in a German house in a coal-mining town, and explored its attic. He found holiday decorations and decided to put them to use, but before he could do so, the unit was on the move again to the Ardennes Forest. Since he traveled with the colonel in Headquarters Company, arrangements were made for them to spend a night, including dinner in the dining room, in a classy hotel that had once been a royal residence. Snyder recalled that the troops were provided a turkey dinner for Christmas during the Battle of the Bulge. He said that when they arrived in the Ardennes, it looked like a "picture post card" with snow in the branches of the pine trees. The soldiers cut blankets to make heavy socks. At this time, he was driving half-tracks [Annotator's Note: M3 half-track; a vehicle with front wheels and rear tracks], alternately operating a .50 caliber [Annotator's Note: Browning M2 .50 caliber machine gun] and .30 caliber [Annotator’s Note: likely the Browning M1919 .30 caliber air cooled light machine gun] machine gun and the radio. Snyder said he felt safer once he was moved to the I&R [Annotator's Note: Intelligence and Reconnaissance] unit.

When the New Year [Annotator's Note: 1945] came, Robert Snyder's 67th Armored Regiment [Annotator's Note: Snyder was a member of the I&R Platoon, Headquarters Company, 67th Armored Regiment, 2nd Armored Division] was headed for Aachen, Germany, and he points out that the soldiers rarely knew exactly where they were geographically. Snyder doesn't remember engaging in much fighting there, as he was in a reserve unit, but he does recall the destruction. After Aachen, the regiment continued to Magdeburg [Annotator's Note: Magdeburg, Germany], where they were again in reserve. Out in the country, he and a buddy came upon a strawberry patch, and decided to sample the goods, but a woman with a broom scared them away. He recalls coming upon the "open city" of Hamlin [Annotator's Note: Hamlin, Germany], and walking past big buildings that had German soldiers on the balconies, pointing at Snyder, laughing, and miming the action of shooting at him. He felt very threatened, and was relieved when an American patrol picked him up and took him away. Snyder went to Wolfeboro Air Base [Annotator's Note: unable to verify location], to await the occupation of Berlin. He said it was a big shock to learn of President Roosevelt's [Annotator's Note: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States] death, but nobody got excited on V-E Day [Annotator's Note: Victory in Europe Day, 8 May 1945] when the war ended because it was inevitable and expected. When he arrived in Berlin [Annotator's Note: Berlin, Germany], he was impressed by the big city, and said it was "loaded with black market guys," who could provide anything. Much of the area was bombed and burned out; Snyder notes that the Russians were ruthless in their conquest of the city. Snyder's unit [Annotator's Note: I&R Platoon, Headquarters Company, 67th Armored Regiment, 2nd Armored Division] was housed in an apartment building that had hot running water, and didn't "bother" with the local people very much, although some of the American soldiers became friendly with Russian soldiers during their stay in Berlin. Because he didn't have enough points [Annotator's Note: a point system was devised based on a number of factors that determined when American servicemen serving overseas could return home] to go home, he had to think about the possibility of being sent to the Pacific; so when the atomic bombs ended the war with Japan [Annotator's Note: Victory Over Japan Day, 15 August 1945], Snyder was relieved.

Harry Snyder stayed in Berlin until his points [Annotator's Note: a point system was devised based on a number of factors that determined when American servicemen serving overseas could return home] added up, then he packed up and boarded a boxcar headed for Marseilles, France. At stops along the way, prisoners who worked the food lines always asked about their hometowns. Snyder said the soldiers took pleasure in telling them that their country was "kaput." While waiting for a ship to take them home, the soldiers attended movies in an old Roman amphitheater, and had an option to take a short trip to Switzerland, but Snyder didn't want to risk missing his boat, so he declined. When his ship finally arrived in New York [Annotator's Note: New York, New York], all the soldiers crowded on the landward side, causing the ship to list. On the dock was an all-female band to greet them, but Snyder said some of the guys on board were "pretty crude people," and began blowing up condoms and throwing them ashore. The girls packed up and left. When he got off the ship, Snyder kissed the ground. He was discharged in Pennsylvania, and had a happy homecoming. When he reunited with his girlfriend, he proposed, and although his mother wasn't thrilled with the idea, she eventually came to live with him and his wife. The couple have been married for decades. Snyder thinks what "got" him most about the war was the Holocaust, which he still finds "horrible." He is glad he participated in the war, but wouldn't want to do it again. He did his part, learned a lot about people, and experienced places he never knew existed. He didn't think much about the war until two young historians who were creating a documentary approached him about revisiting his war journey for the film. He said he realized the United States is a great country that "has everything."