On Jan. 8, 1945, Sgt. Russel Dunham was leading a platoon of the 30th Infantry, 3rd ID when they got pinned down by German fire at the bottom of a snowy hill near the village of Kaysersberg, France. German machine-gunners and riflemen fired down on the Americans while an artillery barrage landed behind them. “The only way to go was up,” Dunham recalls.
Wearing as camouflage a white robe made from a mattress cover, Sgt. Dunham ran up the hill ahead of his platoon and charged a machine-gun emplacement. He was shot in the back. Despite the excruciating pain, he single-handedly wiped out 4 machine-gun nests and killed or wounded 18 Germans.
Two weeks later, his battalion was surrounded by German tanks at the French town of Holtzwihr. Most of the men were forced to surrender, but he hid in a sauerkraut barrel outside a barn. He was discovered by 2 German soldiers the next morning, but while searching him, they found a pack of cigarettes in his pocket and began to fight over it. They never noticed a pistol in a shoulder holster under Dunham’s arm. While the Germans were taking him toward their lines, one of them stopped at a bar. Sgt. Dunham shot and killed the other soldier. He escaped on foot, was spotted a couple of days later by US Army engineers building a bridge, and was treated for severely frozen feet.
He was awarded the Medal of Honor at a ceremony in Nuremberg, Germany, in April 1945. In a magazine interview in 1999 he said: "It happened in 1945, but I still remember staring into the eyes of the German machine-gunner." He passed away on April 6, 2009.
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