WWII Medal of Honor recipient Russell Dunham dies

ST. LOUIS -- Russell Dunham never considered himself a hero that snowy day he charged a French hill during World War II, killing nine German soldiers and taking two others captive despite being wounded in the back. But he was fiercely proud of the Medal of Honor he received.

Up until his death Monday of heart failure at the age of 89, the widower reveled in recounting his war days for anyone who'd listen, often at conventions, his stepdaughter said Thursday.

"A lot of people come home, they don't want to talk about it and they have nightmares or something like that. He talked about it all the time," Annette Wilson, 60, said of Dunham, three days after his death at his home in the southwestern Illinois community of Godfrey. He'd moved there just weeks ago from nearby Jerseyville.

To Dunham, Wilson insisted, doing what he did Jan. 8, 1945, near Kayserberg, France, was something he merely had to do.

"'You either fight your way out or lose,'" Dunham often would say after becoming one of more than 3,400 Medal of Honor recipients since the decoration's creation during the Civil War's infancy, Wilson said. "'You fight for the guys in the foxhole with you.'

"None of them ever think of themselves as a hero, and he never did. He said, 'You're never proud of killing anybody, and you don't win a medal -- it's not a contest. You just receive it. And you don't receive it for how many you kill but for how many you save.'"

The Illinois-born Dunham was a technical sergeant in the Army that storied, snowy afternoon in January 1945 on France's Hill 616 when he "single-handedly assaulted three enemy machine guns," according to the Medal of Honor's official Web site.

Wearing a white, camouflaging robe made of a mattress cover, Dunham toted a dozen carbine magazines and had 12 hand grenades snagged in his belt, suspenders and buttonholes when he charged the snow-covered hill under fire from two machinegunners and German riflemen, according to the profile.

With his platoon 35 yards behind him, Dunham crawled 75 yards under heavy fire and got within 10 yards of one of the enemy machine guns when he jumped to his feet and charged forward, machine gun rounds ripping through his makeshift robe. A round from a rifle seared a 10-inch gash across his back, sending him spinning 15 yards down hill into the snow.

Suffering excruciating pain from his wound, Dunham sprang up again, kicking aside a German grenade that landed beside him before it exploded just five yards away. He killed a German machinegunner and one of his assistants, emptying his rifle.

But Dunham jumped into the machine gun nest and hauled out a third member of that enemy crew by the collar before attacking the second machine gun nest, ultimately killing that crew with two grenades he lobbed.

Dunham had been an easy target -- blood had soaked his coat red, making him stick out to enemy fire against the white landscape.

All told, Dunham fired about 175 rounds of ammunition and used 11 grenades.

"Dunham, despite a painful wound, spearheaded a spectacular and successful diversionary attack," his profile on the Medal of Honor Web site reads.

Dunham later recounted that he never considered the danger.

"Once you get into battle, you forget your fears," he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1999.

After the war, Dunham spent more than three decades working for the then-Veterans Administration before retiring in 1975.

Additional survivors include a daughter, a stepson, three brothers, three sisters, three grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.

Services will be at 11 a.m. Friday at the Gent Funeral Home in Alton, with burial in Godfrey's Valhalla Memorial Park.