Three German machine guns. One open, snow-covered slope. And a single American soldier wrapped in a coat made from a mattress cover.
On January 8, 1945, near Kaysersberg in the frozen Vosges of Alsace, an entire American company was trapped — machine-gun fire pouring down from the high ground, artillery creeping up from behind, and earth frozen too hard to dig a foxhole. No way forward. No way back. Technical Sergeant Russell Dunham of the 3rd Infantry Division looked up that killing slope and decided the only direction left was up. Alone, against everything dug in above him.
By every rule of war, he should have died in the first ten yards. What he did on that hillside instead left the German gunners with a question none of them could ever answer — and it would take an American general, six weeks later in a ruined stadium, to put a number on what one wounded man's decision had truly bought.
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