Als jij dat op wil pakken, ga gerust je gang. Ik wil er dan wel een sticky topic van maken.

Russell Dunham, 89, a World War II Army veteran who received the Medal of Honor, the military's highest decoration for valor, after he assaulted three German machine gun emplacements, killed nine German soldiers and took two prisoners on a snowy morning in 1945, died April 6 at his home in Godfrey, Ill., of congestive heart failure.

On Jan. 8, 1945, Tech. Sgt. Dunham's company, part of the 3rd Infantry Division, was facing a formidable German force at the small town of Kayserberg, France, on the Franco-German border. The men were issued white mattress covers as camouflage in the deep snow.

Heavily armed, Sgt. Dunham scrambled 75 yards up a snow-covered hill toward three German machine gun emplacements. He took out the first bunker with a grenade.

Advancing toward the second, he glanced around to call up his squad and a bullet hit him in the back, tearing open a 10-inch gash. As he struggled to his feet, a grenade landed nearby; he kicked it away before it exploded.

He then crawled through the snow to the machine gun and lobbed his own grenade into the bunker, killing two Germans. His carbine empty, he leaped into the foxhole and hauled out a third enemy soldier by the collar.

In excruciating pain, his mattress-cover overcoat now stained a conspicuous red, Sgt. Dunham ran 50 yards to the third machine-gun emplacement and took it out with a grenade. As German infantrymen began scrambling out of their foxholes, Sgt. Dunham chased them down the back side of the hill. He and his elder brother Ralph, who was in the same unit, encountered a fourth machine gun; the older Dunham took it out.

A German rifleman who shot at Russell Dunham at point-blank range but missed became the ninth German he killed that winter morning.

His back wound had yet to fully heal when Sgt. Dunham returned to the front. On Jan. 22, his battalion was surrounded by German tanks at Holtzwihr, France, and most of the men were forced to surrender.

Sgt. Dunham hid in a sauerkraut barrel outside a barn but was discovered the next morning. As the two German soldiers who found him were patting him down, they came across a pack of cigarettes in his pocket and began fighting over it. They never finished their search, so they missed a pistol in a shoulder holster under his arm.

Later in the day, his two captors transported him toward German lines. The driver stopped at a bar, the second soldier's attention wandered and Sgt. Dunham shot him in the head. He set off toward American lines in sub-zero temperatures.

By the time he encountered U.S. engineers working on a bridge over the Ill River, his feet and ears were frostbitten. A medic working to save his feet from amputation told him that the commanding officer had intended to recommend him for the Distinguished Service Cross but had changed his mind. The young man from Illinois, the officer had decided, deserved the Medal of Honor.

He was born in East Carondelet, Ill., on Feb. 23, 1920, and grew up in Fosterburg, Ill. When he was about 16, he went to live with brother Ralph in St. Louis, and the two young men made a Depression-era living selling soup and tamales on the street and in bars.

After the war, Mr. Dunham worked for 32 years as a benefits counselor with the Veterans Administration in St. Louis.

His marriage to Mary Dunham ended in divorce. His second wife, Wilda Long-Bazzell Dunham, died in 2002.

Survivors include a daughter from his first marriage, Mary Neal of Cobden, Ill.; two stepchildren, Annette Wilson of Godfrey and David Bazzell of Jarreau, La.; three sisters; and three granddaughters.

Ray Nance, de laatste overlevende van A/116/29ID is gisteren 20 april overleden.....
De 'Bedford Boys' werden bekend door het boek met dezelfde titel dat enkele jaren geleden verscheen en, als ik mij niet vergis, ook in het Nedrlands vertaald werd...

http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/201771

Fallen Iwo Jima vet recalled

Two fellow veterans pay homage to their comrade who was slain Monday.

Archer resident Clair C. Chaffin died Monday, shot and killed in an apparent armed robbery outside Florence, S.C.

Chaffin, Clif Cormier and Bob Gasche called themselves "the Iwo Trio."

The three first met through Gainesville's VFW. They represented each of the three U.S. Marine battalions that landed at Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945. Allied forces suffered 27,909 casualties in the island campaign, with 6,825 killed in action.

After surviving the hell that was the Pacific campaign, Cormier said it was unthinkable that Chaffin, a medical corpsman with the 4th Marine Division, should have been shot and killed by a couple of young men who wanted his wallet.

The 83-year-old war veteran was accosted while packing up his car around 7 a.m. outside the Thunderbird Inn in Florence early Monday morning, authorities say.

Chaffin was on his way to Virginia to meet with other members of the 4th Marine Division Association. He had stopped for the night in Florence.

He apparently was confronted by two men who attempted to rob him at gunpoint, then shot him, Florence County sheriff's deputies said.

He died at an area hospital.

Two residents of Darlington, S.C., one 25 years old and the other 17, have been arrested and charged in connection with Chaffin's slaying.

In an e-mail shared by Florence authorities, Chaffin's daughter Kathleen Dow said she could not believe her father had been gunned down.

"I know my Dad and he was tough. He wouldn't have just handed his money over," Dow wrote. "I wish that he had. Nothing was worth his life."

Cormier and Gasche spoke of their friend and fellow Marine while draping his photo and the 4th Division plaque with black bunting in a corner of McAlister's Deli in Butler Plaza.

The Iwo Trio met there the first Tuesday of each month at 1 p.m. Not everyone who passes the corner on their way to the deli's restrooms notices the photos and memorabilia from Iwo Jima, the plaques for the 3rd, 4th and 5th Marine divisions or the small green sign designating it as "Suribachi Cove."

But for the surviving twosome, it was the appropriate place to talk about Chaffin, their comrade-in-arms.

Chaffin described some of his experiences as a medical corpsman as part of the University of Florida's Samuel Proctor Oral History Project. While on the island of Saipan, he delivered three babies. He also performed a tracheotomy on a Marine while the two huddled in a foxhole, strafed on either side by fire from a Japanese Zero.

He received the Silver Star for his heroism in saving, treating and evacuating eight wounded Marines trapped in a free-fire zone between Allied forces and enemy lines on Saipan.

Cormier recalled another story Chaffin told of assisting a severely wounded Marine on the beach of Iwo Jima. He called out to the coxswain of a Navy landing craft that was unloading gear and asked him to carry the wounded man to the safety of a ship. The coxswain refused. Cormier related how Chaffin drew his service pistol and told the man to get the Marine loaded and get going - which he did.

"There's so many that I wish I could have saved that I wasn't able to," Chaffin said during a Veteran's Day showing of the documentary "Testimony of War" in 2008.

That was Clair Chaffin, Cormier and Gasche said.

"He may have been a corpsman, but he was definitely a Marine," Gasche said.

"He was the kindest, gentlest man I've ever met," Cormier said. "Totally likable ... always with a twinkle in his eye.

"He always went out of his way to help others, and when I heard he'd been a medical corpsman, I wanted to kiss his hand."

Chaffin dropped out of high school in the 10th grade to join the military and "even the score" after the deaths of his two brothers, who had enlisted in the Navy at the start of the war and were both killed. He took part in the Pacific campaign on the islands of Roi Namur, Saipan, Tinian and Iwo Jima.

After the five sailor Sullivan brothers were killed, the government decided that multiple members of a family couldn't be in the same unit, Cormier related.

"So a day after Clair landed on Iwo Jima, a detail from fleet Marine Corps Pacific plucked him off of the island. But he had already earned a Silver Star in the Marianas," Cormier said.

When Chaffin came home from the war, he attended St. Petersburg Junior College, majoring in building construction, and spent 54 years supervising construction projects for the Department of Defense and Veterans Administration.

He and his late wife, Muriel, settled on five acres in Archer that they named "Crooked Fences." He is survived by his daughters Kathleen Dow, Mary Rhoves and Alice Thompson, brother Merrill Chaffin, sisters Lily Smith and Frieda Dawson, seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

A memorial service is being planned, Dow said.

Chaffin was the past president and unit historian for the 4th Marine Division Association, a life member of VFW Post 2811 in Gainesville, the Marine Corps League and Disabled American Veterans.

"I think my father would want to be remembered as a patriotic, God-fearing man," Dow said.

Area D-Day veterans will gather at Conestoga's Restaurant in Alachua today to remember Chaffin.

Gasche said that such gatherings are a way of commemorating fallen comrades but also a way of sending a message to younger generations.

"With World War II veterans dying off at a rate of 1,500 a day, survivors have begun speaking of their experiences," Gasche said. "They want today's generation to know about their heritage and the cost of the freedoms they enjoy."

Gasche and Cormier said they and other World War II vets don't want to be portrayed as heroes or misconstrued as bragging about their wartime exploits.

"Clair Chaffin served his country as a true warrior. We want to honor him, in some humble way, for what he did." Gasche said.

"His death makes us realize we have a story to tell, and there are not that many more opportunities for us to share it," Cormier said.

Veteran a part of 'Band of Brothers'

Darrell "Shifty" Powers, who died at age 86, was a hero on the battlefield and to his family.

In a 2001 interview with The Roanoke Times, Darrell "Shifty" Powers talked about some of his experiences during World War II.

Powers, a United States Army paratrooper and sharpshooter, belonged to Easy Company, part of the legendary 101st Airborne Division. He recalled a bitterly cold day in the Ardennes when he was able to draw down on a German sniper, sighting his target by the misty cloud of the man's breath. He killed him with one shot.

"Right there," he said, touching his forehead. "Between the eyes."

But Powers, of Dickenson County, who died Wednesday of natural causes at age 86, was also reflective about such matters.

In the second-to-last episode of "Band of Brothers," an HBO miniseries that documented Easy Company's wartime exploits, Powers spoke on camera about the soldiers he fought and also hinted at the intrinsic tragedy of combat.

"We might have had a lot in common. He might've liked to fish, you know, he might've liked to hunt," Powers said. "Of course, they were doing what they were supposed to do, and I was doing what I was supposed to do.

"But under different circumstances, we might have been good friends."

Powers, who got the nickname "Shifty" playing basketball as a youngster, served three years in the Army during World War II and later worked as a machinist for Clinchfield Coal Corp. He found renewed notoriety when his military experiences were depicted on film and in the Stephen Ambrose book of the same name.

"He actually hadn't talked about it, his war years, until the book came out," said his daughter-in-law, Sandy Powers. "He gets fan mail from all over the world, and calls."

"For me and my kids, it's just amazing that our regular, sweet uncle was such a hero," said his niece, Cheryl Gilliland of Roanoke. "It sure changed his life in later years. He went places and met people he never would have otherwise."

Darrell Powers met a German soldier in 2005 who had fought against him at the notoriously brutal siege of Bastogne during the winter of 1944.

According to his son, Wayne, he had in September been scheduled to travel to Iraq to meet with U.S. soldiers, but health problems prevented it.

"He was so disappointed. He wanted to meet with the soldiers so badly," Sandy Powers said.

One of his closest friends, Earl McClung, of Colorado, in 2001 called Darrell Powers "a heck of a good soldier and a heck of a good shot."

"And he was there every time I looked up," he added.

"Our family had four boys and one girl, and I'm the only one left," said Powers' sister, Gaynell Sykes of Roanoke, on Wednesday. "He was a great brother. I know he was great at a lot of other things, too -- great father, great son, great husband."