Russell Dunham, who as an Army sergeant in World War II received the Medal of Honor for charging up a snowy hill in the Alsace region of France and single-handedly killing, wounding or capturing 18 German soldiers, died Monday in Godfrey, Ill. He was 89.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his daughter, Mary Lee Neal.

On the afternoon of Jan. 8, 1945, Sergeant Dunham was leading a platoon in the 30th Infantry, Third Infantry Division, when the soldiers, among them his brother Ralph, were pinned down by German fire. They were at the bottom of a hill near the village of Kaysersberg, the birthplace of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Albert Schweitzer.

German machine-gunners and riflemen fired down on the Americans while an artillery barrage landed behind them. “The only way to go was up,” Mr. Dunham told Reader’s Digest long afterward.

Wearing as camouflage a white robe made from a mattress cover, Sergeant Dunham ran up the hill ahead of his platoon and charged a machine-gun emplacement. He was shot in the back, and his camouflage became useless: his white clothing was soaked with blood.

Despite “excruciating pain” from his wound, as the Medal of Honor citation told it, Sergeant Dunham wiped out three machine-gun nests and attacked German riflemen in foxholes. Moments later, Ralph Dunham destroyed a fourth machine-gun position.

Firing 175 rounds of carbine fire and throwing 11 grenades, Russell Dunham killed nine Germans, wounded seven and captured two others.

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 as Mr. Dunham told it to Peter Collier in his book “Medal of Honor,” he hid in a sauerkraut barrel outside a barn.

He was discovered by two 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 Sergeant Dunham’s arm.

While the Germans were taking him toward their lines, one of them stopped at a bar. Sergeant Dunham shot and killed the other soldier. He escaped on foot, was spotted a couple of days later by United States 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.

Mr. Dunham, a native of East Carondelet, Ill., worked as a Veterans Administration counselor after the war.

In addition to his daughter, from his marriage to his first wife, Mary, which ended in divorce, Mr. Dunham is survived by a stepdaughter, Annette Wilson; a stepson, David Bazzell; his brothers Jim, Floyd and Junior; his sisters Josephine, Florence and Charlotte; three grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. His second wife, Wilda, died in 2002. His brother Ralph survived the war and died years later.

In a 1999 interview with The Alton Telegraph in Illinois, Mr. Dunham told how “the shrapnel in my leg is a reminder of the war we fought.”

And a vivid image endured from that snowy hillside in France: “It happened in 1945, but I still remember staring into the eyes of the German machine-gunner.”

Lt. Gen. Harry W. O. Kinnard, who inspired the storied retort “nuts” to a German surrender ultimatum during the Battle of the Bulge, died Monday in Arlington, Va. He was 93.

His death was announced by his family.

General Kinnard parachuted into Normandy in the first hours of D-Day. He received the Distinguished Service Cross for heroism during Operation Market Garden, the airborne attack in the German-occupied Netherlands. And he helped pioneer the airmobile concept, sending troops into combat aboard helicopters during the Vietnam War.

But he was perhaps best remembered for what happened in December 1944 at the Belgian town of Bastogne, where the 101st Airborne Division, short on clothing and boots in a snowstorm and bitter cold, was surrounded by German troops.

Bastogne, at the intersection of important roads, was a crucial objective for the Germans in their surprise attack in the Ardennes region of Belgium, an offensive that had created a “bulge” in Allied lines.

On Dec. 22, two German officers approached the American lines in Bastogne carrying a demand that the American commander surrender his troops within two hours or face annihilation from an artillery barrage.

The message was passed on to Brig. Gen. Anthony C. McAuliffe, acting as division commander while Maj. Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor was in Washington.

General Kinnard, a lieutenant colonel at the time and the division’s operations officer, would recall that General McAuliffe “laughed and said: ‘Us surrender? Aw, nuts.’ ”

As General Kinnard related it long afterward in an interview with Patrick O’Donnell, a military historian: “He pondered for a few minutes and then told the staff, ‘Well, I don’t know what to tell them.’ He then asked the staff what they thought, and I spoke up, saying, ‘That first remark of yours would be hard to beat.’

“McAuliffe said, ‘What do you mean?’ I answered, ‘Sir, you said, ‘Nuts.’ All members of the staff enthusiastically agreed. McAuliffe then wrote down: ‘To the German Commander, Nuts! The American Commander.’ ”

The note was carried back to the German officers by Col. Joseph Harper, a regimental commander. The officers did not seem to understand it, so Colonel Harper told them, “If you don’t know what ‘nuts’ means, in plain English it is the same as ‘go to hell.’ ”

The 101st held out, and four days later an American column broke through the German lines, lifting the siege. That response of “nuts” came to epitomize the grit of American soldiers in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds.

Harry William Osborne Kinnard II, a native of Dallas, entered military service after graduating from West Point in 1939.

Having fought extensively with the airborne, he oversaw a more modern way to get troops into combat quickly when he commanded the 11th Air Assault Division (Test), created at Fort Benning, Ga., in 1963 to develop the airmobile concept.

That became the First Cavalry Division (Airmobile), and General Kinnard commanded it in November 1965 when it undertook the Army’s first major engagement of the Vietnam War, the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley. North Vietnamese casualties were heavy, but that encounter in the Central Highlands left more than 300 Americans dead and foreshadowed a long war of attrition. The battle was recounted in the 1992 book “We Were Soldiers Once ... And Young,” by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway.

General Kinnard retired from military service in 1969. He is survived by his wife, Libby; his sons, Crew and Robert; his daughters, Susan Payson, Kathleen Coursey and Cynthia Harmon; his stepdaughters, Libby Nicholson and Janmarie Hall; his stepson, Col. Tom Nicholson Jr.; 16 grandchildren; and 15 great-grandchildren.

General McAuliffe became famed for the “nuts” reply, but sometimes grew weary of hearing the story retold. On one occasion, he thought he had a respite.

“One evening a dear old Southern lady invited me to dinner,” he recalled. “I had a delightful time talking to her and her charming guests. I was pleased because no mention was made the entire evening of the ‘nuts’ incident. As I prepared to depart and thanked my hostess for an enjoyable evening, she replied, ‘Thank you and good night, General McNut.’ ”