Man who said to tell German troops "Nuts!" in WWII dies at 93
Published 10:52 pm Monday, January 12, 2009
NEW YORK — Retired Lt. Gen. Harry W.O. Kinnard, a paratroop officer who suggested the famously defiant answer “Nuts!” to a German demand for surrender during the 1944 Battle of the Bulge, has died. He was 93.
He parachuted into Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944, with the 101st Airborne Division.
When Hitler launched a surprise counteroffensive in December, the 101st, then in France, seized key road junctions at the Belgian town of Bastogne, where the Americans were quickly surrounded by the enemy.
On Dec. 22, Kinnard, then a 29-year-old lieutenant colonel and the division’s operations officer, was present when German couriers arrived with a written demand to surrender in two hours or face annihilation.
Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, the 101st’s artillery chief and acting division commander, laughed and remarked, “Us, surrender? Aw, nuts,” and then wondered aloud how he should reply.
As recalled later by himself and other witnesses, Kinnard suggested McAuliffe tell the Germans “what you just said … Nuts.”
McAuliffe scribbled: “To the German commander: Nuts! The American commander.”
On the way back to the defense line, a U.S. officer explained to the puzzled Germans that “nuts” meant the same thing as “go to hell.”
The paratroopers held, and four days later the siege was broken by Lt. Gen. George S. Patton’s tank forces.
