We’ve lost another of the so-called Greatest Generation — General Harry Kinnard has died:

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.

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

As 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.’

Though I’ve also heard that this is the bowdlerized version for the press, and the actual response to von Lüttwitz’s was…errrrr…an invitation to have sexual relations forced upon him.

Also, I hadn’t realized that he had commanded the First Cav in the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley.

In any event, resquiescat in pacem to a warrior for freedom.