It’s Memorial Day: The story of a soldier who should be remembered this day: John Dunne.
They came to America as young boys, lost the “e” on the end of their surnames, and each had families of six children.
Some of their children fought in Europe during WWII, including my grandfather Frank Dunn and his first cousin Tim Dunn, who was Larry’s son.
Tim Dunn was born in 1916 and lived on 61st Street in Woodside, NY when he was a young man.
The details of his early life are vague, probably lost to the ages. What I do know is that by the end of 1943, he was in the US Army headed to England as the Allies began to prepare for the D-Day invasion in June 1944.
A partial company photo taken just before D-Day is shown here, with a close-up of Pvt Dunn as well.
He was a member of C Company, 37th Tank Battalion in the 4th Armored Division. This became General Patton’s division of the Army and Pvt. Dunn learned to drive a Sherman Tank.
The 37th Tank Battalion came into France about a month after D-Day to reinforce soldiers who were already in the fight.
They fought their way through France, town to town, found their way to the front, liberated French towns along the way, and pushed the German army back. They had 87 straight days of combat before they were relieved.
By then Pvt Dunn had been promoted to Sergeant and commanded a tank. A photo is below of Sgt Dunn, his tank and his crew at Arracourt in France in September 1944.
A combat report of the smaller, lighter and faster Sherman tanks outfighting the Wehrmacht’s Panzers and Panthers from September 1944 quotes Sgt Dunn as follows:
“All five tanks opened up and knocked out three of the Germans; the fourth panzer retreated behind the wreck of an American bomber.
The second platoon put high explosive on the plane and set it on fire. The tank was not observed to escape…. A fifth German tank was hit when observed coming out of Ley and destroyed.
The fighting around Arracourt was fierce and Sgt Dunn became a tank commander and took over his platoon.
The battalion lost 9 tanks to the Germans 38 tanks lost during that stage of the fighting.
They instituted night fighting, which was unusual for tanks. He patrolled fields with a crew and a bazooka when not moving forward in his tank.
When the Germans counterattacked the Allies in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, Dunn’s 37th Battalion moved into Belgium to relieve and reinforce the 101st Airborne paratroopers that had become totally cut off from their supply lines.
Sgt Dunn’s Battalion had to fight against German paratroopers deceptively wearing American uniforms, and the fighting was fierce as the Germans made a continuing push against the Americans holed up in Bastogne.
After sleeping outdoors during the coldest European winter in 100 years, they were again pushing the Germans back by February 1945 and were in Germany by March.
In March 1945, Tim Dunn, now a staff sergeant, and the rest of the 37th Tank Battalion C Company was taken out of the regular line of combat and deployed for a special assignment - a raid to rescue American POW’s who were in a camp 60 miles behind enemy lines in Germany.
General Patton called up C Company to be a part of Task Force Baum in what became known as the Hammelburg Raid.
merican forces for this rescue mission were 307 men and 57 vehicles, tasked with the job of rescuing 1500 POW’s, including Gen. Patton’s son-in-law, Lt Col John Knight Waters.
They opened a hole in the enemy lines and fought their way into the German prison camp near Hammelburg, known as Oflag XIII-B, only to find 6500 prisoners, who they liberated.
The objective was reached but the triumph was fleeting, because they could not transport all of the prisoners since there were many more than expected.
The Germans counterattacked heavily, thinking that this small group of raiders was leading in the entire Army 4th Division, and the Americans had to break up and separate to escape.
The US soldiers fought heroically and it remains the US Army’s deepest raid into an enemy territory to this day.
26 American soldiers were killed in that action. Staff Sergeant Timothy J. Dunn was among them. He died while fighting Germans and rescuing American prisoners of war on April 1, 1945.
Tim Dunn’s death came only a month before the end of the war in Europe. Germans were on the run and the losses in that raid were quickly eclipsed by V-E Day - victory in Europe.
His death was certainly agonizing for his mother (his father had passed by then) and his siblings, and my grandfather was said to have been furious about it. I don’t believe he had a wife or children.
He is buried at the Long Island National Cemetery in Farmingdale with 355,112 other Americans who gave their life for their country and veterans who fought for us. A photo of his gravestone is below.
He was a non-commissioned officer who did his duty. He fought and died for his country. He gave all he had - no happy ending of the war, no greatest generation, no opportunity to go home and raise his family, but a young life lost in the defense of freedom and decency.
He, and those who did what he did, saved the entire world. He is remembered.
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