Frank Denius, helped to hold a vital hill in WWII battle

Frank Denius was a 19-yearold staff sergeant when he and 700 other men of the U.S. Army’s 30th Infantry Division — “Old Hickory” — found themselves on a hill in Mortain, Normandy, France, in August 1944 surrounded by four German Panzer divisions, including hundreds of tanks and heavy guns, and 40,000 Nazi troops, among them members of Hitler’s elite SS forces.

Denius, a forward artillery observer, and his comrades were trapped for six days. Half were killed or wounded in what the Texas-raised Denius, who died July 29 at 93, once called “an Alamo situation for sure.”

The hill in question — Montjoie — was known to the Allied military as Hill 314 from its height in meters; although only 1,030 feet high, it was by far the highest point in the region.

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander of Allied forces in Europe, ordered Old Hickory to “hold it all costs” as part of an effort to block Hitler’s counterattack to drive the Allies out of France and across the English Channel after the Normandy landings that June. Denius had waded ashore with a 150-pound backpack on Omaha Beach in the hours after the initial D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944.

From the two ends of Montjoie’s summit, hundreds of yards apart, Denius and 2nd Lt. Bob Weiss were able to call in Allied air and artillery strikes against the Nazi forces firing on the hill with tanks, artillery, machine guns and rifles, in Denius’ words, “24/7 for six days.”

With no specific front line around the base of the hill, he and his comrades engaged in hand-to-hand or bayonet combat with German soldiers they encountered at night, as both sides tried to draw water from the nearest well or pick up food rations dropped by U.S. aircraft.

Most historians say that Mortain was the battle that changed the outcome of the war in France after the Normandy landings. Senior German officers later acknowledged that defeat at Mortain was the “beginning of the end” for Hitler’s forces, which were forced back from Hill 314 in disarray.

Still with Old Hickory, Denius went on to help capture the German city of Aachen, part of the Nazis’ Siegfried Line. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge, one of the war’s bloodiest conflicts.

His decorations included four Silver Stars and two Purple Hearts, and in 2012, he received one of France’s highest awards, Knight of the Legion of Honor.