Category: Manly Stuff
Adolf Hitler. Amidst humanity’s literally countless certifiable homicidal maniacs, Hitler consistently ranks number 1 on the psycho hit parade.
Accusing political figures of being Hitler appears to be a prerequisite for graduation from Leftist school. It has been done so many times that the sobriquet has lost a great deal of its luster. That’s because nobody is as bad as Hitler. To insinuate otherwise illuminates one’s simply breathtaking ignorance.
Donald Trump is a perennial target. Everyone from cerulean-haired militant feminists to unhinged Left-wing politicians has availed themselves of this handy comparison. A partial list of Democrats who have likened Trump to Hitler includes Kamala Harris, Bill Maher, Louis C.K., Sarah Silverman, and Jerry Nadler.
Donald Trump might not be a terribly nice man, but he has a long way to go to actually give Hitler a run for his money. Anyone who watches the news can catalog the President’s many hijinks. By contrast, Adolf Hitler institutionally slaughtered six million Jews, murdered 27 million Soviet citizens, and enslaved most of Europe. Hitler had his enemies impaled on meat hooks or slowly strangled with piano wire. Trump, by contrast, slams out mean tweets at odd hours and deports illegal immigrants. News flash–those things are not the same.
It’s All Relative
All thinking folk appreciate that Adolf Hitler really was history’s alpha villain. We’ve had no shortage of psychopaths. Jeffrey Dahmer kidnapped, killed, cooked, and ate seventeen young men and boys, but he clearly lacked vision. What made Hitler unique was that he had some proper ambition. Hitler used the apparatus of the state to take institutional murder to new, rarefied heights. Chairman Mao killed en masse because he was stupid. Stalin murdered because he was diagnosably paranoid. Hitler, however, wiped out entire people groups because he made a cold, calculating decision that his world would be better off without them.
That all begs the timeless question—if you had the means to go back in time to an era before Hitler had come to power, would you let him walk, or would you exterminate him for the good of humanity? As time machines are not real, that conundrum will remain tragically hypothetical. However, no less a source than the monster himself did claim that one man had that chance and indeed let him live. That man, a British infantry private named Henry Tandey, was quite the hero in his own right.
The Guy
Henry James Tandey was born in August 1891 in the Angel Hotel on Regent Street in Leamington, Warwickshire, in the UK. Henry’s Dad was a former soldier. His Mom died when he was young. That happened a lot back then.
Young Henry languished for a time in an orphanage and eventually took a job as a boiler attendant in a hotel. In the summer of 1910, he enlisted in the Green Howards, a line infantry regiment in the King’s Division. This took him to Guernsey and South Africa. However, in 1914, things got real. Tandey’s first taste of serious action was at Ypres.
Nowadays, American troops serve a set period in a war zone and then rotate home. Not so back during World War 1. These poor slobs fought until they were killed, were too badly wounded to fight any more, or the war ended. Henry Tandey was in the thick of it at places like the Somme, Passchendaele, and Cambrai. He fought from the opening salvoes of the war to the very bitter end.
Courage Rewarded
Henry Tandey’s courage under fire bordered upon the superhuman. This was the citation for his Distinguished Conduct Medal—
“He was in charge of a reserve bombing party in action, and finding the advance temporarily held up, he called on two other men of his party, and working across the open in rear of the enemy, he rushed a post, returning with twenty prisoners, having killed several of the enemy. He was an example of daring courage throughout the whole of the operations.”
Next Level Awesome
Henry Tandey never gained much rank. On 28 September 1818, he was still a private at age 27 after nearly four years in combat. However, it was on this day that Tandey earned the Victoria Cross, his nation’s highest award for valor. This was the citation—
“For most conspicuous bravery and initiative during the capture of the village and the crossings at Marcoing, and the subsequent counter-attack on 28 September, 1918. When, during the advance on Marcoing, his platoon was held up by machine-gun fire, he at once crawled forward, located the machine gun, and, with a Lewis gun team, knocked it out. On arrival at the crossings, he restored the plank bridge under a hail of bullets, thus enabling the first crossing to be made at this vital spot.
“Later in the evening, during an attack, he, with eight comrades, was surrounded by an overwhelming number of Germans, and though the position was apparently hopeless, he led a bayonet charge through them, fighting so fiercely that 37 of the enemy were driven into the hands of the remainder of his company. Although twice wounded, he refused to leave till the fight was won.”
Meeting the Monster
At the same time that Henry Tandey was slogging through the trenches earning his nation’s most esteemed awards for gallantry, a certain nondescript Austrian corporal was enduring comparable deprivations on the other side of no-man’s land.
Adolf Hitler was 25 when WW1 kicked off. He volunteered for service with the Bavarian Army at the onset of hostilities. His Austrian citizenship should have disqualified him. However, he was allowed to remain in uniform due to a clerical error.
Hitler fought in many of the same battles as did Tandey. He served as a dispatch runner on the Western Front in France and Belgium. In the days before reliable radio, critical messages were often conveyed across the battlefield by individual messengers. This was a hazardous job that produced an inordinate number of casualties. By all accounts, Hitler served admirably in this role, earning the Iron Cross Second Class for valor.
On the day he earned his Victoria Cross, Henry Tandey was fighting with the 5th Duke of Wellington’s Regiment at the French village of Marcoing. As the battle was finding its level and the violence was dying down, Tandey encountered a wounded German soldier who wandered into his line of fire.
For reasons lost to history, he chose not to kill this man. There were credible allegations that this wounded straggler was none other than Corporal Adolf Hitler. Here’s where the story gets weird.
There are lots of reasons to believe this was not the case. Records were spotty. Hitler might have even been home on leave on this particular date. Nobody is completely sure. However, Hitler himself had some strong opinions on the subject.
The Painting
Henry Tandey ended the war a true hero. In 1923, the Green Howards Regiment commissioned a painting of Tandey carrying a wounded man at the Kruiseke Crossroads northwest of Menin in 1914. This painting was crafted from a sketch made at the time of the event. A building depicted behind Tandey was owned by the Van Den Broucke family. The regiment gifted this family with a copy of the painting.
A member of Hitler’s staff named Dr. Otto Schwend ended up with a copy as well. I couldn’t determine if this was a second copy or the one gifted to the Ven Den Broucke family.
The Nazis stole a lot of stuff. Schwend had served as a medical officer during the Battle of Ypres in 1914. Knowing Hitler’s affection for mementos of his wartime service, Schwend had a large photograph made of the painting and presented it to der Führer as a gift. Upon detailed study, Hitler identified Tandey as the man in the painting who had spared his life on the battlefield in 1918.
The Prime Minister
In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain famously visited Hitler at the Berghof. These talks ultimately led to the Munich Agreement that spawned Chamberlain’s infamous “Peace in Our Time” announcement.
While together, Chamberlain and Hitler discussed the painting, the photograph of which Hitler had prominently displayed. Hitler told the English PM, “That man came so near to killing me that I thought I should never see Germany again; Providence saved me from such devilishly accurate fire as those English boys were aiming at us.”
Hitler subsequently asked Chamberlain to track down Tandey and give him his warmest regards. Though the details are disputed, Chamberlain purportedly did call Tandey’s home upon his return, speaking with a nine-year-old relative named William Whateley. At the time, Tandey worked for the Triumph Motor Company. As near as I could tell, Chamberlain and Tandey didn’t actually speak.
The Rest of the Story
Tandey remained in the Army after the war, refusing promotions so he could continue to serve as a private. In this capacity, he deployed to Turkey and Egypt. He was finally mustered out in 1926.
Tandey married upon his return home, but never had kids. In 1940, while living in Coventry, his home was bombed by the Luftwaffe. Tandey reportedly rescued several victims from their burning homes during the Blitz.
When approached by a journalist at the time, he was once asked about the story concerning his sparing the life of Hitler. He said, “If only I had known what he would turn out to be…when I saw all the people and women and children he had killed and wounded I was sorry to God I let him go.”
Tandey worked for Triumph for a total of 38 years. He died in 1977 at the ripe age of 86 and was cremated. His ashes were interred among his brothers at the Masnieres British Cemetery at Marcoing, France, where he had earned his Victoria Cross. It was an honorable end for the man who quite likely spared Hitler.
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Some Red Hot Gospel there!
Despite the weatherman’s dire prediction of 10 straight days of sunny skies, mild temperatures and zero white stuff, I woke up on Idaho’s December 1 opener to an inch of unexpected powder. It was a welcomed twist as I met up with my hunting partner, Chess Carbol.
To bypass territorial competition, we prefer hiking for lion tracks in wilderness areas inaccessible to vehicles rather than the overcrowded roads and snowmobile trails. In order to maximize our ability to cover the most ground, we park one truck on the opposite end of the mountain range and then hike to it from the other end.
At daylight, we collared our dogs and moved up the trail while the hounds pushed ahead searching for a track to run. Two miles in, Spike, my big red English/Plott cross, struck a track and shattered the morning silence with his howl. My little red female, Sparta, sounded off, letting him know that she too smelled the lion.
It was the sound I’d longed to hear for months; the sound I crave more than any other, including the gobble of a spring longbeard or a screaming bull elk. In this wild setting, the primeval hound song is not out of place, and my dogs, even with thousands of years of selective breeding, still trace their lineage back to wolves. They are as savage as anything on the mountain.
They moved out fast, roasting the track and filling the canyon with their eerie music. I took a quick measurement of the cat’s stride with my vinyl tape measure and confirmed what I knew from the size of the prints: It was a tom.
The track was straightforward and Spike and Sparta treed him quickly, two miles from where we’d turned loose. On the way to the tree, we crossed the trail of the lion and dogs, but there were two separate lion tracks in the snow covered by our hounds’ tracks.
“He found himself a lover last night,” I told Chess.
Upon approaching the action, I saw my dogs baying under a tree with two tawny forms above them. The smaller of the two, the female, bailed and headed down the mountain, but the tom stayed. He backed up on a bare tree trunk that stood at an angle out of a steep slope on the mountain. I told Chess what I’d been thinking: “He is a solid, mature tom. We don’t tree many good cats.”
“I don’t know. I killed a lion last year.”
“So what? You see anyone else out here, busting their asses since 2:00 a.m.? Feeding dogs all year? Roading them? Buying them GPS collars? Scooping their crap? Paying vet bills?”
“Good point.”
“Up to you,” I said. “We treed 19 last season and killed one. It isn’t like we are knocking everything we catch out of a tree.”
He looked up at the magnificent cougar, who stood baring his teeth in contempt at the barking dogs below him. He looked striking on the bare tree trunk.
“Let’s do it,” he said, and began digging in his pack for his scoped .44 magnum revolver.
At the shot, the tom tensed, then deflated before free falling stone dead into the snow. Upon approaching the lion, we saw there was no ground shrinkage, no regret.
Chess kneeled near the beast and began inspecting him. He brushed his hands through the buckskin-colored fur then examined his teeth and claws in awe and respect, as it should be. 
After pictures, skinning and packing the lion up, it was only 10:30 a.m.
“We have two options,” I said. “We can head back to my truck, drive to the little Mexican joint and get a super macho steak burrito, or we can head over the mountain to your truck as planned.” We laughed, both knowing that quitting at 10:30 a.m. on a day with good snow wasn’t an option, kill or no kill. That’s why we were hunting partners.
It’s a funny thing how hunting partnerships are forged. In this case, I had taken quite a few of my friends on lion hunts, but Chess was the only one who would keep coming. Hiking in the snow, often with snowshoes, for double-digit miles in single-digit temperatures to maybe run a lion is tough work. Combine that with the fact that the lion may go the opposite direction you want him to, and a long damn way at that, it isn’t a sport for everyone.
I took a friend once and we caught a lion early, but it jumped from the tree right when we arrived and put a couple moves on my hounds. Mid-race, my buddy just quit. He walked back to his truck, called his wife and informed her that he was headed home but would not be able to fulfill his marital duties to her that night due to head-to-toe pain and fatigue. He downed half a bottle of whiskey before bed and within a week, a few of his toenails turned black and fell off.
Another buddy, one of the toughest guys I know, joined in and could handle the hiking, but was extremely uncomfortable being in close proximity to the lion. The cougar was in a low cedar tree, and it is understandable that some people don’t like being near a pissed-off predator that has the tools to kill a bull moose. He didn’t come again.
Chess and I turned the dogs loose on the trail of the female that split, hoping for a quick rerun for practice. Spike and Sparta left on the track and moved quickly, but it was apparent that the cat had gone on a walkabout.
The hounds traveled away, still in earshot, then reappeared across the canyon, two red spots leap-frogging across a bare south-facing slope, sounding off when they smelled a track. Both possessing lead-dog mentalities, they pushed the track hard and fast, discontent being anywhere but in the front. In their years running as pack mates, they’d formed this strange alliance, two warring hearts with one goal.
They trailed out of sight, their barks and howls still audible and rhythmic in cadence, but soon they turned chaotic and we knew they had jumped the lion. Then we heard the beautiful long bawls they only use when cats are treed.
The lion made her stand in a tree that was long dead with gnarly, twisted branches. I tied Spike and Sparta up on a single tree tie with a coupler to a nearby branch.
We snapped a few pictures, but I could tell the cat was getting nervous. When the lion turned to jump, she looked down at Spike and Sparta coupled together and dove off the branch directly at them.
That’s when things got Western.
For a split second, the lion hung in the air, legs apart, claws out with a nasty snarl on her face. She slammed into my dogs so hard that the branch they were tied to snapped and the mob of bodies started rolling down the hill.
I ran after them, tripping, falling, regaining my feet, tripping again, and then rolling toward them, screaming like a madman the entire time. It wasn’t a fair fight with my dogs hooked together with a coupler that kept their heads less than a foot apart, and I didn’t want them getting killed.
I rolled into the action, vaguely aware of getting scuffed up from the rocky slope. I got up and gave the lion a kick that would’ve knocked a man’s teeth down his throat. She didn’t budge, but instead turned her attention to me, snarled and delivered a lightning-fast swat to my boot sole, knocking me down. As I fell back, I grabbed at the orange tree tie attached to my hounds and yanked it hard.
My dogs stumbled from the whiplash, but pulled back toward the cat, still baying hard and not wanting the fight to end. I tried again, but with better footing, and pulled them as hard as I could. Amped up on adrenaline and with purchase under my boots, I pulled too hard. They stumbled past me, tangled with the leash and each other. I fell to my butt, defenseless and vulnerable, for just a moment with my only protection behind me tangled up in their leash.
The lion looked at me calmly and took two steps forward. I shielded my face with my hands and pulled my legs in tight against my torso, bracing for what I knew would be an eviscerating blow.
It never came. Instead, she peered at me through soulless eyes and then nonchalantly walked 10 yards to the base of a cedar tree, her lithe muscles showing through her tawny fur. Then she stood, defiant and proud, unwilling to yield and climb.
As we walked away, I kept an eye on the lion. She never moved from under the cedar, as if there was an unspoken truce that if she stayed there and we stayed away, she’d play nice. Spike and Sparta wanted a rematch, and they weren’t happy about me dragging them out of there.
“We shot the wrong cat,” I told Chess. “We should have let the tom walk and given that crazy bitch a ride off the mountain in your backpack.”
Truthfully, there is no game animal I have more respect for than mountain lions. They hunt alone, with no pack to support them, and when the days get short and the weather turns cold, they don’t hunker down in a den for a five-month nap. They are masters of stealth and secrecy and dealing death.
I still wasn’t fond of that particular lion, however.
It took us another eight miles of hiking to get to the main ridge where we were rewarded with a view of snow-covered mountains as far as we could see. Often adventure ends in being cold, wet and tired, but the reward here, among others, was being in a place so big we felt as small as dust. It would be another three miles down through the valley where we left the truck so many hours before. 
As we took in the view, however, something caught my eye just in front of us. I walked over. It was a lion track, and it was left by a true giant. I measured the stride. He was 45 or 46 inches with massive pads—the kind of cat you hoped to cross paths with once in a decade, or maybe even a lifetime of hunting.
I didn’t say anything. I just held the tape measure and looked up at Chess. We had maybe an hour of daylight left.
“You really want to see that lion don’t you?” Chess said, but it was a statement, not a question.
A lion track is an adventure unlived, and a story yet untold. One of the best and worst parts about lion hunting is that when a track is found, the cat could be 10 miles away, or 200 yards away, and there is only one way to know for sure. We didn’t have to decide; Spike did for us.
Exhausted, with his head hanging low and the wag in his tail long gone miles ago, he put his nose over the behemoth track. It was like someone put a shot of adrenaline straight into his heart. His body tensed, his tail went back and forth and from deep within he let out a hoarse and ragged howl to let us know he’d found a track, and to let the lion know that he was coming for him.
It was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard. I fell to the ground on my knees, then sat down, soaking my butt in snow, registering the cold but not caring. Chess sat down too.
Sparta joined and they trailed down the ridgetop, pushing the track into the sunset. Sore-footed, their muscles and lungs shot, my hounds were running on nothing but heart, reminding us that regardless of whether or not we wanted to quit and go home, the hunt is never over for them.
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