Category: Hard Nosed Folks Both Good & Bad
Command can be fun but that is times that are few and very far apart.
Obituary: Brigadier Michael Calvert by M. R. D. Foot
MICHAEL CALVERT, who survived both the Chindit expeditions into Burma, was one of the outstanding leaders of irregular troops during the Second World War, though born into the old officer class and himself a regular army officer.
He was the youngest son of a senior member of the Indian Civil Service, who rose to be acting governor of the Punjab; his mother was Irish. He was himself born in the Raj, near Delhi; went to school at Bradfield; and followed his brothers to “The Shop”, the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. Though he cared little for smartness he passed out seventh and was commissioned a second lieutenant Royal Engineers in 1933. He then spent a year at Cambridge reading Mechanical Sciences at St John’s and securing a swimming Blue. He was also a boxer, later the Army’s middleweight champion.
His first Army posting was to Hong Kong where he raised a force of coolies. He was then moved on to Shanghai in time to witness its conquest by the Japanese in 1937: an early lesson in the horrors of war. He reported in detail on the infantry landing craft, with hinged front panels, which he saw the Japanese using; his report lay forgotten in a pigeon-hole in the War Office.
The outbreak of war saw him adjutant of a London RE battalion, work so dull that he volunteered for the Fifth Battalion, the Scots Guards (though well under the proper height for a guardsman). This battalion consisted of men preparing to fight beside the Finns against the Soviet Union during the winter war of 1939 to 1940. They spent weeks at Chamonix learning to ski, and were then disbanded as the Finns had given in.
Calvert missed the fighting in France next summer but was an early member of the Commando training school at Lochailort in the Highlands, which he left to assist Peter Fleming in preparing the stay-behind parties in Kent who were to try to upset the communications and petrol supplies of the German army that, thank goodness, never invaded.
He was then sent out to Australia to help set up a school similar to Lochailort there. From one of his fellow instructors, Freddie Spencer- Chapman (later author of that marvellous book, The Jungle is Neutral, 1949), he learned a lot about jungle warfare; and he helped to train Australian special forces. He was moved on to set up a bush warfare school at Maymyo in Burma, east of Mandalay – in fact a school to train guerrillas to fight in China.
There he was surprised by the Japanese invasion in the winter of 1941/42. Off his own bat he dressed his staff and pupils in Australian bush hats and mounted a raid by river craft behind the Japanese lines, intended to lead them to think that the Australian army was already present in Burma in force. He got no thanks in the short run – indeed he was reprimanded for damaging the property of the Burmah Oil Company without permission. He discovered in the long run that he had indeed done a little to hold up the Japanese advance. His casualties were light and he had managed some important demolitions.
Moreover he next met Orde Wingate, that formidable pillar of unconventionality; who had read a paper Calvert had scribbled in 1940, about the way raiding parties could be kept supplied by air, far behind any existing fighting line, and was looking forward to implementing that then quite novel idea in the field. Calvert was one of the few regular officers whom Wingate was prepared to treat as an equal. That their ranks at the time were major and brigadier made no difference at all; the two of them got on splendidly.
Before he could rejoin Wingate, Calvert had a couple of months hard fighting in the rearguard of the army retreating from Burma, with such wild men as he could find to undertake tasks that were at first glance hopeless. In his autobiography, Fighting Mad (1964), this is the point at which he lays down a principle. “I have always maintained that the men in a fighting unit must be led from in front by a commander they know is willing and able to do everything he asks them to do and probably more.”
Nelson would have approved; this is the way real leaders lead. Once Calvert paused to bathe in a river, and met a Japanese officer who was doing exactly the same. He won a quarter of an hour’s wrestling match, drowned his opponent, and had his patrol kill the whole Japanese patrol whom they surprised in the next bend of the river.
He then got back to India, with infinite difficulty through the monsoon, and was at once summoned by Wingate to help train his first Chindit expedition. “God often gives men peculiar instruments with which to pursue His will,” Wingate remarked; “David was armed only with a sling.”
In August 1942 Calvert joined 77th Brigade which Wingate commanded; in it Calvert commanded a column of some 400 men when it went into Burma six months later. This first attempt at Long Range Penetration – its official name – had little strategic impact but was a colossal propaganda success: home morale in Great Britain was much boosted by the idea that our men were attacking the Japanese in the jungle and the name of Chindit became famous. Casualties were heavy, at about 30 per cent of the force; Calvert, though emaciated after a march of over a thousand miles through jungle, survived.
He was indeed promoted brigadier – thus winning a bet he had made with a schoolfriend when he was 12 – and took 77th Brigade into Burma again by air on 5 March 1944. He established a stronghold and landing ground codenamed Broadway well behind the Japanese lines, and another called White City a little farther south; and held both of them against sustained Japanese attacks. This operation was of far more use than the previous one – it dislocated the Japanese assault on Imphal, that threatened India; but the fire went out of it when Wingate was killed in an air crash, and Calvert found himself under the orders of the American General Stilwell – passionately anti-British – and forced to fight a conventional war for which his men were neither equipped nor trained.
This time Calvert lost over nine-tenths of his Brigade, but his leadership kept the survivors together as a formidable fighting force however weakened, and he pulled through himself. For each of these Chindit sorties he was appointed to the DSO. Absurdly enough he then injured his Achilles tendon in a football match. He returned to the United Kingdom and in March 1945, was picked to succeed Brigadier R.W. McLeod in command of the Special Air Service brigade. Leading again from in front he took two French parachute units of that brigade into eastern Holland and north-west Germany in the closing stages of the war. For those actions he was awarded a French and a Belgian Croix de Guerre.
Thereafter his career went downhill. He had a spell helping to administer Trieste while its ownership was in dispute between Italy and Yugoslavia. In 1950 he was posted to command a new SAS unit called the Malayan Scouts in a colony already troubled by Communist subversion. Many men posted to him from elsewhere in the Army were discards from their former units and with this material even he could do nothing useful. He fell ill; returned to England; and was posted – in his substantive rank, still major – to a corner of the control commission in Germany.
He did not get on with his fellow officers and took to drinking by himself in a bar in Soltau (though he spoke no German). Some young men called on him and accused him of trying to seduce them. He was court-martialled for conduct unbecoming to an officer and a gentleman – his biographer David Rooney strongly suspects that he was framed – and dismissed from the service.
He tried business in Australia; it did not succeed. He then took to drink in so big a way that he was reduced to methylated spirits in the slums of Glasgow. His fellow drinkers abused him – what was an educated man like him doing among such down-and- outs as themselves? This shocked him back on to the water wagon; and for a few years he worked as a temporary lecturer in Military Studies at Manchester University. A book he then projected on the theory of guerrilla warfare was never finished; and he retired to the Charterhouse. Alas what the temperance movement used to call the “Demon Drink” reasserted its hold.
Though he never rose above brigadier anyone who served under him knew that Michael Calvert was a tremendous leader of men; quite careless of his own danger and taking care not to put his troops into worse trouble than he could help.
James Michael Calvert, soldier: born Rohtak, India 6 March 1913; DSO 1943, and Bar 1944; died London 26 November 1998.
In other of my yarns I’ve covered the lives of Bill Tilghman and Heck Thomas–two of the fighting marshals from the frontier days of old Oklahoma. This story of Deputy U.S. Marshal Chris Madsen rounds the tale out. Collectively, these men were called the “Three Guardmen of Oklahoma.” And while the first two men were raised on the American frontier, Madsen had a whole different, and most interesting, background.
Born in Denmark around 1851, Christian Madsen is reputed to have had a lengthy career in the Danish army. One source even states that he served in the French Foreign Legion and saw action in Algeria. At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Madsen returned to Europe and took part in much of the fighting.
For some unknown reason, Madsen came to the United States in 1876 and immediately enlisted in the U.S. Cavalry. His assignment to the 5th Cavalry put him right in the middle of the ongoing war with the various Plains Indian nations. On July 17, 1876, he was on War Bonnet Creek in western Nebraska when a civilian scout, William Cody, fought a hand-to-hand duel with a Cheyenne fighter known to the whites as Yellow Hand. Upon killing his adversary, Cody is supposed to have lifted his scalp and declared, “Here is the first scalp for Custer!”
By 1891 Madsen had been promoted to the rank of Sergeant, awarded the Silver Star, and transferred to El Reno, Oklahoma. Tiring of the military life, Madsen had decided to start a third career. Of course, this one involved fighting too, because Madsen had accepted a position as a deputy U.S. Marshal.
GRITTY GUNFIGHTER
In November 1892, Madsen, Thomas, and Tom Houston were in the area of Orlando, Oklahoma, looking for Ol Yantis, a wanted bank robber. At Yantis’s sister’s house the officers jumped the outlaw and called on him to surrender. Yantis’s pistol shot was answered by shots from Madsen’s Model 1886 Winchester rifle Deputy Houston’s gun. The lawmen tried to care for the wounded outlaw, but he died later in the day.
Another time that Marshal Madsen showed his grit was in 1893, while escorting a judge on his rounds. At Beaver City, Oklahoma, they found lodging in a room above a popular saloon. During the night, the cowboys got to celebrating by shooting holes into the ceiling of the saloon and, thus, through the floor of Madsen’s rented room. Madsen went down to the saloon and corralled a trio of exuberant cow herders.
He buffaloed one with his Colt Single Action and wounded another in the shoulder before the affray was ended. Legend has it that one of the cowboys had hollered, “I’m a wild son-of-a-bitch from Cripple Creek!”
To which, Madsen is supposed to have replied, “I knew who you were, I just didn’t know where you were from.”
In May 1894, Madsen met an informant in El Reno, Oklahoma. The informant told him that a wanted train robber, Felix Young, was out on the street. As Madsen approached the wanted man, the outlaw recognized the officer and ran for a nearby horse. Madsen fired five shots, probably from his Colt sixgun, and killed the horse. The stout Dane then ran down the wanted man and took him into custody.
Madsen’s final gunfight of record occurred in March 1896 near Cheyenne, Oklahoma. Red Buck George Weightman had been a member of the Doolin and Dalton gangs and was reportedly hiding in a dugout near Cheyenne. Madsen was part of a posse that surrounded the dugout and called on Weightman to come out with his hands up. Instead, the tough outlaw tried to shoot his way to freedom. Madsen is supposed to have fired one rifle shot and, as the old-timers would put it, Weightman’s case was automatically appealed to a higher court.
SKILLED ADMINISTRATOR
By the time the Spanish-American War broke out in Cuba, Marshal Madsen was a widower with two children to raise. However, he was called on by Colonel Leonard Wood to come contribute his military skills to the campaign. The fighting Dane couldn’t turn down such a call and immediately was made a sergeant in the quartermaster department.
It is not reported that Sgt. Madsen saw any action in Cuba, but he spent his time trying to bring order to the quartermaster’s nightmare that existed. Cavalrymen were sent to Cuba without their horses, they were issued winter wool uniforms instead of the tropical variety, and Madsen had his hands full trying to keep worse errors from happening.
Madsen lived a long and eventful life. In later years, he was involved in giving technical advice to the growing motion picture business. And while in California, he was introduced to a nice young actor named Roy Rogers. Death came for the old lawman in 1944 at the Masonic Home in Guthrie, Oklahoma. He was 92 years old.
Besides having lived an exciting and eventful life, Madsen is also interesting because he did not have the looks or background of the traditional frontiersman. Raised in Denmark instead of having a frontier childhood, Madsen was short and stockily built and did not have the tall, dark look of Tilghman or Thomas.
However, he clearly showed that good fighting men come in all sizes. His reply to the drunken cowboy (“I knew who you were, but I didn’t know where you were from.”) has become a classic piece of western lore. Chris Madsen’s life and career are a clear indication that the true stories of the West are much more exciting than the best fiction.
The archetypal image of the flinty-eyed Western gunfighter, his fingers twitching over the butt of a Colt revolver, came to define an era. As is so often the case with archetypes, however, reality bore little similarity to the embellished tales from the pulp novels of the day. An exception, however, was the shootist, Clay Allison.
Soldier, Rancher, Gunfighter, Psychopath
Robert Clay Allison was born in September 1841 in Waynesboro, Tennessee, the fourth of nine children. Clay’s father Jeremiah Scotland Allison was a bi-vocational Presbyterian minister who also raised sheep and cattle. Clay worked on the family farm until the outbreak of the American Civil War.
Growing up on a mid-19th century Tennessee farm was hard. Clay was afflicted with a congenital club foot and at some point had received a mighty blow to the head. This injury left him with a visible divot in his skull and some fascinating personality traits.
The human brain is the most amazing machine. When you hold a fresh one for real it is remarkably insubstantial, kind of like really thick Jell-O.The human brain is the most complex mechanism in the known universe. A typical adult brain weighs about three pounds and is predominantly fat. The brain generates about 23 watts of power and consumes about one-fifth of the body’s total blood and oxygen. The brain is comprised of some 100 billion neurons and features 100,000 miles of blood vessels. This remarkable device can reason, scheme, love, create and survive.
The normal function of the brain is characterized by a yin and yang of impulses and inhibitions that are even today poorly understood. When everything is operating correctly you get a normal well-adjusted productive citizen. Let some of those inhibitory functions be traumatically damaged, however, and you get Clay Allison.
Allison’s Exploits
In October 1861 Allison enlisted into the Confederate Army with CPT WH Jackson’s artillery battery. Three months later he was discharged. His discharge papers stated, “Emotional or physical excitement produces paroxysmal of a mixed character, partly epileptic and partly maniacal,” whatever that actually means. However, less than a year later Allison signed on with the 9th Tennessee Cavalry under Nathan Bedford Forrest. Allison rode with Forrest until the end of the war.
Inspired by Forrest, Allison grew a similar Van Dyke beard that he wore for years. After surrendering to the Federals at Gainesville, Alabama, Allison was convicted of spying and sentenced to death. The night before sentence was to be served he purportedly killed a guard and escaped.
What followed was a most remarkable life of action, adventure, and wanton gunplay. Upon returning to civilian life, Allison joined the local Ku Klux Klan. Back home on his family farm in Tennessee Allison confronted a Union corporal from the 3rd Illinois Cavalry who had paid a call with mischievous intent. Allison retrieved a long gun and calmly cut the man down.
Settling Squabbles
Allison got into a disagreement over the fee for portage across the Red River in Texas and beat the ferryman, one Zachary Colbert, senseless as a result. Nine years later he met the ferryman’s nephew, a gunfighter of some renown named Chunk Colbert, with bloody results. Hold that thought.
During a stint in Texas, Allison got into a disagreement with a neighbor named Johnson over usage rights to a local watering hole. Allison dug a grave and entered the hole along with Johnson and a brace of Bowie knives. The winner retained access to the water. The loser retained access to the hole. The club-footed, brain-damaged Clay Allison lived to fight another day.
Allison had a fairly binary view of frontier justice, and he didn’t manage liquor well. In 1870 a ne’er-do-well named Charles Kennedy was jailed for robbing and killing overnight guests at his rural cabin. Allison felt that the wheels of justice were turning too slowly so he gathered some buddies, broke into the jail, and appropriated the hapless Kennedy. Allison then proceeded to lash the man to his horse and drag him back and forth along the main street until his body was a lifeless bloody pulp. Still not satisfied, Allison severed the man’s head and carried it in a sack 29 miles to the town of Cimarron. There he staked Kennedy’s head on a fence outside what later became the St. James Hotel.
Allison accidentally shot himself in the foot while trying to steal a dozen government mules. Though he recovered from the injury it left him with a noticeable permanent limp.
Just in case anybody thought of denigrating the man over his physical shortcomings, Allison was legendarily accomplished with both a knife and a handgun. On two different occasions Allison, while drunk, threw his Bowie knife and pinned men to the wall by their shirts. The first was a county clerk named John Lee. The second was a local attorney named Melvin Mills. In both cases, the men were otherwise unharmed.
The Art of the Gunfight
By 1874, Clay Allison had a reputation. Chunk Colbert, the nephew of the ferryman mentioned earlier, purportedly had six kills to his credit when he came looking to make Allison his seventh. The two men met in a local saloon and spent most of a day together drinking and gambling on horse races.
That evening Colbert invited Allison to join him at an overnight stage stop called Clifton House on the Canadian River. Prior to this fateful meal, the local sheriff had accidentally shot and killed a Clifton House waiter while trying unsuccessfully to apprehend Chunk Colbert.
Both men were wary, but by all accounts, they enjoyed an expansive meal together. Upon taking their seats Colbert set his hogleg in his lap, while Allison laid his Peacemaker on the table alongside his plate. The meal complete, Colbert thumbed back his hammer to kill Allison. However, Mr. Murphy is seldom far from enterprises of this sort. Colbert’s muzzle caught on something underneath the table, and his shot went wide. Allison raised his roscoe and shot Colbert through the head at contact range.
Friends later asked Allison why he ever accepted an invitation to dinner from a man so clearly bent upon killing him. Allison responded, “Because I didn’t want to send a man to hell on an empty stomach.”
The Gun
The Colt Model 1873 Peacemaker attained a larger-than-life reputation in the hands of gunfighters like Clay Allison. Lots of companies made sidearms during this tumultuous period in lots of different calibers. However, it was the Colt .45 that came to define the genre. The many splendored motivations behind this rarefied reputation were fully deserved.
Sam Colt devised his revolver action during a voyage as a young seaman on the brig Corvo. Intrigued by the action of the ship’s capstan, young Sam adapted the same mechanism into a rotating handgun action and changed the world.
It’s tough to quantify the secret sauce that Sam Colt used to make his eponymous revolver so awesome.
The gracefully curved butt looks so antiseptic and mechanical, yet it fits my own hand better than that of any modern plastic pistol. The single action requires a little attention, but through six rounds I can run mine almost as well as I might a Glock.
The Rest of the Story
Clay Allison shot his way into and out of trouble on several occasions after he executed Chunk Colbert over a meal. He also had a fascinating habit of getting liquored up and riding into town wearing nothing but his gunbelt. In November of 1875, he arrived in Cimarron in just such a state to celebrate his shooting of Francisco “Pancho” Griego. Allison performed some kind of war dance at the scene of the recent killing with a red ribbon tied prominently around his manhood.
Allison also played a major role in the Colfax County War that claimed some 200 lives. In 1876 he reacted to a negative editorial in the local paper by blowing up the newspaper office with a substantial black powder charge and throwing the printing press into the nearby Cimarron River. Allison shot and killed a Deputy Sheriff named Charles Faber but later beat the rap in court. Allison was said to have faced down Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson in Dodge City in 1878, but the details are disputed.
In 1886 Allison developed an abscessed tooth, but the dentist got nervous in the presence of such a notorious gunfighter and extracted the wrong molar. Enraged, Allison enlisted the assistance of another dentist to remove the diseased tooth before returning and pulling a molar from the first practitioner in retribution.
In 1887 at age 45 Clay Allison was driving a wagon loaded with supplies to his new ranch in Pecos, Texas. A grain sack shifted, and Allison lurched to prevent its falling. The inveterate gunman lost his balance and tumbled out of the wagon. The horses reared and the wagon wheel rolled across his head and neck, crushing his skull and nearly decapitating him. Clay Allison, legendary gunfighter and originator of the term “Shootist,” was laid to rest in the Pecos Cemetery the following day. A crowd of hundreds arrived to pay their respects.
Bill Longley was known for a ruthless nature, skill with a gun, a quick temper, and an unpredictable disposition.
William Preston Longley (1851–1878), a.k.a. Bloody Bill, Wild Bill, Rattling Bill, Bill Black, Bill Henry, and Bill Jackson, claimed to have murdered 32 people in the Old West, including his childhood friend Wilson Anderson.
I’ve written about a bunch of “Bills” in this column, including Bill Jordan, Curly Bill Brocius, William Collins, William H. Anderson, Billy Dixon, and Bill Doolin. Some were law abiding; some were outlaws. Well, Bill Longley may have been the bloodiest Bill of ’em all—and he certainly did not honor the law.
William Preston Longley was born on October 6, 1851, on Mill Creek in Austin County, Texas. He was raised on a farm and learned to shoot at a young age. By 1867 he had dropped out of school and taken up a “wild” life of drinking, carousing, and running with unsavory types.
In December 1868, at the age of 17, Bill committed his first confirmed murder, by shooting a former slave who was traveling on horseback with two other former slaves along the Camino Real approximately one mile from the Longley family farm. When Longley and his buddies confronted the travelers, one tried to flee, whereupon Bill shot him—several times.
Bill then roamed around Texas, gambling, robbing settlers, stealing horses, and killing. His murder victims to that point included at least two more freed slaves. By March 1870, a $1,000 reward was posted for him and his partners in crime.
He drifted north, joining Company B of the U.S. 2nd Cavalry Regiment. That didn’t last, and he deserted just two weeks later. He was captured, court-martialed, sentenced to two years at hard labor, and imprisoned. However, he was released back to his unit after four months, and due to his sharp-shooting skills, he was assigned to regular hunting parties. Not surprisingly, he deserted again in 1872.
In February 1873, he was accused of killing another freedman in Bastrop County, Texas. He was released from custody, perhaps in exchange for a bribe from a family member.
In March 1875, at the age of 24, “Bloody Bill” murdered his childhood friend Wilson Anderson with a shotgun, most likely at the urging of Bill’s uncle who blamed Anderson for the death of a son. Reportedly, Anderson was plowing a field when Bill fired two blasts from a double-barreled shotgun into him.
Subsequently, Bill fled from place to place, using many aliases (including Wild Bill, Rattling Bill, Bill Black, Bill Henry, and Bill Jackson) to avoid arrest. Over the years he killed a hunting buddy named George Thomas, a fellow outlaw named Shroyer (supposedly in a stand-up gunfight), a trail boss named Rector, a horse thief named McClelland, a card player named Charlie Stuart, a farmer named Sawyer, and a preacher named William R. Lay, who was milking a cow at the time. By his own account, there were several more.
Bill Longley was eventually arrested without incident in June 1877. He was tried and convicted for the murder of Wilson Anderson and received a sentence of death. He was hanged on October 11, 1878.
Numerous myths and legends about Longley have surfaced, but most cannot be verified. Many of them stem from tall tales told by Longley while he was imprisoned. He wrote to many newspapers telling of his exploits, and he was granted many interviews with reporters. Longley liked attention, and according to one source, so many reporters visited him in jail the sheriff eventually had to ban such visits.
Another such myth was a story of being captured and lynched in 1869 alongside a known horse thief by the name of Tom Johnson. Allegedly, Bill survived the hanging because a shot from one of the departing lynch mob, who had been shooting at the dangling “corpses,” severed his rope.
Two more outrageous examples that Longley liked to spout involved his supposed killing of a black militiaman in 1866 for insulting Longley’s father and that he killed eight black people in 1867 in Lexington to avenge the loss of a horseracing bet. Neither crime can be confirmed, but apparently, in addition to being just plain mean, he liked to boast about killing people.
On May 2, 1945, he was assigned to a rifle company of the 5th Marines during the invasion of Okinawa. That day, the 5th Marines were pushing uphill towards a ridge against determined Japanese resistance. The slope was strewn with Marine casualties, and Corpsman Bush moved unceasingly among them rendering aid despite the withering fire all around him.
When the attack passed over the crest of the ridge, he moved up to the top of the slope to aid a wounded Marine officer. A Japanese counterattack swept over the ridge just as he began administering blood plasma to his patient.
As the Japanese approached, Corpsman Bush gallantly held up the plasma bottle with one hand and fired a pistol at the Japanese with the other. Then he grabbed a carbine and killed six advancing Japanese. He suffered several serious wounds himself, including the loss of an eye.
He remained guarding his “officer patient” until the enemy were repulsed. Then, according to the official citation, he “valiantly refus[ed] medical treatment for himself until his officer patient had been evacuated…”