Category: Soldiering
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.
Modern folks living in Jerusalem, Hiroshima, Bastogne, Volgograd, or Rome likely don’t believe anything of consequence ever happened in their neck of the woods. Familiarity might not necessarily breed contempt, but it does reliably foment apathy. It’s tough to get excited about the history of a place with which you feel you are so intimately familiar.
I admit to harboring a bit of that myself. I live in the suburbs of a tiny little town in north central Mississippi. My community is little more than a crossroads, so the suburbs reference is a subjective assessment at best. Suffice to say, I do like my solitude.
It was the pastoral aspect of the place that first sold me on it. My little corner of heaven is quiet. When it isn’t, I made it that way.
Then I bumped into a sweet lady in my medical clinic who had grown up hereabouts. She related a most fascinating local tale that reached all the way back to the American Civil War. Her story was poignant, gripping, disturbing, and sad all in comparable measure. It also unfolded underneath my very feet.
That brief discussion sparked a quest for the details. This deep into the Information Age, those details were readily ascertained. All that was required was a determined detective with a serviceable Internet connection. The lion’s share of what you are about to read took place within two miles of where I sit typing these words.
Table of contents
Total War
It was the summer of 1864, and the fight was going badly for the Confederacy. After some promising initial gains, the tide had turned the previous summer at Gettysburg. Defeat at Vicksburg around the same time had sealed the deal. By any reasonable metric, the war was lost. However, there yet remained quite a lot of bloody dying to be done before the details were fully resolved.
By this time, war had fully engulfed the American Deep South. General Grant was moving toward my hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, with murderous intent. Now three years into this bitter conflict, everyone knew what that entailed.
In addition to the inevitable wanton pillaging to be found in any war, Grant had a reputation for burning county courthouses as he came upon them. There was little to be gained from this incendiary practice either tactically or strategically.
However, such conflagrations did reliably destroy the land and marriage records. This kept the gentry, most of whom were off fighting with their Rebel units, from reliably verifying land ownership and familial connections. In a renegade country already ravaged by total war, this practice injected just a little bit more madness.
The Player
Colonel Samuel Evan Ragland was born in Halifax County, Virginia, in 1811, a mere 35 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. At some point, he made his way south to Mississippi with a few relatives, ultimately procuring a nice piece of bottom land outside the small town of Delay.
This is rich, fertile dirt, the product of millennia of topsoil deposition from areas upstream via the nearby Yocona River. The same stuff reliably produces bountiful crops of soybeans, corn, and cotton to this very day.
The Wife
Along the way, Sam Ragland married Elizabeth Hobson, and they established a home. As was often the case with landowners during this time at this place, that home included a number of African slaves. Prior to the invention of ubiquitous farm machines, agriculture on an industrial scale seemed otherwise impractical. However, for these sins, the Ragland family would soon pay most dearly.
When the first shots rang out at Fort Sumter, Sam Ragland was already fifty years old. Given the abysmal state of infant mortality, life expectancy for a man was only 39 years at this sordid time. The argument could be made that Sam Ragland might have been better off sitting this one out. However, despite the flawed nature of his cause, Ragland was nonetheless a patriot. By 1864, he was a full Colonel in Pemberton’s Confederate cavalry.
Deployed as he was sowing chaos alongside John C. Pemberton, Ragland still got sporadic news from home. When he heard that Grant was moving on Oxford, he took his leave and moved with all dispatch back to Lafayette County.
Arriving in the nick of time, he loaded all the land records from the courthouse up in a wagon and trundled them off to his rural home some dozen miles to the east. There, he secured the documents in his root cellar while the Oxford Square and its associated courthouse were predictably incinerated.
Greed, the Infernal Engine
In due time, this war, like all others, finally ground to its gory terminus. With Lee’s capitulation at Appomattox, Sam Ragland, now 54 and haggard from years of campaigning, returned home to his wife.
The Rebels had been soundly beaten, and the victors dictated the terms. That meant that the Ragland family slaves were now rightfully free. They subsequently set themselves up nearby in an awkward, unequal world, trying to redefine themselves amidst social and cultural convulsions simply without precedent.
Throughout it all, Ragland retained custody of those county records. The courthouse was now a charred, empty lot, and the beaten South lacked the resources to rebuild. The fact that these records were there was hardly a secret. Anyone who cared knew this. However, at some point, the story morphed into legend, with disastrous results.
Word somehow got around that, in addition to the real estate documents, Sam Ragland had also stashed away a small fortune he had somehow brought back from the war. The details were fuzzy. However, nobody had anything, and money meant hope. To a modest group of recently emancipated slaves, that temptation became too great to resist.
The Crime
The specific details have been lost to time. What is known for certain is that this group of freed slaves approached the Ragland property via stealth, intending to liberate the swag purported to be secured within.
The cellar where the records were kept has been referred to as a vault, but the specifics are sorely lacking. Regardless, at some point during the prosecution of this enterprise, Sam Ragland discovered the burglary. Violence ensued, and Sam’s wife, Elizabeth, was killed. Sam was himself badly wounded, and the murderers fled empty-handed into the nearby swamps.
Old West Law
Understand, this was a different time. One could not just dial 911 and expect Law Enforcement to descend upon a crime scene to make things right. In Mississippi, in the first year following the Civil War, there was very little remaining in the way of recognized infrastructure. If justice were to be found, it would have to be done informally.
Now both heartbroken and enraged, Sam Ragland bound his wounds and called upon his neighbors. Together they formed a posse and struck out into the nearby swamps in pursuit of Elizabeth’s killers.
These were hard men who had only recently fought a long and bitter war against a determined enemy. They rounded up the culprits in short order. Disinclined to avail themselves of whatever vestigial judicial apparatus might even exist in this place at this time, Ragland and company simply strung the captured miscreants up from some local trees. Once the bodies ceased their twitching, the vigilantes unceremoniously disposed of them in the nearby Yocona River.
The Aftermath
Sam Ragland buried his wife in the family plot and, in due time, moved on from the sordid events of 1866. He later remarried and fathered another son. The identity of the murderers has been irretrievably lost.
Family Cemetary
There is a small, well-maintained family cemetery right down the road from where we live. My wife and I walk together every day I’m not at work, and the weather is nice, so we resolved to do some exploring. What we found was a veritable goldmine of local history liberally intermixed with pathos.
Elizabeth Ragland was 52 years old when she was killed. Her vengeful husband, Sam, ultimately passed in 1894 at the ripe age of 83. There was no readily discernible evidence to be found in the plot of his second wife or subsequent child, though there were ample demised Raglands in attendance.
Per the headstones, RJ Ragland, presumably a brother or cousin, served in Company D, 3rd Regiment of the Mississippi Cavalry. He died in 1883 at the age of 60.
Evan Ragland, likely the first son of Sam and Elizabeth, was born in 1838, served in the 4th Mississippi Cavalry, and died in 1917 at 78. Their graves remain well-maintained to this day. One George Marshall Lynch had a particularly poignant story.
George Lynch married Miss Martha Ragland, who died in 1869 at age 25. He then wed Martha Adams, a local lady some fifteen years younger than he. She subsequently succumbed in 1909 at age fifty. George tragically outlived both of his cherished Marthas. All of this heartbreak you could see quietly etched into these old humble stones.
Ruminations
Cemeteries tell stories, and this was a great one. Right down the road from where I raised my kids, some 158 years ago there was committed a crime most heinous. A woman perished, and her husband was subsequently thrown into a feral rage. The perpetrators were duly apprehended and strung up with minimal fanfare, their cooling corpses disposed of like those of animals.
Such frontier justice was a most brutal thing indeed. All remaining then endeavored to get on with their lives. Sam Ragland’s liberation of the land records back in 1864 is the only reason land ownership in Lafayette County, Mississippi, can be tracked back to the days before the American Civil War today.
The American Deep South is the best place in the world to live. I have traveled the planet as a soldier and do not make such a lofty claim glibly. However, there was once a most horrible darkness in this place. Stark evidence of this fact can be found in a well-maintained family plot at the end of a gravel track just west of County Road 445, right down from Oxford, Mississippi. Sometimes the most amazing things do happen right in your backyard.