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While compiling the timeline for “Pistol of the Century,” our tribute to the 1911 in the June issue of Field & Stream, I read through many accounts of the 1911 in combat. The most unusual shot,(and possibly the best ever) made in wartime with a 1911 pistol had to be the one fired by a USAAF B-24 co-pilot named Owen J. Baggett in March, 1943 in the skies over Burma. Of course, I am biased toward this one as it involves a flying target . . .

On a mission to destroy a railroad bridge, Baggett’s bomber squadron was intercepted by Japanese Zero fighters and his plane was badly damaged. After holding off the enemy with the top turret .50s while the gunner tried to put out onboard fires, Baggett bailed out with the rest of the crew. He and four others escaped the burning bomber before it exploded.

The Zero pilots circled back to strafe the parachuting crewmen, killing two and lightly wounding Baggett, who played dead in his harness, hoping the Japanese would leave him alone. Though playing dead, Baggett still drew his .45 and hid it alongside his leg…just in case. A Zero approached within a few feet of Baggett at near stall speeds. The pilot opened the canopy for a better look at his victim.

Baggett raised his pistol and fired four shots into the cockpit. The Zero spun out of sight. Although Baggett could never believe he had shot down a fighter plane with his pistol, at least one credible report said the plane was found crashed, the pilot thrown clear of the wreckage with a single bullet in his head.

If Baggett really did shoot down a fighter with his 1911, it has to count as one of the greatest feats ever accomplished with a .45.

Baggett survived two years in a Japanese prison camp in Singapore and eventually retired from the Air Force as a colonel.

 

The Germans referred to their massive 1944 counteroffensive through the Ardennes as “Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein” or “Operation Watch on the Rhine.”

We called it the Battle of the Bulge. Regardless of the terminology, this sweeping attack represented the Germans’ final hope at staving off unmitigated disaster.

The stakes really could not have been higher. Success might mean a negotiated peace. Hitler hoped to turn the US and the UK against the Soviets for a united fight against the forces of Bolshevism. Failure would mean abject defeat and a ravaged homeland. Such pressures on young men can precipitate some fairly egregious behaviors.

Kampfgruppe Peiper led by SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Joachim Peiper represented the vanguard of the 6^th SS Panzer Army commanded by Sepp Dietrich. Racing against the clock and an ever-dwindling fuel supply, Peiper’s panzers crushed American resistance and punched deep into the Allied rear. The farther they pushed the more precarious their situation became and the more desperate they grew.

On December 17, 1944, German SS troops captured some 120 American troops from the 285^th Field Artillery Observation Battalion. Desperate to continue the advance and lacking the facilities to manage prisoners, SS troops opened fire on the unarmed Americans. 84 Allied soldiers were killed.

Sepp Dietrich, Joachim Peiper, and their immediate subordinates were all tried after the war for murder. There resulted 43 death sentences and another 22 defendants sentenced to life in prison. None of the executions were actually carried out. Peiper was eventually released from prison and settled in Traves in Eastern France. In the early morning of July 14, 1976, unknown assailants set Peiper’s house alight. The unrepentant Nazi died of smoke inhalation.

The Malmedy Massacre came to define the Battle of the Bulge. Once word of the shootings got out very few SS prisoners survived to see the inside of a prison camp. Through the shaded lens of history it is easy to look down our long Roman noses at the SS troops involved and rightly revile them. However, our own behavior in this regard was not without blemish.

The Setting

Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, kicked off on July 9, 1943. The command structure for this convoluted operation was complex, but LTG George Patton commanded the American ground element. In the lead-up to the invasion, Patton was in rare form.

Patton addressed his officers prior to the invasion so as to dispense last-minute command guidance and encourage his men. Many of the troops involved in Operation Husky had not seen combat before. Emotions were running high.

One of Patton’s regimental commanders, Colonel Forrest E. Cookson, later testified that General Patton had stated, “If the enemy continued to resist after US troops had come within 200 yards of their defensive position, surrender of those enemy soldiers need not be accepted.” Some of Patton’s troops apparently took that directive quite literally.

Event Number 1

Green troops from the 180^th Infantry Regiment were given the task of capturing Biscari Airfield and linking up with the US 1^st Infantry Division. The 180^th so struggled in the first two days of the invasion that the Division commander MG Troy Middleton considered sacking the Regimental commander. By July 14^th the men of the 180^th were tired, frightened, and frustrated.

SGT Horace West was tasked with securing a group of some 45 Italian and 3 German POWs. The prisoners were stripped of their shoes and shirts to discourage attempted escape. West and a few others marched the prisoners about a mile back from the lines before peeling off eight or nine for submission to the Regimental S2 (Intelligence Officer) for questioning. SGT West then borrowed a Thompson submachine gun from his company First Sergeant Haskell Brown. When the 1SG asked why he wanted the Thompson, West replied that he was going to, “Kill those sons of bitches.”

SGT West directed his men to turn away and raked the group of unarmed shirtless prisoners with automatic fire. Once he had the group knocked down he swapped out magazines, switched his Thompson to semiauto, and shot each of the fallen POWs through the chest. The following day the Regimental Chaplain discovered the 37 bodies and alerted his superiors.

Event Number 2

CPT John Compton, commander of C Company, 1^st Battalion, 180^th Infantry Regiment, was undeniably strung out. He had been without sleep for three days, and his company had taken an absolute pummeling. Persistent and relentless sniper and mortar fire exacted a horrible toll.

By the time Compton got to his objective at the Biscari Airfield, they had already taken heavy casualties. Of the 34 men in Compton’s 2d Platoon, fully a dozen were either dead or severely wounded. Italian snipers had fired upon wounded American troops as well as the medics dispatched to tend to them. The pressure of such grinding sniper activity weighed heavily on Compton and his men.

When Compton’s company finally seized their objective they took some 35 Italian prisoners. These Italian troops were located in a dugout fighting position from which the sniper fire had been coming previously. Several of the Italians were in civilian clothing when they were captured.

Through an interpreter, an American squad leader named SGT Hair asked the Italians if they were the ones who had been shooting at the American wounded. The Italians refused to answer. SGT Hair reported all of this to his platoon leader, 1LT Blanks, who duly passed it on to CPT Compton. Compton said simply, “Get them shot.”

With CPT Compton in tow, his men formed an 11-man firing squad, lined up the unarmed Italian soldiers, and gunned them down. A few of the POWs attempted to run. When the dust cleared Compton’s men had killed them all.

The Guns

The Thompson submachine gun was designed to fight the First World War. The first operational prototypes became available within days of the 1918 armistice. With no massive government contracts to fill, General John Taliaferro Thompson marketed his handy little meat grinder to Law Enforcement and civilian users. Abuse by such sordid characters as John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd bought us the onerous National Firearms Act of 1934.

Everything about the Thompson is wrong. It is too heavy, too unbalanced, and too complicated. However, when the US was dragged kicking and screaming into WW2 it was all we had available. In competent hands, the Thompson was nonetheless a reliable and effective close-combat tool.

The M1 Garand was called simply the M1 by those who wielded it. At 9.5 pounds and 44 inches long the M1 was a beast of a thing. However, the .30-06 round it fired was inimitably powerful. A friend who carried one in WW2 once told me that so long as you hit a German soldier center of mass with the M1 he was down and out immediately.

The M1 soldiered on from 1934 until 1957. I actually saw images taken from Haiti that showed security guards armed with M1 rifles in the news just last week. The M1 rifle was one of the most critical weapons in the American arsenal during WW2.

The Rest of the Story

News like this is all but impossible to suppress in a congested war zone. Eventually, word got back to General Omar Bradley who confronted Patton over it. This was Patton’s subsequent entry in his war diary that evening, “I told Bradley that it was probably an exaggeration, but in any case to tell the Officer to certify that the dead men were snipers or had attempted to escape or something, as it would make a stink in the press and also would make the civilians mad. Anyhow, they are dead, so nothing can be done about it.”

Patton was later informed that the 45th Division’s Inspector General found “No provocation on the part of the prisoners…They had been slaughtered.” Upon further introspection, Patton purportedly said, “Try the bastards.”

SGT Horace West admitted to the killings but claimed that a combination of fatigue and LTG Patton’s ambiguous orders were mitigating circumstances. He was convicted of premeditated murder by court-martial and sentenced to life in prison. Eisenhower, ever eager to avoid an unnecessary scandal, remitted his sentence on November 24, 1944. West was restored to active duty and served in combat until the end of the war. He received an honorable discharge and lived out his days in Oklahoma. He died in 1974.

CPT John Compton was court-martialed over the deaths of the 36 prisoners under his charge and used a similar defense, particularly relying upon LTG Patton’s directives regarding prisoners resisting within 200 yards of friendly forces. He was acquitted on October 23, 1944, and transferred to the 179^thInfantry Regiment. Two weeks later he was killed in action fighting in Italy.

The winners write the history, and war is bad. Normal men forced into such abnormal circumstances are frequently driven to do things that seem unnatural from the comfort of our living rooms. The very act of combat is the most repugnant of human pursuits.

The Axis was ultimately defeated and with them went their death camps and dark aspirations for world domination. However, it took hard men doing hard things to put the final nail in the Nazi coffin. Sometimes war takes those hard men to some particularly dark places.

 

 

A wealthy New Jersey businessman had his firearms seized after he used an AR-15 to chase car thieves away from his property last year, according to a new report from the New York Post.

Newly released footage shows Evan Wexler, naked, in front of his Fort Lee mansion firing several shots at another man who was trying to steal his Mercedes G-Wagon. According to the Post, it was the 18^th time thieves had attempted to steal one of Wexler’s exotic cars, and the police had done little to stop them.

“I keep calling the police and showing them videos to prove I’m not crying wolf,” Wexler said. “I’m begging them to deter these guys, but they’re not doing s–t. The cops show up too late or go on high-speed chases but they never catch anyone.”

So, the wealthy butcher-turned-high-end hamburger and steak supermarket wholesaler decided to take matters into his own hands.

In the video, the would-be thief can be seen opening the door of Wexler’s Mercedes, which he admits he sometimes left unlocked. According to the Post, car thieves often looked in Wexler’s daily drivers to find keys to his more exotic cars.

In one incident last August, they stole Wexler’s $500,000 Lamborghini Aventador SVJ Coupe. It was found a week later with $80,000 worth of damage.

Moments after the thief starts the Mercedes, Wexler can be seen on his home security camera running onto his porch. He isn’t wearing any clothes, and he’s holding what appears to be an AR-style rifle. He keeps the gun trained on the thief as the man runs away and fires what the Post describes as “warning shots” from his porch.

The move succeeded in deterring that particular thief, but police were none too thrilled. They slapped Wexler with aggravated assault and possession of weapons for unlawful purposes, which the meat mogul pled down to possession of a deadly weapon.

“An incident happens where a guy gets my car started, I came out of the house with a rifle, the guy puts the car into drive, drives forward, and my gun discharges,” Wexler described the incident to the Post. “At that point, Fort Lee police show up, there’s no victim of a shooting, but they come and turn the tables on me.”

Wexler was forced to sell his guns and was sentenced to two years of probation.

“Assault firearms” are illegal in New Jersey, and Wexler’s rifle appears to meet the state’s definition of that term. But the Post reports that the charge Wexler pleaded guilty to was leveled when police found another weapon on his property that violated the state’s standard-capacity magazine ban.