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N0KFQ > TODAY 28.09.13 16:12l 64 Lines 3052 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Today in History - Sep 28
Path: IZ3LSV<I0OJJ<VE3UIL<N0KFQ<KB0WSA
Sent: 130928/1336Z 5199@KB0WSA.MO.USA.NA BPQK1.4.55
Sep 28, 1918:
British soldier allegedly spares the life of an injured Adolf
Hitler
On September 28, 1918, in an incident that would go down in the
lore of World War I history_although the details of the event are
still unclear_Private Henry Tandey, a British soldier serving
near the French village of Marcoing, reportedly encounters a
wounded German soldier and declines to shoot him, sparing the
life of 29-year-old Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler.
Tandey, a native of Warwickshire, took part in the First Battle
of Ypres in October 1914 and the Battle of the Somme in 1916,
where he was wounded in the leg. After being discharged from the
hospital, he was transferred to the 9th Battalion in France and
was wounded again during the Third Battle of Ypres at
Passchendaele in the summer of 1917. From July to October 1918,
Tandey served with the 5th Duke of Wellington Regiment; it was
during this time that he took part in the successful British
capture of Marcoing, for which he earned a Victoria Cross for
"conspicuous bravery."
As Tandey later told sources, during the final moments of that
battle, as the German troops were in retreat, a wounded German
soldier entered Tandey's line of fire. "I took aim but couldn't
shoot a wounded man," Tandey remembered, "so I let him go." The
German soldier nodded in thanks, and disappeared.
Though sources do not exist to prove the exact whereabouts of
Adolf Hitler on that day in 1918, an intriguing link emerged to
suggest that he was in fact the soldier Tandey spared. A
photograph that appeared in London newspapers of Tandey carrying
a wounded soldier at Ypres in 1914 was later portrayed on canvas
in a painting by the Italian artist Fortunino Matania glorifying
the Allied war effort. As the story goes, when British Prime
Minister Neville Chamberlain traveled to Germany in 1938 to
engage Hitler in a last-ditch effort to avoid another war in
Europe, he was taken by the führer to his new country retreat in
Bavaria. There, Hitler showed Chamberlain his copy of the Matania
painting, commenting, "That's the man who nearly shot me."
The authenticity of the Tandey-Hitler encounter remains in
dispute, though evidence does suggest that Hitler had a
reproduction of the Matania painting as early as 1937_a strange
acquisition for a man who had been furious and devastated by the
German defeat at Allied hands in the Great War. Twice decorated
as a soldier, Hitler was temporarily blinded by a mustard gas
attack in Belgium in October 1918 and was in a military hospital
in Pacewalk, Germany, when he received news of the German
surrender. The experiences of battle_first glory and ultimately
disillusion and despondence_would color the rest of Hitler's life
and career, as he admitted in 1941, after leading his country
into another devastating conflict: "When I returned from the War,
I brought back home with me my experiences at the front; out of
them I built my National Socialist community."
73, K.O. n0kfq
N0KFQ @ KB0WSA.MO.USA.NA
E-mail: kohiggs@gmail.com
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