Henry Tandey: The Soldier Who Supposedly Spared Hitler, and Why It Probably Never Happened
Henry Tandey was the most decorated British private soldier to come home from the First World War. He won the Victoria Cross, the Distinguished Conduct Medal and the Military Medal in the space of about five weeks in 1918. By rights he should be remembered for that alone. Instead he's remembered for something he couldn't recall doing, in a place the other man probably wasn't, on the word of the least trustworthy witness of the 20th century.
The story goes that on a French battlefield in September 1918, Tandey had a wounded German soldier in his sights and chose not to fire. The German nodded his thanks and limped away. His name was Adolf Hitler. It's a brilliant tale, and it's been told in books, documentaries, pub quizzes and a thousand social media posts. The trouble is that the closer you look at it, the more it falls apart.
Quick Answers
• Who was Henry Tandey? A private from Leamington Spa, born 30 August 1891, who won the VC, DCM and MM in 1918.
• Did he spare Hitler? Almost certainly not. The claim came from Hitler himself in 1938 and has never been backed up by any record.
• Where was Hitler on 28 September 1918? Records suggest he was only just back from leave, and his regiment was around 50 miles north of Marcoing.
• What did Tandey say about it? He said he couldn't remember the man. He didn't rule it out either.
• Where are his medals now? At the Green Howards Museum in Richmond, North Yorkshire.
A Stonemason's Son From Leamington Spa
Henry Tandey was born at Swain's Buildings on Kenilworth Street in Leamington Spa. His dad, James, was a journeyman stonemason, and young Henry went to St Peter's School in the town. According to the Leamington History Group, money was tight and he spent part of his childhood in an orphanage. By 18 he was stoking the boilers at the Regent Hotel on the Parade, which is about as far from glamour as you could get in a spa town.
You'll often read that he joined up at 14. He didn't. He was 18 or 19 when he signed up, and the teenage-recruit version is a myth, one of several bits of padding that have attached themselves to his story over the years.
In August 1910 he walked into the depot at Richmond, Yorkshire and joined the Alexandra, Princess of Wales's Own Yorkshire Regiment, better known as the Green Howards. He was 5ft 6in and picked up the nickname "Napper". Before the war he served with the 2nd Battalion in Guernsey and South Africa, which meant that when war broke out in 1914, he was a trained regular rather than a raw volunteer.
Four Years on the Western Front
Tandey was in the thick of it from the start. In October 1914 he fought at the First Battle of Ypres, where he carried a wounded comrade to safety at the Menin Road crossroads. Hold that thought, because it comes back later. He was shot in the arm on the Somme in 1916 and wounded again at Passchendaele in November 1917. By 1918 he'd been transferred to the 5th Battalion of the Duke of Wellington's (West Riding) Regiment, and it was with them that he won all three of his gallantry medals. Transfers like that were common as battalions were chewed up and rebuilt, and he'd also be mentioned in despatches five times over the course of the war.
It's worth remembering how rare it was for a regular soldier of 1914 to still be standing in 1918. The old professional army was more or less wiped out in the first few months. Men like Tandey, and the likes of Adrian Carton de Wiart, seemed to survive through a mix of luck and sheer stubbornness.
Five Weeks in 1918
Then came the summer and autumn of 1918, when Tandey had one of the most remarkable runs of any British soldier in the war. During the Hundred Days Offensive he won the DCM for leading a bombing party that rushed a German post with just two men backing him up, killing several of the enemy and taking around 20 prisoners. His Military Medal came at Havrincourt, where he carried a wounded man to safety under fire and helped break up a German counter-attack.
On 28 September 1918, at Marcoing near Cambrai, he topped the lot. When his platoon was pinned down by a machine gun, he crawled forward, found it and knocked it out with a Lewis gun team. At the canal crossing he repaired a broken plank bridge under heavy fire so the rest of the men could get across. Later that day he and a small group were surrounded by a much bigger German force. Rather than surrender, he led a bayonet charge straight through them, and 37 Germans ended up as prisoners. He was wounded but stayed on until the fighting was done.
King George V pinned the VC on him at Buckingham Palace the week before Christmas 1918. His hometown made him a Freeman of the Borough the following year, presenting him with an illuminated scroll in a silver-gilt casket, and the local Courier called him "a hero of the old berserk type", which is a fairly spectacular compliment. In November 1920 he was one of the VC holders chosen to form the guard of honour at the burial of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey.
For some perspective on how late in the war all this was, Marcoing came just six weeks before the Armistice. Across the lines, men were still dying right up to the final minute, as the story of Henry Gunther, the last soldier killed in World War I, shows.
How the Hitler Story Started
Here's the key thing: the Hitler story didn't come from Tandey, from his officers or from anyone who was at Marcoing. It came from Hitler, 20 years after the event.
In 1923 the Green Howards commissioned the Italian artist Fortunino Matania to paint a scene from the fighting at the Menin Road crossroads in 1914. In the foreground is a soldier carrying a wounded man on his back, and that soldier was identified as Henry Tandey. In 1937 a German called Dr Otto Schwend brought the painting to the attention of Hitler's staff, and a copy was sent over from the regiment. Hitler hung it at the Berghof, his mountain retreat in Bavaria.
The painting itself is worth a closer look. Matania worked it up from sketches made at the time, and it shows the 2nd Battalion Green Howards at a first aid post at a crossroads near Gheluvelt in October 1914. It's called Menin Crossroads, although the spot is also known as the Kruiseke crossroads. The officer on the left holding a map is the battalion's commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel King, who was killed on 30 October, about a week after the scene it depicts. The original still hangs in the Green Howards Museum in Richmond.
Here's the twist that makes the whole thing so slippery. Hitler really was near there in 1914. His regiment's first taste of battle came around Gheluvelt at the end of October 1914, within days and a few miles of the moment Matania painted. So when Hitler looked at that picture, he may well have recognised the landscape of his own first battle. It's easy to see how a vague memory of Ypres could have been stitched onto a British private whose face happened to be in the foreground, and then moved four years and roughly 60 miles south to Marcoing to make the story work.
The story then goes that when Neville Chamberlain visited the Berghof in September 1938, during the run-up to the Munich Agreement, Hitler pointed at the picture and told him that the soldier in it had nearly killed him, but let him go. Hitler supposedly asked Chamberlain to pass on his thanks. In the most popular version, Chamberlain phones Tandey at home in Coventry when he gets back to Britain.
That phone call is where the story first cracks. Historian David Johnson, who spent years on the case, found nothing in Chamberlain's papers to support it. Newspaper reports from 1939 instead suggest Chamberlain mentioned the story to a Green Howards officer, who then told Tandey at a regimental reunion in August 1939.
Why It Almost Certainly Never Happened
Hitler did serve on the Western Front, as a runner with the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, often called the List Regiment. He'd even been awarded the Iron Cross First Class in August 1918. So he was in the right war. The problem is that he doesn't seem to have been in the right place.
According to Bavarian records, Hitler was on leave until 27 September 1918 and only returned to the front on the 28th, the day of Tandey's VC action. On top of that, his regiment had moved on 17 September to the Wytschaete area in Belgium, around 50 miles north of Marcoing. For the encounter to have happened, Hitler would have needed to step off his leave train and turn up at the wrong battle, in the wrong country, on a different stretch of front to his own unit. Johnson's conclusion, first set out in One Soldier and Hitler, 1918 and then in The Man Who Didn't Shoot Hitler, is blunt: the two men didn't cross paths at Marcoing. The Bavarian State Archives backed up the timing of Hitler's leave in a letter as far back as October 1997.
Then there's the recognition problem. Hitler claimed he'd spotted Tandey from a newspaper photograph published around the time of the VC award, which he said he'd kept. You'd have to believe that a wounded German runner, in the chaos of a battle, got a good enough look at a British private's face to match it to a grainy newspaper picture years later. And the painting that supposedly jogged his memory doesn't even show Marcoing. It shows Ypres, four years earlier.
So why would Hitler make it up? Nobody knows for sure, but it suited him nicely. It cast him as a man spared by Providence for a higher purpose, a theme he leaned on constantly. It also gave him a warm little anecdote to share with a British prime minister at the exact moment he wanted Britain to think of him as a reasonable old soldier. It's the same period when he had cheerleaders in the British press, as we covered in our piece on the Daily Mail and Lord Rothermere's fondness for Hitler.
What Tandey Actually Said
Tandey's own response was about as honest as you'd hope. Speaking to the Coventry Herald in August 1939, he said people told him he'd met Hitler, adding: "Maybe they're right but I can't remember him."
He did say that he'd let wounded Germans go that day, which fits with what we know about soldiers at the end of a long battle not wanting to shoot men who were no longer a threat. So the kernel of the story, a British soldier choosing mercy over a wounded enemy, may well be true. It's just that the enemy almost certainly wasn't Hitler.
After the Coventry Blitz of 14 November 1940, which destroyed his home in Cope Street, Tandey is reported to have said he wished he'd known what that German corporal would become. The exact wording varies from source to source, so it's worth treating with some caution. Johnson found no sign that Tandey or the people around him ever took the story seriously, and after 1940 he stayed silent on the subject, presumably hoping it would just go away.
Life After the War
Tandey left the army in 1926 and settled in Coventry with his second wife, Edith. He took a job as a commissionaire at the Standard Motor Company and stayed there for 38 years, later working on reception at the Standard-Triumph offices at Fletchamstead. Colleagues from the 1960s remembered him as modest and courteous, not the sort to go on about his medals.
During the Second World War he served as an air raid warden in Coventry, which meant that when the Luftwaffe flattened much of the city in November 1940, he was out in it. Edith happened to be away when their house was hit, which was a small mercy on a night that killed hundreds of people.
He died at home in Coventry on 20 December 1977, aged 86. He'd asked for his ashes to be scattered at the British cemetery at Marcoing, but instead they were buried in October 1978 at the British Cemetery at Masnières, just down the road.
What Happened to His Medals
Tandey's medals went under the hammer at Sotheby's on 26 November 1980 and sold for £27,000 to a private collector. In November 1997 they found their way home to the Green Howards, and they're now part of the regimental museum's Victoria Cross collection in Richmond, the same town where he'd enlisted 87 years earlier.
Leamington didn't forget him either. In September 2012, 94 years to the day after his VC action, a blue plaque went up on Kenilworth Street near where he was born. A maple tree was also planted in his memory in Jephson Gardens, although the plaque that went with it has since disappeared.
The Man Behind the Myth
It's a bit unfair, really. Henry Tandey survived four years of the worst fighting in history, was wounded three times and pulled off one of the bravest days of any British soldier in 1918. Yet his name mostly turns up online as the answer to a "what if" question that was planted by Hitler himself. If you want an alternative version of history, it's more interesting to wonder about the Vienna of 1913, when Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, Freud and Stalin all lived in the same place. Tandey's story deserves to be told on its own terms: a stonemason's son who went from stoking hotel boilers to the VC, and never made a fuss about any of it.
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Sources
1. Private Henry Tandey VC and Adolf Hitler, The History Press
2. The Man Who Didn't Shoot Hitler, Sky HISTORY
3. Henry Tandey VC DCM MM, Leamington History Group
4. Henry Tandey VC, DCM, MM, Standard Triumph Works Directory
5. Victoria Cross Recipient Private Henry Tandey, Warfare History Network
6. Private Henry Tandey VC DCM MM, British Empire
7. Crossroads at Gheluvelt, British Empire
8. The Menin Crossroads, painting by Matania, IWM Lives of the First World War
10. The Man Who Didn't Shoot Hitler: The Story of Henry Tandey VC and Adolf Hitler, 1918, David Johnson (The History Press, 2014)
