Category: Manly Stuff
While Alexander the Great is generally considered one of the Worlds Great Captains. He did fuck up a few times in the field just like everyone else.
One of these fubars was by marching his Army thru the dessert of South Iran. (Because his troops would not invade India and instead wanted to go home.So he punished them by doing this.)
Well as you can guess, The Army quickly ran out of water. But then a small amount was found and offered to the King. At the point old Al took the helmet full of water. Went to where everyone could see him and poured it out.
After that his troops would follow him anywhere.
Part utilitarian, part shrine, almost furniture: Grandpa’s gun cabinet always held fascinating treasures.
Even better, every item had its own special backstory.
Let’s face it — your gun safe is boring. Mine too, for many of the same reasons I’ll explain. It’s full of matte-black polymer rifles, a few optics you bought because some guy on YouTube told you to, and a mountain of gizmos you don’t really need.
Old school
Grandpa’s gun cabinet? It wasn’t so much about storage but more like a shrine — an oak-and-glass monument to a time when guns had a different role, hard-earned character, a certain aura and, above all, stories.
This short pontification is inspired by a recent GUNS Magazine Podcast. In episode #298, Roy Huntington and I discussed the changes in gun culture over the years and were instantly reminded — yet again — some AR owners don’t accept anything less than glowing praise about their favorite “weapon system.” Roy and I have taken every possible pain to explain we don’t hate ARs; in fact, between us, we probably have several dozen, yet the angry comments keep coming.
Guns such as grandpa’s Lefever Nitro double-barrel 20 gauge have more character in their splinter fore-end
than an entire cabinet full of black rifles — never mind the stories it represents!
In such remarks, the writers are unconsciously reinforcing the negative stereotypes of certain shooters as they completely miss the point by at least 50 MOA.
What we were trying to analyze is the significant changes in how shooters relate to firearms nowadays. There is nothing wrong with our “modern” gun culture, but anyone with an ounce of honesty will admit the all-encompassing black rifle and pistol craze has a dull, certain sameness. They’re useful, yes, and there is a certain beauty in function over form, but generally the word to describe them is “monotonous.”
Down home
Grandpa’s gun cabinet was so much different. Open the door and you were hit with the glorious sweet petroleum aroma of old-formula Hoppe’s No. 9, 3-in-1 oil, aged walnut and maybe a trace of cigar smoke. Your safe smells like plastic, silica packs and unfilled dreams.
Grandpa didn’t own five ARs that are identical except for different bolt carrier groups. His cabinet was the firearms version of the Whitman Sampler (look it up).
The stereotypical “load out” included a lever gun with honest bluing wear from countless deer seasons, a pump shotgun with a small crack in the stock that still dropped birds every fall, and a .22 rifle that taught three generations how to shoot. There was also a center-fire bolt-action rifle, maybe an old 98-pattern or a 1903 surplus Springfield. On these workaday guns, every nick, scratch and dent had a story attached.
Grandpa’s gun cabinet drawer often held a museum of old dog-eared, half-filled cartridge boxes,
each representing something interesting.
Even the ammo shelf was cooler. Grandpa stocked cartridges with names you’ve only heard of — .300 Savage, .257 Roberts, maybe a half-empty box of .32-20 that hadn’t been made since before you were born. These cartridges were for guns he used to own but (regretfully) sold years ago, while those partial boxes of ammo were kept “just in case.”
For pap, buying ammo wasn’t a bulk-online experience seeking the lowest cost per round of “commodity” calibers — it meant going to the hardware store and asking for a certain dusty green-and-yellow box behind the counter.
Furnishings
And there was the cabinet itself. It wasn’t a giant steel monolith hiding in the basement or closet. It was a piece of furniture, often prominent in the dining room or front hallway, with a plate-glass front and a tiny brass lock that wouldn’t stop a semi-determined raccoon.
The lock was primarily to keep the kids and other semi-honest people out of the guns without adult supervision, and it worked well, even though certain unkempt children wondered if a paper clip or bent wire would trip the simple mechanism.
Yet, I — sorry, I meant to say “those kids” — never tried it because it would break an important trust with somebody you never wanted to disappoint.
The glass front made a dangerous yet reassuring rattle when you opened it, a hollow jangling noise you can’t describe but one you’d recognize instantly. While not flashy, the whole thing was essentially a monument to the household armory. Grandpa wasn’t ostentatious, but he was quietly proud of his guns.
Ever “need” a 16-gauge bolt action Mossberg 190? The best place to find one was Grandpa’s gun cabinet!
Heart of the matter
The coolest thing about Grandpa’s cabinet wasn’t even the firearms within; it was the stories. When he opened that door, you didn’t just gain access to firearms—history came pouring out. “This one kept the coons out of the chicken coop back on the farm,” he pointed out.
Up until the 1950s, a fox or hawk snatching a chicken was nearly as serious as someone kidnapping a kid today because it meant soup for dinner. “This one’s been to deer camp every year since Eisenhower,” he said with a certain wistful tone, as you considered he hadn’t gone deer hunting in years. But, no matter…
Your safe just beeps angrily if you punch in the wrong code twice.
You’ll never know what you’ll find but treasures abound in Grandpa’s gun cabinet!
Long memories
Spend all you want on Cerakote, carbon fiber and aircraft aluminum, but you can’t buy Grandpa’s perspective, the experiences or the miles he put on those guns. His cabinet was cooler because it wasn’t just about what was inside — it was about the man who kept them, the history of a life he and his guns lived, and the stories he passed down every time he turned the little brass key.
My own grandkids will grow up with shooting memories of polymer handguns, beeping keypads and digital displays, but it just won’t be the same — and I think we’re all poorer because of it.
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.
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Some Red Hot Gospel there!
