In Retrospect, We Could Have Avoided World War 2 and the Holocaust. What Would You Have Done?
The Shot Not Taken: A Moment That Haunts History
Put yourself in the mud, the blood, and the mind of the man who spared Adolf Hitler.
It is 28th September 1918, near the French village of Marcoing. The air is thick with the stench of cordite and decay. You are Henry Tandey, a private in the 5th Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. To call you a veteran would be an understatement; you are a hardened survivor of some of the Western Front’s most brutal slaughters—Ypres, the Somme, Passchendaele. Your chest bears the ribbons of the Distinguished Conduct Medal and the Military Medal, and you have just learned you are to receive the Victoria Cross for astounding bravery. You are, by any measure, a hero.
The war is in its final, gasping weeks. The German army is in retreat, but it is a desperate, fighting withdrawal. You are exhausted, a hollowed-out man running on instinct and training.
Now, picture this specific moment. You have just fought through a ferocious battle to secure a crossing. The enemy is falling back. Through the smoke and chaos, movement catches your eye. A group of German soldiers is scrambling for cover, harried by the relentless British advance.
Then, you see him.
One limping, wounded soldier struggles to keep up. He is separated and vulnerable. He staggers into your line of sight, no more than twenty or thirty yards away. He is not a monster; he is a young man, pale and gaunt, his uniform caked in filth. He is utterly defenceless. He turns, and for a split second, your eyes meet. In his, you see not the fanatical glare of a foe, but the same animal fear you have seen in the eyes of your own comrades. The same exhaustion. The same desperate desire to live.
Your rifle is up. The stock is familiar and solid against your cheek. The sights are aligned perfectly on the centre of his body. Your finger rests on the trigger. There is no one else. In this bubble of time, it is just you and him.
This is your dilemma.
The training, the years of killing, the command to eliminate the enemy—all scream one thing: Squeeze the trigger. It is your duty. It is what a soldier does.
But another voice, worn thin but not yet broken, whispers something else. This is not a man fighting back. This is a wounded, retreating soldier. To shoot him now feels less like combat and more like… murder. An execution. It would be a violation of some unspoken code of the battlefield, a final surrender of your own humanity in a war that has already stolen so much of it.
What do you do?
The Ticking Clock of History:
We know what the real Henry Tandey did. He lowered his rifle. He gave a faint nod. The young German soldier, Adolf Hitler, nodded in return and disappeared into the smoke.
William “Henry” Tandey emerged from the First World War as one of the most decorated British private soldiers of the conflict. His gallantry was beyond question, evidenced by a remarkable set of awards that included the Victoria Cross, the Distinguished Conduct Medal, and the Military Medal. His most famous act of valour, for which he received the VC, occurred just days before the encounter with Hitler, when he braved intense fire to rescue several wounded comrades and almost single-handedly stormed a German machine-gun nest. To his fellow soldiers and his country, he was the very embodiment of courage and resilience under fire, a humble man who had performed extraordinary feats.
However, the weight of his wartime legacy became profoundly complicated in the ensuing decades. As Adolf Hitler rose to power and the terrifying spectre of Nazism loomed over Europe, Tandey was confronted with the haunting possibility that an act of mercy on a French battlefield had catastrophic consequences. The story became public in the 1930s, and Tandey was left to grapple with the immense burden of hindsight. He was reported to have said, “If only I had known what he would turn out to be, I would have shot him without a moment’s thought,” a sentiment that reflected a deep and personal anguish over a decision made in a fleeting moment of humanity.
For the rest of his life, Tandey was forced to live with this unintended and terrible connection to one of history’s greatest monsters. The man celebrated for his bravery was now also known for the shot he did not take, a cruel twist of fate that overshadowed his genuine heroism. He passed away in 1977, his name forever linked to an agonising “what if” of the 20th century.
The connection was solidified when, according to accounts, Adolf Hitler himself identified Tandey as his saviour. The Führer had apparently recognised Tandey from a newspaper photograph depicting the war hero carrying a wounded soldier at Ypres, an image that also featured Tandey’s distinctive Yorkshire Regiment cap badge. In 1938, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was reportedly shown the painting by Hitler during the Munich Agreement discussions, with Hitler stating, “That man came so near to killing me that I thought I should never see Germany again; Providence saved me from such a devilishly accurate fire.”
And that is the heart of the trap. You are not standing there in 1918 with the knowledge of the Holocaust, the Blitz, or the millions of graves to come. You are a man in the mud, making a split-second decision based on the morality of the moment.
Could you have pulled the trigger, ending a life that appeared broken and defeated, on the chance of what it might become? Or would the instinct for mercy, so precious and so rare in that hellscape, have prevailed?
To pull the trigger is to commit an act that feels, in that very second, like a profound moral wrong.
Not to pull the trigger is, with the awful clarity of hindsight, to allow a cataclysm to walk away.
So, I ask you again. Put down this article. Close your eyes. Feel the weight of the rifle. Smell the acrid air. See the frightened young man in your sights.
Your finger is on the trigger.
What do you do?
