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Having spent ten hours fighting his way into blazing houses, rescuing victims and pulling out bodies as the Luftwaffe turned Coventry into a blazing inferno, Henry Tandey couldn’t help feel a sickening sense of guilt.

The seemingly never-ending assault from the skies on the night of November 14, 1940, eventually saw 1,400 people killed or seriously injured.

And for Henry there was a horrible thought - 'I could have stopped this'.

It seems odd for one man to have such thoughts. Even more so for the most decorated Private of World War One.

Born in Leamington in 1891, he enlisted into the Green Howards in August 1910 and was awarded a Distinguished Conduct Medal, a Military Medal and bar, and finally a Victoria Cross for “desperate bravery and great initiative” in one of the final battles of the First World War.

He was presented with his Victoria Cross by King George V at Buckingham Palace just before Christmas 1918.

Henry moved to Coventry after leaving the army in 1926 and was one of the city’s air raid wardens when the infamous Nazi raid began 14 years later.

Thousands of bombs destroyed the city centre over an 11-hour period and, as the dust settled, Henry reminisced on the fact that just two years earlier he had discovered that HE was the man who let Adolf Hitler live.

In the dying moments of the First World War 22 years earlier, he had pointed his rifle at a wounded German soldier trying to flee a French battlefield.

Their eyes met and Henry lowered his gun. The German nodded in thanks, then disappeared.

In that moment of compassion for a fellow human being, Henry, then 27, let 29-year-old Corporal Adolf Hitler walk free.

“I didn’t like to shoot at a wounded man,” he said in 1940.

“But if I’d only known who he would turn out to be... I’d give ten years now to have five minutes of clairvoyance then.”

For 20 years Henry had no idea he had missed the chance to kill Hitler.

But in 1938 he received a shocking phone call from Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who had just returned from a fruitless meeting with Hitler to try to talk him out of war.

Chamberlain had been invited to Hitler’s hilltop retreat in Bavaria and shown a reproduction of a famous painting called The Menin Crossroads.

An Italian war artist had captured soldiers of the Green Howards evacuating the wounded at the Battle of Ypres in 1914 – with Henry Tandey in the foreground carrying a comrade on his back.

Incredibly, Hitler recognised him as the man who spared him four years later, on September 28, 1918.

He told Chamberlain: “That man came so near to killing me 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 asked Chamberlain to convey his best wishes and gratitude to Henry, whose response to the phone call isn’t known.

Henry died in Coventry in 1977 at the age of 86.

He was cremated at Canley and his ashes were buried in Masnieres British Cemetery in Marcoing.