by Alex Kershaw
Sparks’s first assignment was to serve on an admissions committee. His first day on the committee, a judge appeared in his office. “Here, sign these,” the judge told Sparks. “I’ve checked them over and they’re all right.” Sparks said he wanted to look at what he was signing. He did so and realized the papers admitted men who had in fact failed the bar exam not once but three times.
“These guys flunked the bar three times,” Sparks told the judge when he returned. “How can they be admitted?”
“They’re Democratic … you’ll need them for the election.”
Sparks refused to sign. The judge apparently never forgave him. Far too blunt and honest to go far in politics, he would never break the habit of speaking truth to power, whether to a four-star general or a state’s governor. He served just two years before leaving the court in disgust, then returned to Delta, to the cottonwood-lined Gunnison River and the peaks of Grand Mesa, to resume his old practice. Eventually, a specialization in water law led to him serving as director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board for twenty-one years. Sparks’s colleagues savored like “fine wine” his sometimes fierce but always witty memos. Until he retired from his law practice in 1979, he always fought “for the little guy,” according to his son Kirk, and against corruption, corporate malpractice, polluters, and other powerful interests, and was especially determined to preserve Colorado water rights for the state and to protect its natural resources. “Colorado can never repay [Sparks],” recalled former governor Dick Lamm, “for the way he protected Colorado water. I think he would have fought a duel to save Colorado water for Coloradans.”
LAMAR, COLORADO, 1970S
THE PAST WOULD not die. Sparks could not forget the war. As the decades passed, he felt the need to commemorate the men who had died under his command. He also wanted to spend time with those who had survived. They alone understood what he had endured. Only they knew the cauldron of war that had forged him more than anything in his life, far more than the bitter poverty and unemployment of his youth. In the seventies, he began to attend Company E reunions in Lamar, sharing long-repressed memories and drinks with men like the Montana journalist Jack Hallowell, who had also survived the long journey from Sicily to Dachau. “Sparks had known every man in the company on a first name basis,” recalled Hallowell, “whether they were married, how many kids they had, what they liked for breakfast.” Now Sparks was no longer Captain Sparks or Colonel but Felix or simply Sparks or even “Sparky.” “If there was a piano,” added Hallowell, “I’d play the German song everybody knew—‘Lili Marlene.’ Sparks would boom out the verses, even the questionable ones.”
The bond between Sparks and the men who had carried out his orders had been something holy, and it would never weaken. As Irwin Rommel’s troops said of him: “Er hat die Strapazen mitgemacht”—“He shared the shit.” Sparks had certainly done that and more. “When the regiment had wanted an objective taken, Sparks was frequently first choice,” remembered Hallowell. “If you were with him, you knew your unit would be leading the assault. If the unit got in a jam, he’d take personal risks trying to help his men get out of it. I don’t know what guardian angel kept watch over him, but one certainly did.”
In the early eighties, Sparks organized his regiment’s first reunion and then dedicated himself to preserving its history, publishing newsletters and encouraging the men he had once commanded to also honor their fallen comrades. “He was a lawyer and had deep pockets,” recalled Anse “Eddie” Speairs, who had liberated the liquor warehouse in Aschaffenburg. “He didn’t hesitate to spend his money on his hobby—the 157th Infantry.” Speairs had gone on to serve in Korea and Vietnam: “I volunteered for it all. It gets in your blood.… It’s like dope—you get accustomed to it and you love it.”
Among those who attended the first reunion was K Company medic Joe Medina, who had served under Sparks for almost four years and later became one of his best friends from the regiment. Medina had retreated into the mountains of Colorado and tended his family’s sheep herd for years after he returned from Europe, finding the remote solitude the most effective balm for his post-traumatic stress.
“You remember that time you gave me first aid?” Joe was often asked at reunions.
“No, I don’t remember,” Joe would reply. “I treated so many.”
Another stalwart over the years was Rex Raney, who had also returned to Colorado after the war and actually lived several blocks from Sparks in Delta. In fact, his mother-in-law had worked for a time as Sparks’s secretary. It wasn’t until he had been married for twenty years that Raney, who became a teacher, realized how much the war had affected him. He had, like Sparks, gone all the way, from Sicily to Dachau, convinced he would never again see his parents, let alone the United States or Colorado. As with many of the veterans at reunions, he had struggled to “put the pieces back together” when he returned, suffering terribly from post-traumatic stress, especially at night, when the past that he tried so hard to forget returned in full, vivid force. “My wife told me the first fifteen years were not the best,” he recalled. “I guess things happened at night. She’s had a little peace for the last twenty or so.”
Just as he had done during combat, Sparks remembered every man’s name, and also the name of each man’s wife, and sometimes the names of his children. During one reunion, Vincent Stigliani, who had served in E Company until captured, turned up some forty years after the war and surprised Sparks. “You don’t remember me, do you?” asked Stigliani, who was fluent in Italian and had often sought out chickens and fresh food for Sparks.
“It’s Vinnie!” cried Sparks. “The chicken guy!”
Sparks was back in his element, surrounded by soldiers once more, concerned about them again, determined they should receive the recognition they were due. In 1982, he learned that some men at a reunion had not received medals he had recommended them for in January 1945, after the battle of Reipertswiller. These men had been with him that terrible day, January 18, when he had led two tanks toward his surrounded battalion. In fact, none had received so much as a Bronze Star. The investigation Sparks had requested into the battle at the time had in fact recommended that Sparks’s entire battalion also receive some sort of official honor. No action had been taken. Sparks immediately set about remedying this, and three years later, in 1985, the tanks’ crews finally received the medals he had first recommended them for forty years earlier.
ONE DAY, ABOVE all others, from more than five hundred at war, still haunted Sparks. The events of April 29 at Dachau had cast a long shadow over his life. According to his son Kirk, he was greatly pained by the notion that he had not acted honorably and humanely that day. He had stopped the madness, the slaughter. The idea that others might think otherwise nagged at him like an old wound, no matter how many accolades and medals he received in recognition of his service and sacrifice.
At a reunion in the early nineties, the talk was of an inspector general’s report into the shootings at Dachau, titled Investigation of Alleged Mistreatment of German Guards at Dachau, which was finally declassified in 1987 and then discovered in the National Archives by a researcher in 1991. There had been rumors and innuendo for decades about Sparks and his men’s actions at the camp in the first hours after liberation. Brazenly false accounts of what had happened had stained their reputations.
One of Sparks’s fellow Thunderbirds had, sadly, done the most harm. According to the largely mendacious book Dachau—Hour of the Avenger by former battalion doctor Howard Buechner, published in 1986, Sparks’s men had killed more than five hundred Germans in cold blood. It was an utterly shameful falsehood, with serious implications. At a reunion shortly after the book’s release, some men were even overheard talking about how much jail time they were going to have to serve—indeed, whether they would have to die in prison.
In 1945, Buechner had actually admitted under oath that he refused to treat the wounded SS men after the shooting and that he had seen 15 or 16 dead and injured S
S men on the ground along the coal yard wall. The number was far less than the 520 who he claimed in his book had been executed that day, of which 346 were, he added, machine-gunned by I Company’s Lieutenant Jack Busheyhead, a former good friend of Buechner’s who was no longer alive to defend himself.
Neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers have predictably seized on Buechner’s fiction ever since—particularly on the Internet—in an attempt to diminish the crimes committed by the SS at Dachau by equating the actions of the SS with Sparks’s and his men’s: Both were guilty of atrocity. Indeed, the SS had been victims too. But the declassified inspector general’s report finally set the record straight.
LT. COLONEL FELIX L. SPARKS, O-386497, WAS IN COMMAND OF THE 3RD BATTALION, 157TH INFANTRY, DURING THE DACHAU OPERATION.… ACCORDING TO THE TESTIMONY [HE] WAS THE ONE WHO STOPPED THE SHOOTING OF THOSE SEGREGATED. THE INSPECTOR WAS UNABLE TO FIND ANY CONFIRMATION OF THE STATEMENT OF ONE WITNESS THAT LT. COLONEL SPARKS FIRED HIS PISTOL [AT A GERMAN]; THERE IS NO PROOF THAT HE HAD ACTUAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE BOX CAR SHOOTING ALTHOUGH NEARBY; NOR THAT HE KNEW OF THE SEGREGATION OF THE SS MEN OR THE PURPOSE THEREOF.
The report concluded that because Sparks had not been questioned, it could not make any “conclusions as to his responsibility.” Sparks had long wondered why he had not been called to testify, given that he had in fact been in Europe during the investigation. No one had wanted to hear his side of the story, reasoned Sparks, because he would have contradicted evidence given by General Linden, a West Pointer. Under oath, Sparks would also have revealed why the 42nd Division general and his party had been at Dachau in the first place—to escort the reporter Marguerite Higgins and thereby garner headlines. “It didn’t look good,” said Sparks, “for an assistant division commander to go out of his area with a nice-looking babe to someone else’s territory so she could conduct interviews.”
In the early nineties, a Jewish World War II veteran named David Israel, who had visited Dachau after the liberation, began to research the events of April 29, 1945. Israel was fascinated by the many conflicting and dramatic accounts of what American soldiers had done that day. He learned that a group of photographers had been with the 45th Division, the 3rd Division, and the 42nd Division as they sped toward Dachau, Munich, and Berchtesgaden to the south. The film crews and the 163rd Signal Corps men were assigned to these units in the hope they would get the scoop of the war—shots of Hitler being captured.
Israel contacted members of the corps, hoping that perhaps they might be able to tell him more about what had really happened at Dachau. They were not under Sparks’s command, so they would have little incentive to lie or cover up. He discovered that one man, Robert Goebel, had been at Dachau but had never spoken about events there. In early 1994, Israel tracked him down to an intensive cardiac care unit in Buffalo, New York, where he was recovering from heart surgery.
“We were in the army together,” said Israel over the telephone. “I’m doing some research about the war.”
“Are you crazy, calling me here? I can’t remember that long ago.”
“How about one day? Dachau, April 29, when Germans were lined up against a wall?”
“I remember that.… I took pictures there. Never developed some of them; matter of fact they’re still in a can, back in my garage in New Jersey.… Look, if I recover, I’ll send you the negatives.”
Israel knew from others in the 163rd Signal Corps that motion picture film of the killings in the coal yard had been destroyed in London, along with other images, after senior figures had ordered it never be seen again. Clearly, some images had escaped destruction, but would the negatives reveal anything? After fifty years, would they have survived in a fit state to be developed?
Goebel did live and did send the negatives, which were spotted and damaged. Israel had them developed carefully. He was stunned by what he saw in four shots, shown in sequence on the negative. At the next reunion of the regiment, Israel appeared and pulled out the images. The four clearly showed Sparks thrusting his hand out, firing his pistol, shouting for his men to stop. Taken a split second apart, they showed beyond any doubt what Sparks and his men had sworn to be true: He had not ordered the killings. He had stopped them.
Sparks looked at the images in astonishment.
“Yes, that’s me. There’s the map in my pocket.”
According to Israel, Sparks “choked up,” deeply moved. Finally, he felt he had been proved innocent.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
THE LAST BATTLE
The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you choose, what you think, what you do—is who you become. Your integrity is your destiny … it is the light that guides your way.
—HERACLITUS
Felix Sparks, the successful lawyer, 1950s. [Courtesy of the Sparks family]
DENVER, COLORADO, MARCH 15, 1993
THE FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD pulled out a 9mm semiautomatic and then pulled the trigger, aiming at a car full of teenagers. One of the bullets went through a rear window and hit sixteen-year-old Lee Pumroy in the back of the head. Lee’s twin brother was beside him in the backseat and held him as he died in his arms. The shooter, it was later reported, had been intent on hitting John Vigil, a sixteen-year-old passenger in Pumroy’s car, but had ended up killing Felix Sparks’s grandson instead.
It was a shattering blow to an old man who had already experienced far too much death and tragedy. Indeed, Lee Pumroy’s killing wounded Sparks more than any other loss, both during the war and in the almost fifty years since the guns had fallen silent in Europe. He was particularly close to Lee and his twin brother. They had lived for a while with Sparks after their mother Kim, one of Sparks’s three children, had divorced.
Sparks’s eldest son, Kirk, had only seen his father cry once before, when Kirk’s mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer, which thankfully she had survived. Sparks had once scolded Kirk himself for crying in public. But now the tears came in torrents. According to grandson Blair Lee Sparks, a Denver police officer, the killing opened a floodgate of suppressed grief. The heartache at losing so many men, hidden for more than fifty years, and now the pain of losing a loved one to the gun, was finally too much for any man to bear.
The grief could have easily killed Sparks. He was recovering from his third heart operation when he learned his grandson had been killed. Incredibly, he had been in Miami, Arizona, attending his ninety-five-year-old mother’s funeral, when he was told of the fatal shooting. At least he had been spared having to break the news to her. Days later, at his grandson’s funeral, he told mourners it was just not right that grandparents should outlive their grandchildren, and he began to weep once more.
The only other time grandson Blair had seen Sparks lose his composure was when a burglar had broken into Blair’s home. Sparks had heard about the burglary, grabbed his Colt .45, the same pistol he’d fired at Dachau, and turned up late at night in his pajamas. No one was going to hurt his family. The Denver police had finally managed to calm him down. “They were like: ‘Who’s this old guy from World War II in pajamas with a .45 strapped on?’ ”
Not long after the funeral, Sparks wrote to his friend Jack Hallowell, who now lived close by in Denver: “May God bless you for thinking of us in our time of grief and tragedy. Friends like you help us bear the pain of our broken hearts. While the funeral for our beloved grandson is over, the battle has just begun in hopes of sparing others from similar grief and tragedy. It will be my last battle.”
Seventy-six-year-old Sparks was not content to mourn and grieve. As was in his nature, he would strike back. He was determined to stop the senseless slaughter of children on American streets by changing the law. At the ensuing trial, the teenage shooter, sixteen-year-old Phillip Trujillo, was convicted of murder. Sparks then devoted every waking moment to a campaign to change the gun laws in Colorado. “I’m not the type to sit back and grieve, though we grieve a lot,” he said. Yet he was surely fighting an impossible battle in Colorado, where the rig
ht to carry a gun, whatever one’s age, had been considered a birthright since the state was admitted to the Union in 1876.
Sparks formed a pressure group comprising people who had lost loved ones. “Elect me your president,” he told one meeting of bereaved Denver parents. “I’ll put in 50,000, or whatever is required. I’ll work full time.” Sparks duly became the leader of PUNCH: People United No Children’s Handguns. To fight his case in the courts, he got himself readmitted to the bar in Colorado. Soon, the story of a highly decorated combat veteran railing against gun violence started to draw state and then nationwide attention. “It’s difficult to talk about this but I have to for the other kids,” Sparks told one reporter. “It was the other grandson who got me started because he was threatening to get everybody who had anything to do with it. I told him he couldn’t do that and he said: ‘Grandpa, I can get a gun anywhere.’ ”
In the same interview, Sparks admitted that it wasn’t until he had started attending reunions in the seventies that he had been able to talk about his time in combat. “The thing about war is it can give you a pretty low opinion of mankind,” Sparks added. “I don’t have a low opinion of mankind, but sometimes we sure do some stupid things.”
Sparks called on friends, on both sides of the political divide in Colorado, and other influential figures to lend their support, distributed leaflets, and placed ads in newspapers. At the height of his campaign, he told another reporter, his phone rang off the hook. Others provided almost 10,000 to support his cause. Among his backers were 132 men who had served with him in the 157th Infantry Regiment in World War II. “Just within the past few weeks,” Sparks informed them on June 30, 1993, “several children have died or been seriously wounded by handguns in the hands of other children in the Denver area, including the deaths of two young boys who were in the 7th grade. A ten-month-old baby and a five year old were also shot.”