Article by W.C. Heinz
March 18, 2008 10:26 AM 
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The great writer
W.C. Heinz died recently. In his
NY Times obituary, it talks about an article he wrote in 1949 for True Magazine called “The Morning They Shot the Spies”, describing the firing-squad execution of three Germans who had infiltrated American lines in World War II.
Is this article available online?
From the NY Times obituary by Richard Goldstein:
Mr. Heinz recalled how the war correspondents were given a final chance to depart rather than witness the executions.
“I thought about backing out, and I wished no one had mentioned it,” Mr. Heinz wrote. “I was starting to feel a fear.”
But he stayed, and he remembered the scene as it would have been viewed by the three Germans who were about to be shot.
He wrote: “I looked at the ground, frost-white, the grass tufts frozen, the soil hard and uneven. I wondered if it is better to die on a warm, bright day among friends, or on a day when even the weather is your enemy. I turned around and looked down into the valley. The mist still hung in the valley, but it was starting to take on a brassy tint from the sun beginning to work through it. I could make out three white farm buildings on the valley floor, a little yellowed now from the weak sunlight, and I could envision this, in the spring a pleasant valley. This view I see now, I said to myself, will be the last thing their eyes will ever see.”
WHEN WE WERE ONE: Stories of World War II, W.C. Heinz, Da Capo Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002, 262 pages, $23.00.
posted by spock at 10:41 AM on March 18