By Hank Nuwer, excerpt from “Kurt Vonnegut: The Man in the Hole. A Life of Reinvention.” In-progress bio by Hank Nuwer
On the third day of the German offensive at the Battle of the Bulge, Colonel Charles C. Cavender, commander of the 423rd Infantry Regiment, asked for a volunteer to carry a white flag of surrender to German negotiators. The Germans had the 106th Infantry Division pinned down at the Schnee Eifel in the Ardennes.
One man who later claimed that he volunteered to carry the flag was Major William J. Garlow, executive officer of the 2nd Battalion, 423rd Infantry Regiment.
William J. Cody, from Cody Gazette
Garlow was the grandson of the legendary Buffalo Bill Cody.
While more research is needed for a positive identification, I found that Garlow, an officer in Kurt Vonnegut’s own 106th Infantry Division, may be a previously overlooked candidate for one of the real-life inspirations behind Wild Bob in Slaughterhouse-Five. During two extended research visits to Indiana University’s Lilly Library, I found no document establishing that Garlow was Vonnegut’s model.
Consider these compelling coincidences.
Even among the memorable characters in Slaughterhouse-Five, the dying prisoner of war Wild Bob stands out. Vonnegut used great fictional license. Wild Bob had not merely carried a white flag of surrender; he had been the colonel who surrendered his fictional 451st Infantry Regiment.
Before dying of pneumonia in German captivity, Wild Bob deliriously imagines himself addressing his lost regiment. He dreams that someday they will hold a regimental reunion in his hometown.
That hometown is Cody, Wyoming.
“He was going to barbecue whole steers,” Vonnegut wrote.
William J. Garlow also lived in Cody, Wyoming.
Maj. Garlow, Camp Atterbury, National WW2 Museum photo
And he was Buffalo Bill Cody’s grandson.
And at the war’s end he was a colonel.
The Surrender
Garlow told the Dallas Morning News on October 4, 1949, that he personally had carried the white flag in the surrender of some 5,000 Americans during the early days of the Battle of the Bulge. Historical accounts generally place the number of Americans captured in the surrender of the 422nd and 423rd regiments at between 6,000 and 8,000.
The Dallas Morning News described Garlow as “lean, brown, westernish.” He graduated from Harvard Law School and after the war became an attorney in Cody.
An amateur genealogist, Garlow had written about his famous showman grandfather for the Casper Star-Tribune on March 12, 1939. Before the Battle of the Bulge, he had supervised live-ammunition training at Camp Wolters, Texas.
“He thinks the 5,000 men he surrendered may have been the largest American force ever surrendered,” the Dallas Morning News reported. “Then a major, he had gone into France with the 106th Infantry Division.”
Buffalo Bill
After the war, Garlow operated a guest ranch and pursued other business enterprises.
Eventually he began calling himself Bill Cody II and William J. Cody.
In 1969, the year Vonnegut published Slaughterhouse-Five, Bill Cody traveled the United States as a representative of the Daisy-Heddon Company. His wife, the former Barbara Sass of Austin, Texas, accompanied him on his speaking engagements.
His face lined by years in the sun, Cody consciously resembled his famous grandfather. He wore a Stetson and clothing made from buffalo fur, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch of October 26, 1969. He also hunted big game in Wyoming.
Like Vonnegut, Cody became an outspoken advocate for preserving the environment.
He said that parents who bought their children Daisy air rifles sometimes discovered that the experience changed the entire family.
“The family moves outdoors with the youngster and a whole new world opens up,” he told the Times-Dispatch. “They enjoy the heritage nature has provided, and they want to see our rivers cleaned up and the pollution removed from the air.”
William J. Garlow Cody, born January 4, 1913, in North Platte, Nebraska, died September 18, 1992. His grave in Cody bears the name William Garlow Cody.
I have found no evidence that Garlow ever believed he was the model for Wild Bob. Nor have I found evidence that Vonnegut ever identified him as such.
Again, perhaps the similarities are coincidence.
But Garlow served in Vonnegut’s 106th Infantry Division. He was a visible spokesperson using a microphone at Camp Atterbury to address yje troops. He apparently was involved in the surrender that sent both men into German captivity. He claimed to have carried the white flag. He hailed from Cody, Wyoming. And he was so obsessed with being the grandson of Buffalo Bill Cody that he eventually took Cody’s name and dressed like a frontiersman. .
Twenty-four years later, Vonnegut gave the name Wild Bob to a doomed American officer whose final dream was to reunite his lost soldiers in Cody, Wyoming.
William J. Garlow, bottom right