John Dillinger & Baby Face Nelson in Iowa

John Dillinger

MASON CITY, Iowa. March 13, 1934. Mid-afternoon. The Dillinger gang rolls in—guns hungry, plans uncertain. Their target: the First National Bank.

They tore across North Federal Avenue in a blue Buick—rear window gone, replaced by a firing port. Inside, members fan wide: Hamilton, Van Meter, Tommy Carroll. Outside, Nelson, Dillinger, all eyes. No hesitation. No mercy.

President Willis Bagley is talking with a customer near the front door. He hears the engine roar, and bolts toward his office. Van Meter backs up, presses the gun. He fires through the closed door. Bagley ducks as splinters scatter. Bullets slap the wood. Van Meter finally bursts through into the lobby. Bagley later recalled, “He fired several bullets through the door in an attempt to force his way inside.” Another teller told reporters, “It sounded like a war had started right inside the lobby. You couldn’t hear yourself think.”

The bank explodes into noise. Screams. Vault doors slamming open. Cash drawers yanked. Hamilton steps up with a canvas sack bulging. He’s tense; his fingers tremble. One employee whispered later, “You could see it in his eyes—they were scared too. It wasn’t just us.”

Baby Face Nelson

Outside, Officer James Buchanan is creeping behind a monument with a sawed-off shotgun, calling, “Come out with your hands up!” He thinks he’s got the drop. Dillinger snarls back. He shifts, draws a .38, fires. Misses. Instead, rounds sing past Buchanan’s head, cracking stone. “He just grinned,” a bystander said later. “Like it was a game.”

Van Meter and Nelson on both flanks cover exits. Gunfire rakes windows. Nelson leaps atop a counter behind the tellers. He fires blindly, cutting glass. The smell of gunpowder fills the air. The ring of brass echoes off marble and steel. “I remember the smell,” a clerk said years later. “Like burned matches and money.”

Hamilton emerges, bag in hand, bleeding. He’s shot, either inside the vault or near the back corridor, wounded but upright. A telltale puff of blood stains his shirt. “He staggered,” someone said. “But he kept walking like he couldn’t feel it.”

They herd hostages—men, women, clerks—against the car bodies to shield from return fire. Some jump onto running boards; others stand rigid, faces pale. One hostage later said a bandit pressed a Tommy gun butt into her ribs and hissed, “Don’t dare move—or you’ll get paid plenty for it.” Another woman told the Globe-Gazette, “They smiled at us—like they were just doing a job.”

Crowd gathered outside the First National Bank of Mason City
shortly after it was robbed by the Dillinger Gang.

The Buick surges forward at 25 mph. On its route, they drop nails to slow down pursuing cars. Radiators and fenders catch stray bullets. One driver’s car is shredded, forced to grind to a halt. “I saw sparks fly from the street,” said a Mason City mechanic who watched from the corner. “They were throwing death behind them.”

On the third floor, Judge John C. Shipley peers over a windowsill. Dillinger glances upward, shouts: “Stay back.” The judge retreats, grips his pistol, fires a shot downward. One round hits John Dillinger in the shoulder. Dillinger hisses, gritting pain, keeps going. A reporter later wrote, “He never flinched. Just turned his head, gave a half-smile, and vanished into the haze of smoke.”

The car creeps toward the city’s edge, hostages still pinned. At a gravel pit four miles south, two waiting cars lie in wait. The gang leaps out—wounded men supported by brothers in crime. The hostages are told to walk away. One remembered hearing a voice call out, “Don’t look back, lady—Santa Claus just left town.”

By nightfall, the tally: about $52,000 in cash. Two gang members wounded. Eleven shaken hostages. A battered town in shock. Newspapers blazed the next morning: “Dillinger Shoots His Way Out of Mason City.” Another headline read, “Public Enemy Leaves Town in Trail of Smoke and Blood.”

The heist marked the crescendo of Dillinger’s run across the Midwest. The gang expected more—but a teller cleverly pushed small bills, slowing the flow. Their haul fell short of their hopes. Still, it was bold, brutal, unforgettable. “They moved like soldiers,” one witness said. “And then they were gone.”

Dillinger’s legend only grew. As one old-timer told the paper years later, “You could still smell the gunpowder long after they left. Like Mason City itself had been robbed of its peace.”