Christmas at War

Nice visit: Santa Claus with injured U.S. soldiers during the Battle of Guadalcanal and gives out gifts. 25 Dec 1942.
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This is part of an article from the Warfare History Website:

“The Christmas Truce of 1914:

Here’s how one soldier described it.

“It was a Christmas card Christmas eve. There was white beautiful moonlight, frost on the ground — almost white everywhere. And round about — I should think 7 or 8 in the evening we heard this singing and a lot of commotion …. Then all of a sudden lights appeared all along the German trench and I thought ‘There’s a funny thing’ and then the German’s started singing ‘Stille nacht, heilige nacht’.

“I woke up — well all the other sentries did the same thing — we all woke up the other people to come along and see this — what on earth’s going on. They finished their carol, we applauded them, then we thought we must retaliate in some way so we replied with ‘The First Noel’. When we finished they all began clapping then they struck up their other favourite carol of theirs ‘O Tannenbaum’ which is the same tune as ‘The Red Flag’.

“So we went on, first the Germans singing one of their carols then we’d sing another of ours. Then we started up ‘O come all ye faithful’ and the Germans immediately joined in singing the same thing to the Latin words of ‘Adeste Fideles’. Well I thought this was rather an extraordinary thing really, to think of the two nations both singing the same carol in the middle of a war.”

But that was only the beginning. Frederick James Davies, of Lampeter, Ceredigion, described meeting enemy soldiers across No Man’s Land on 25 December 1914.

…”They (the German soldiers) were only 50 yards away from us in the trenches. They came out and we went to meet them,” he wrote. “We shook hands with them. We gave them cigs, jam and corn beef. They also gave us cigars but they didn’t have much food. I think they are hard up for it. They were fed up with the war.”

The Christmas Truce of 1914 has become a thing of legend, seen as an iconic act of defiance, as common humanity triumphed over the bloodshed of a senseless war. It has been memorialized with statues, sports games, and in fiction.”

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