A common theme during many European wars throughout history, those moments where peace and dignity can and do happen, spontaneously, and naturally. I’ll bet it’s just a little more difficult fighting people who look like your own family members, who share your own ancestors, who are your own neighbors.
If these children, in the middle of all-out war were capable of this, imagine what we adults could do with our luxurious first world lives.
Have a Merry Christmas, everyone. May your skin be warm and your bellies filled.
I think the craziest part of WWI was when it ended. There were a few sectors where the French and Americans had launched last minute assaults into the German trench works. Complete and utter hand to hand chaos.
Then suddenly 11:00am hits. Horns are blown and alarms go off all across the front. The Officers present on both sides order the men to stand down. There are stories of French and German soldiers literally trying to stab each other with fighting knives and bayonets and then they just stopped, got up off the ground, and went their separate ways.
One British soldier talked about how when the alarm bells went off in his sector, the Germans in the trench ahead of them climbed out, bowed gracefully, and then started marching back to the rear areas. It blew his mind because just a few hours earlier they had been shooting at each other.
There was a lot of live and let live on the last day of the war. Most soldiers were intentionally shooting high so they wouldn’t hit anyone. Both sides didn’t want to carry off artillery shells, so they just launched them miles into random directions.
Last man to die in the war was an American. He was killed about 20 seconds before the alarms went off. He charged the German lines by himself. The Germans tried to tell him to get down in what little broken English they could speak and shot over his head. But he never stopped. They shot him down right before he jumped in their trench. The last Frenchman had died just a few seconds before that. The last Canadian about two or three minutes before. Last Brit about 10 minutes or so before the alarms.
It’s crazy how it just ended at 11:00am. Complete opposite of World War II where cut off units kept fighting for over a week after it officially ended.
Definitely. Dude didn’t surrender until 1974. And they had to go find his old commanding officer to convince him. Working in the middle of Nowhere, Japan he had to put on a uniform he hadn’t worn in thirty years and go tell this guy “the war is over man, give it up.”
It was absolutely nuts. But that classic Japanese culture…
There’s an hypothesis out there that after a “long peace” (in quotes because there never really is total peace), wars crop up again, often violently, because humans have a tendency to want to test out how good they’d be in battle.
And maybe we are getting tired of only simulating that in all the FPRP war video games and want to try it for real.
Just throwing it out there…that the Christmas Truce happened precisely because WW I was so ghastly, and all involved could see that…but we really can’t see that today.
It’s true that people who join the Army and don’t join the Infantry have the hottest girl on Earth in their bed, and all they want to do is cuddle, so maybe you’re onto something about people secretly wishing they could taste combat. lol
Could you imagine being plucked out of retirement to go back for Private Pyle 30 years later? I can’t tell if I’d be pissed or laughing my ass off the whole way.
