“Always winter, but never Christmas” – C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. For many observing Christmas in 1942, in the throes of war and uncertainty, this fictional quote was the harrowing truth. All the markings of winter arrived, but this time without the coloured trimmings of Christmas to streak its snowy landscapes. Soldiers stationed in far-off lands witnessed man’s capacity for unimaginable cruelty, questioning how the spirit of Christmas had become so contorted. Yet, despite tremendous suffering, profound moments of kindness, connection, and compassion still transpired…
This week’s blog is from New York Times bestselling author Peter Harmsen as he reflects on the events of Christmas 1942 and what they tell us about the human condition in extraordinary times.
The Paradox of Christmas at War by Peter Harmsen | 5 min read
So This is Christmas
War is full of paradoxes, and one of the most paradoxical things about war is the continued celebration of Christmas amidst the chaos and carnage wrought by conflict. Central to Christmas is a call for “on earth peace, good will toward men,” and yet war is about the exact opposite. Rather than spreading good will, soldiers hand out death and destruction, and while peace on earth is usually the ultimate objective they are striving for, they achieve it by means that are anything but peaceful. It is as true today as it was eighty years ago, during the fateful December of 1942, which is the subject of my new book Darkest Christmas.
To a large extent, it was this paradox that attracted me to the topic and made me decide to write a book about it. Of course, I was interested in the actions of the men and women sent to fight in faraway places in December 1942, but I was even more interested in exploring the thoughts of the soldiers. Facing the mortal danger and physical exhaustion of the battlefield or the ennui-filled deprivation of the prison camp, what did they think as they passed those precious few hours in late December that in normal times would have been spent with loved ones at home?
Did they also reflect on the contrast between the original spirit of Christmas on the one hand, and the dirty and bloody business of war on the other?
Credit: Australian War Museum, photograph by George Silk
Cruelty and Callousness
Indeed, they did. Sometimes they considered the ongoing conflict to be of a particularly vicious character, causing the underlying message of Christmas to be forgotten to an even larger extent than in previous conflicts. Writing for a newspaper at a Japanese prison in Singapore in December 1942, an unnamed Allied POW made an explicit comparison with the famous Christmas truce on the Western Front in 1914:
“Only a quarter of a century ago, British and Germans, true to the traditions of Christendom and their common heritage, laid aside their weapons for a few hours on this day to fraternise in No-man’s-land. To-day, we may be sure, no considerations of this sort will prevent the bomber from taking off with its deadly load.”
With the historian’s inherent benefit of hindsight, having an even more complete and depressing picture of how people behaved towards each other in December 1942, it is easy to see how thoughts such as these came about. It is fair to say that during that Christmas, killing was carried out in more locations and in more ways than during any previous Christmas in the holiday’s nearly 2,000-year history.
In Auschwitz, German guards made a direct mockery of Christmas, actively using the holiday and its traditions as an excuse to bring about yet more suffering. A group of prisoners were being worked to death, and as they succumbed to the exertion and the cold, and to the blows and kicks of their tormentors, their dead bodies were laid, one by one, under a Christmas tree in the middle of the camp.
Kindness and Magnanimity
If we left the story at this, Christmas at war would be just an unsolvable paradox. But there is more to it than that. December 1942 saw not only acts of cruelty and callousness, but also gestures of kindness and magnanimity. Some individuals experienced both extremes of human behaviour within just a few hours.
On Christmas Eve, in the Polish city of Krakow, the Jewish resistance fighter Yitzhak Zuckerman had narrowly escaped a Nazi ambush and was walking injured through the streets looking for a place to hide. A priest at a Catholic church turned him away, but he was eventually saved by an elderly woman in an apartment building nearby. “We are turning into wolves,” she told him, explaining why, even during Christmas, he was almost left to die.
Credit: National Archives (photo no. 127-N-72376)
December 1942 also saw hints of solidarity among soldiers on opposing sides. It goes without saying that they could not be friends, but on several occasions, a tacit bond evolved during a few brief hours in the course of Christmas, in which they quietly acknowledged that they were all just young men forced by circumstances beyond their control to kill each other.
In the mid-Atlantic, the crew of an Italian submarine celebrated Christmas with the survivors of some of the Allied ships they had sunk. In England, an officer of the Royal Air Force told two astonished American visitors that an unofficial truce with the Luftwaffe was in effect: “We have an armistice on Christmas. We don’t bomb them and they don’t bomb us.” In North Africa, the young German soldier Nico Ossemann was startled to hear men on both his side and on the other side, unseen somewhere out there in the darkness of the desert, united in singing Christmas carols in their respective languages.
It was, he remarked many years later, as if “fate joined the soldiers of enemy nations.”
Cover image: Sgt. Hiram Prouty of US 175th Infantry Regiment dressed as Santa Claus during the Christmas season, arriving on a M3 medium tank, Perham Down, England, United Kingdom, 5 Dec 1942. Credit: World War II Database, United States Army Signal Corps
Peter Harmsen is the author of New York Times bestseller, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze and Nanjing 1937: Battle for a Doomed City, as well as the War in the Far East trilogy. He studied history at National Taiwan University and has been a foreign correspondent in East Asia for more than two decades. He has focused mainly on the Chinese-speaking societies but has reported from nearly every corner of the region, including Mongolia and North Korea.
His latest book, Darkest Christmas, is a global account of how – as the outcome of World War II still hung in the balance – millions of men and women around the world, torn from their civilian lives, passed the most important holiday of the Christian year.
What do you think about this wartime Christmas? Let us know in the comments below 👇
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