Friday, December 22, 2006

Merry Christmas, Red Baron


A tip o' the blog to Mapmaker Scrap who posted my favorite version of Snoopy's Christmas Song with a link to my article from last Christmas on the WWI Christmas Mutiny. A Story well worth remembering any time there is war in the world.


Of course the real 'Snoopy' was Canadian;
Shot down by the Red Baron - The First World War: Canada Remembers ...
A Canadian flying ace recalls the day he was shot down by Manfred von Richthofen.


As an update from that story; those Canadian soldiers who were executed during WWI for desertion, like their British and German counterparts, were finally given posthoumous amnesty this year.

Recoginizing most of them probably suffered from 'shell shock', which we call today post traumatic syndrome.

Four years earlier the Mon's was the scene of the first Christmas Peace, it would also be the last village fought over as real peace finally occurred in 1918.

By November 1918, trench warfare has finally given way to a headlong pursuit of the retreating Germans. Canadian troops under Sir Arthur Currie are tasked with liberating Belgian villages such as Mons, where house-to-house fighting is fierce. Then a rumour spreads: the war is over! As we hear in this clip, the news seems too good to be true. Even when armistice is confirmed, the exhausted soldiers can barely comprehend the new reality: death one day, peace the next.

And so I also get to link to that other great Christmas Anti War Song, Happy Christmas War Is Over. A sentiment best expressed 'out of the mouth of babes';

Dear Santa

What I want for Christmas is my dad to come home because he went to the war. I just hope he does not get hurt and I love him. Your friend, Anna Marie Eide



See

WWI

Christmas

John Lennon Working Class Hero





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