6 Inspiring Tales of Friendship in the Middle of Brutal Wars
As awful as war is, it's still being fought by human beings, and they don't just check their humanity at the door. Sometimes, right in the heat of battle, sympathy and simple human kindness breaks through. Spontaneous truces occur when groups of soldiers decide they just can't take it anymore.
The result is a series of stories that you should bookmark for the next time you're in a bad mood.
#6. Americans and Nazis Share a Christmas Meal
The below story is so cheesily heart-warming that we would call bullshit if multiple people involved hadn't come forward to verify it. It sounds like one of those corny email forwards.
In the last days of the Second World War, just before Hitler realized that picking a fight with the entire world wasn't going to end well for him, the Nazis launched one final offensive against the Allies. The Battle of the Bulge was not, as we thought in elementary school, the story of one man's battle to hide an unfortunate erection, but a very last ditch effort of a cornered and angry German war machine. Occurring over Christmas 1944, yuletide cheer was running in understandably short supply.
Wikipedia
The 32nd division's "Nutcracker Suite (With Occasional Flesh Wounds)" didn't go down well.
In the meantime, in a small cottage nearby on the German-Belgian border, a 12-year-old boy and his mother were busy minding their own damn business. Their dreams of blissful ignorance were shattered when three American soldiers arrived at their front door, one with serious wounds. These Americans were armed, desperate and, with it being Christmas Eve, freezing to death. For Germans under the Nazi regime, sheltering enemy troops was high treason. Fortunately, this German woman didn't give even a single shit about politics on Christmas.
Wikipedia
It's not Christmas without some kind of fight over who invaded whom.
So she invited them in and began to tend to their wounds. Then there was another knock at their door.
Four Nazi soldiers had arrived.
Wikipedia
"History tends to forget that a good 30 percent of us weren't murderous douchebags."
Though the mother knew they could be shot for violating the rules of war, she took a gamble and sternly told the lost and hungry Germans that there would be no killing that night. The boy and his mother had a Christmas chicken all fattened up and ready to be butchered, so they went ahead and prepared the feast with their unexpected guests. Proving that Hollywood has no monopoly on Christmas magic, the American soldiers and the German soldiers all turned their weapons over to the woman and feasted together, without so much as exchanging passive-aggressive insults.
ba-ez
"What are your plans for the weekend?" "Well, we're -- awwwww, you almost got me. You bastard."
Then, in the morning, when the wounded American had semi-recovered, the German soldiers directed the American soldiers back to their lines, telling them how to avoid all the areas that the Nazis had recaptured.
The story spread after the boy, Fritz Vincken, grew up and told the story to Reader's Digest (it became so famous that even President Ronald Reagan mentioned it in a speech when he visited Germany). You could write it off as something he pulled out of his imagination when up against a magazine deadline, but then in 1995 Fritz found one of the soldiers, who had separately been telling the story to everyone he met for years. On that night, American and Nazi soldiers really did just sit down in the middle of the war and have a quiet Christmas dinner.
ba-ez
That little boy grew up and got to meet the American soldier who gave him the coolest Christmas ever.
#5. The Australians Make Friends With the Turks in Gallipoli
In the heat of World War I, the British decided that they needed to invade Turkey. It was a ballsy decision, considering that doing so would result in a bloodbath the likes of which the world had rarely seen. So, rather than suffer the senseless death of tens of thousands of British soldiers, they decided on a different tactic: Send in Australians.
remembrance2010
There is so much weird going on in this picture.
The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs) were shipped out to Turkey to seize the Gallipoli peninsula, a task which basically relied on their ability to sprint across the beach and absorb two dozen bullets each before falling over. But the Australians -- who were more than used to living in hellish conditions -- held their own. Although they were unable to drive back the far superior numbers of the enemy, they killed or wounded up to 10,000 Turks while losing only a few hundred of their own.
But then a remarkable thing happened. With the blazing heat of the Turkish beach working on the corpses of thousands of fallen soldiers, both sides simultaneously came to the conclusion that this was a bunch of bullshit. At the very least, someone should give all these dead people a respectful burial.
smh
"If we're going to treat the living terribly, we might as well take care of the dead."
On May 24, 1915, a daylong ceasefire was arranged between the troops. The Allied troops and Turkish troops came out of their trenches together to bury the dead. It was hard, sweaty work, but in between, the soldiers struck up quite a remarkable friendship. They started by exchanging greetings and cigarettes before they began to swap badges like players at the end of a soccer game. Thousands of Turkish civilians came out to watch the spectacle from the surrounding hills. For the first time in recent memory, it was kind of like, you know, there wasn't a World War going on.
anzacsite
"I like to pretend my lice are actually itchy tingles of happiness."
When it came to 4 o'clock, the Turks approached one of the Australian commanders, Captain Audrey Herbert, asking him for orders. He then retired both the troops and walked down the lines and made the two sides shake hands. When a dozen Turks popped out of their trench, Audrey taunted them, saying they would shoot him the next day, to which they replied, "God forbid! We would never shoot you."
invisionzone
Especially as the Australians had secretly deactivated the Turks' rifles.
Twenty minutes later, all jokes aside, the indiscriminate killing began again, as though this eerie interlude had never happened.
#4. The Confederates Show Mercy at the Battle of Fredericksburg
The Battle of Fredericksburg was one of the most one-sided battles of the American Civil War. The South was defending a stone wall at the base of Marye's Heights, and it must have been a pretty damn important stone wall, because they shot 8,000 Union soldiers in just one morning to stop them from getting to it.
reivax
It's OK as walls go, we guess.
Sergeant Richard Kirkland decided enough was enough. So Kirkland walked up to his general and calmly stated that he couldn't bear to hear the cries of the wounded soldiers.
He pleaded with the general to let him go out and give the wounded enemy soldiers some water. The general, who knew it probably wasn't a brilliant idea to go running headlong into the line of fire, tried to talk him out of it. But Kirkland was so insistent that the general offered a compromise: He could go, but he couldn't take a white flag, the general opting instead to see whether God would protect him. It's fortunate for the Confederates that he didn't extend this logic to taking the soldiers' weapons away to see if God would shoot the Yankees dead.
Wikipedia
God has an amazing kill ratio, but really lets himself down when he teabags whole countries.
Kirkland left the trenches and started pouring water into the mouths of wounded Union soldiers. When the enemy saw what was happening, they stopped trying to annihilate him as he moved from body to body. When he was done, he returned to safety behind the lines.
Richard Kirkland died a year later at the Battle of Chickamauga because the universe hates good people. But at least he got a statue.
BattlefieldPortraits
Here he is, apparently shoving a whole canteen down a guy's throat.
I'm Australian, and I have to say that I love Kiwis. They are our brothers (or, a the very least, close cousins), and deserve just as much recognition and kudos as we do for their heroism at Gallipoli.
Reply-This counts as deleting the comment-
ReplyThis article should have been out on Christmas Day, or at least Cracked should have released it again on that day.
ReplyThis may or may not have already been mentioned, but the German soldiers in #6 MOST LIKELY WERE NOT Nazi's, but rather normal Wermacht(German army) infantry. Yes technically the Nazi party ruled Germany and so therefor one could argue that the soldiers fighting for Germany were Nazi, but that would be like saying all the American soldiers are Democrat or Republican(depending on who's the president).
ReplyIf the soldiers had been SS troopers they may have refused to to comply with the woman.
But then again, hey, I don't know. I haven't done further research into the event and I wasn't there. Perhaps they were SS and avid supporters of the Nazi regime. Or perhaps they were just German men fighting for their country and were impartial or even disliking of Hitler.
this is like one of the funniest and touching stories i've read. "War and soccer are like the only 2 ways Britain and Germany communicate with each other." I laughed so hard
ReplyStories like this penetrate my hideously cynical shell and appeal directly to the fluffy part of my hindbrain that just loves this shit. That said I still cringed a little at the idea of the allies and Germans playing soccer; in this context it’s definitely football guys…..
Replysir may I commend you for the Blackadder reference
#6 may be unbelievably cheesy, but damn if it isn't inspirational
ReplyWe watched a movie based on number six in class last year. I don't know why I decided to share but I thought it was an interesting coincidence.
ReplyThere's a story from the battle of Singapore (the Japanese did actually fight honourably on occasion and not just go beheading/starving/crashing themselves into people) where a wounded British officer was bought into the Japanese HQ and asked them to take his dying message to his wife. After the British surrendered they did actually try and track her down, only to find out she'd sailed out on a ship that had later sunk. The officer who was carrying the message (and who wrote the book I read) said he still found it to be one of his saddest memories of the whole war.
ReplyAlso a German pilot once discovered a terribly shot-up American bomber and couldn't bring himself to shoot it down, so instead escorted them back to the channel (the pilot was apparently badly wounded and flying the wrong way). A few British pilots did the same to a German bomber, only for somebody else to swoop in at the last minute and finish the job. He said he could hardly keep himself from shooting down one of his own side.
Actually in that same book, and another example of an honourable Japanese, is a tale from a pilot who was captured and forced to work in a mine. He injured his hand and expected to be shot, but a Japanese civilian miner worked twice as hard to make it appear that the guy was still doing his share.
I think the one about the German pilot was in a Cracked article, actually.
If you read about Japanese conduct in past wars they were remarkably chivalrous by the era's standards. Robert Egerton's Warriors of the Rising Sun provides plenty of examples of commendable Japanese conduct during the Boxer Rebellion (especially noteworthy when every other country was butchering Chinese on sight) and the Russo-Japanese War. The big problem is that the Bushido nutjobs took over the military between the world wars.
Don't know the exact facts, but as an Australian, I am fairly sure we got seriously owned at Galipoli, and normally cracked is on top of it with its facts but there definitely wasn't 10,000 turks killed for a few hundred ANZACS (provided I read it correctly).
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesActually the Turks lost twice as many men than the Allies in that campaign, and since the Australians only made up a quarter of the Allied casualties it does sound about right.
You're right, the ratio definitely wasn't that high (we lost a hundred odd at the Nek alone), but the Allies did inflict more casualties than we took. The only problem was that the Turks had more soldiers and, since they were defending their homeland, fought extremely hard. The furthest that the Allies managed to get at Gallipoli was achieved by a section of New Zealanders during the landings. They were forced out of the position by the Turks and, like most other positions, it was never reclaimed. Since the front was a stalemate with no end in sight, the troops were withdrawn to the Western front or to Palestine.
One thing that Cracked probably could have mentioned was that, even though they were fighting each other, the Turks and the ANZACs actually had very good relations. IIRC, the Turks would trade food for cigarettes (throwing both items between trenches) and, when they realised that the Australians at the Nek were going to charge, pleaded with them to stop the stupidity. When they left, the ANZACs also left bottles of whiskey and tins of food for the Turks.
Since then, the ANZACs and the Turks have celebrated (well, that's probably not the right word, but it will do) ANZAC day together. For instance, ANZAC forces in Korea were going to have ANZAC day together with the Turks before they (the ANZACs) were told to march out to Kapyong. I'm not sure if they still ended up celebrating it after the Australians were forced to withdraw on the 24th, but I imagine that the Turks would have sent their sympathies and probably a present or two to the badly mauled Australian forces.
There's also a couple of heartwarming tales between the Australians and Chinese at Kapyong, but that's neither here nor there.
The main reason the Turks lost so many lives is because they had sweet f**k all clothes and shoes and socks, they were dying more from frostbite, hypothermia and disease than getting shot or blown up.
I do love how they spoke to each other cause the trenches were so close together at some parts. I love Aussie mateship :-)
#3 - They sent the pregnant girl to a brothel?
ReplyNUNNERY, they sent her to a NUNNERY
Tis article is like something straight out of Rurouni Kenshin (Samurai X) :)
ReplyHenry Tandey is hot
ReplyPoliticians propagate the wars, soldiers make friends with the enemy hoping they know why they are fighting each other.
ReplyThis is not very relevant to the article but I've never thought that Australians were used to living in hellish conditions. Maybe that because I'm Canadian, a place that really has a reputation for a hellish climate.
Reply Hide All See All 12 RepliesTry living in a country where looking at a simple little spider the wrong way, or even looking at it, will cause it to chase you down until you collapse of exhaustion or it notices someone else looking at it.
we have a bird that can kill you..... with its talons... our trees explode from extreme heat... stepping on branch could land you a deadly snake bite... oh and we also have some fierce gangland violence.
I thought Hell was hot, not cold. We've had one of the hottest heat waves, Marble Bar has the highest average temperature, and people in Coober Pedy have to live underground because it's too hot outside. Canada has snow. That's magical, not hellish.
Viking Hell was icy and cauld D: Though being a Scot I concur that Australia is a nightmare land because of it's awful heat and it's bloody insects. Here in the Celtic heartland it's too cold for even ants so the size of the insects down under is just unreal.
Canada's pretty hellish too, but it's predictably hellish. It tries to freeze you into a solid chunk of ice for about half the year, every year, and as long as you take some appropriate precautions, you'll be fine.
Australia is unpredictably and creatively hellish. You're just going about your day, feeling fine, when you happen to step in the wrong place and wham- some prehistoric terror of an insect/snake/jellyfish/elder god injects you with a horrible poison and you die a lingering death.
Unless you live in around the CBDs of the different states like the majority of Australians. In which case your living in an extremely unremarkable Western metropolis that may occasionally get hot (still nothing compared to parts of Africa, The MIddle East and parts of the Mediterranean.) I imagine thrill-seaking Cracked readers are going to be extremely disappointed by Australia.
Some people think that hell would be a combination of extreme heat and cold. Think 'set on fore and chucked in a frozen river'.
Also, Canada is not full of Australians. Just doesn't compete.
I personally think it's the randomness of Australia that gets you. It's the floods in Queensland while Victoria has fires, then hurricanes while there's droughts elsewhere. It's just a see-saw tipping from side to side every few months.
I live in Sydney, but I've travelled enough to know :)
Go to Tasmania, then tell me Australia isn't hell. Tassie is the Ninth Circle.
Yeah, well... I'm from Louisiana &, uh... it's somewhat humid... sometimes. So... beat that.
Psh y'all got nothin on Tennessee. It just rained for like 2 days. Friggin killer
there was a world war one?
ReplyYeah, but it was mostly underground. You've probably never heard of it.
So it's like, the Hipster War, or something?
"Nobody is perfect. Certainly the allies committed war crimes, and certainly there are still some skeletons left in the closet. The acts that were committed were indeed disreputable acts indeed.
Reply Hide All See All 6 RepliesBut comparatively, the Nazi regime was far worse. As far as bombings go, London was hit hardest. I'm not saying that makes what was done by the Allies justified, but it does make the Allies the lesser of two evils. What I mean to say is that, if you want to talk dirty deeds, the Nazi's far outrank anyone in that regard. As far as perpetrating acts of evil go, the Nazi's soar high above anyone else.
Were the war crimes perpetrated by the allies bad? Yes. Were they as bad as the war crimes, and the crimes against humanity pepetrated by the Nazi's? Hell no.
I'd also make the argument that the Russian war crimes don't count towards the Allies' reputation, since they were committed by Russia alone, not decided upon by the Allies. The allies never said "Hey Russia, why don't you go medieval on some german ass: sack their villages, rape their women, and generally commit horrible atrocities; thus denying yourself of your own humanity and right to life. You know, for shits and giggles." That did not happen."
"But comparatively NAZI REGIME was worse." It seems LOGIC and REASON do not phase you so let's try the arcane art of RHETORIC. Imagine, it's 1941, you're a farmer living on the german countryside, you've never stepped on any toes ,you live an honest life,and you think the Jewish are alright people. You don't even agree with the nazi policies, but on a dfateful day you find yourself conscripted to the German army, you have to make a choice: Be captured by the police and be promptly executed or fight in the war so that you at the very least, have a chance to see your family again. now, tell me why is a German man, plucked away from his home, his family,to fight for his country, any different from an american soldier, who was, again plucked away from his home, and his family?
Actually, the bombing of Dresden by the Allies was much, much worse than anything London or Coventry experienced. Estimates are 150,000 - 250,000 casualties, the vast majority non-combatants and nothing to do with the war at all. Also, the Soviets managed to kill far more people than the Nazis after the war too. It's just they did it with starvation, repression and incompetence rather than organized murder.
Russia sacrifice more than 20,000,000 millions human beings to stop the Germans.
The Germans killed civilians russians as sports. They starved cities like Stalingrad destroying every convoy with supplies.
The Soviets where looking for retaliation, just like the US retaliate Pearl Harbor, by changing the landscape of Japan to rubble.
Nothing any of the allies did, including the USSR, even comes close to things the Nazi regime did. None of the allies invaded other countries, and kidnapped, torured, and killed 11-17 million of those other countries' people. As far as the thing about conscripts goes, no one was blaming individual German grunts anyways, but they had options. Instead of passively allowing their leaders to commit genocide and destroy their own country, they could have resisted them, like join a resistance movement. Their were many anti-nazi rebel groups in germany.
@Alienspy I do believe that Stalin killed more of his own people than Hitler.
I was in Germany a few years ago and the Stadt (town) museum had RAF log books listing targets and results things like Hospital- destroyed, Cathedral-damaged. They knew what they were hitting they hit the railway lines in the middle of a small town with no other strategic signifcance than the railways lines killing hundreds of people and the lines were back and operational two days later. Yes the Naz's did horrible reprehensible things but we were no great deal behind them. We locked up german citizens, we refused to accept jewish refugees and the on the Channel Islands when they were invaded british police officer co-operated with the Nazis and gave up jews of foreign nationality (three women who were all killed) to protect the british jews living there.
@alienspy... actually yes we did there were a number of countries the allies occupied to prevent the axis countries getting their hands on them.
Sheesh. Why are all these articles pretty much anti-anything-not-from-the-US-of-freakin'-A? Do you have to call them "Nazi" soldiers (in italics?) They were GERMANS. Not Nazis. Because a few morons called Nazis were governing the country does NOT mean that the country suddenly was inhabited by Nazis. THEY WERE GERMAN! Sure, they had Swastikas on their uniforms. Well, when there's conscription, you go to war or you're screwed. You also don't get a choice in uniform patterns, so you get Hugo Boss and Swastikas. I am German. Both my grandfathers fought in WWII and my great grandfather fought in both WW. All of them were amazing people, none of them supported the Nazi regime - but there wasn't much choice. Did I forget to mention my family sheltered Jewish fugitives?
Reply Hide All See All 6 Repliesmeh, it's a comedy site. playing upon stereotypes helps strengthen the story. (To those not offended by the stereotypes.)
well, that and the fact that WWII was one of the few wars that can be rationalized morally. The Nazi regime (those few morons in power) really was going to try to take the world in a very nasty direction. So they make lovely villains to the American mind, because they really were "bad guys."
What I find ironic is that from what I know, the fighting was much more vicious between the U.S. and Japan. Apparently the Americans at the time hated the Japanese more than the nazis, partly because of Pearl Harbor and partly because of straight-up racism against asians. But now with the civil rights era between then and now, racially based hatred doesn't jive so well now with the younger, politically correct folks so nazis are easier to demonize.
They were fighting for the Nazis, so it makes sense to call them Nazis. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're the evil, mass murdering Nazis. Is there also something wrong with calling soldiers from the Soviet Union Soviets?
IsolatedZombie, you sir win the internet. An excellent point indeed.
I agree. It's like calling American soldiers from WWII "Democrats." Nazi was a political party, not a damned religion.
being from a half german family, my great grandfather was a soldier in the german army. His first wife gave him 2 sons, but she died of TB at the age of 23, he married again, had a daughter.. then was sent to war.. he died 2 years before the end of the war in the hands of Russians. Was he a bad guy for fighting in a war just so he could have a chance to give his family a better life? Also... My grandmother's house (Oma) in Dortmund got destroyed by the Allies bombers.. she was i think 7 years old and had to squish into a tiny 2 story house with the extended family and not see her father because he had to stay working the coal mines.. so German's are bad people? I grew up being called nazi just because I'm half German and i am blonde, blue eyed and pale, even though my first bf was Middle Eastern they still called me a Nazi and a murderer... So who in reality is the bad person? Oh Im Scottish on my mother's side and have family members on the allied side too..
Well not to piss you off even more but Hitler did make vague attempts to ally with the Arabs and get them to fight the British, who did after all rule virtually the whole middle east.
I find it interesting that my granny and my girlfriend's mum were both evacuees, the granny from Germans bombing London and the girlfriend's mum from Americans bombing Tokyo. One thing is clear, and that's that Coventry is shit.
I wonder if Henry Tandey lived to see what that soldier he decided not to kill became.
Reply Hide All See All 9 RepliesThere was no way he could have known that, though.
I wonder too.
Would he feel remorse for not killing him? guilt for the victims? remorse for thinking that killing someone is actually the right thing to do if it's going to save millions of lives later? would people love him, respect him or hate him when he told them the story?
I think I'll try to find an interview or something. It must be fascinating.
Only if he was an idiot.
Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out
Obviously killing Hitler was the right thing to do. He couldn't have known however.
It's like in Lost when Sayid tried to kill younger Ben. Except that didn't work and caused him to turn bad. And also it's not really the same at all.
I think he would have go like "I saved his life, whatever he did with it is not my problem, I'm not a bloody psychic"
Yes, Tandey found out who he had saved. He learned about it about the time his hometown was being bombed.
You can't put all of nazi Germany on Hitler alone. that's just silly.. governments don't work like that
Seeing all the comments concerning soldiers, some seem to forget that most soldiers are just people like the rest of us, who shoot at people trying to kill him/her, and recite propaganda (occasionally) to keep from going insane and thinking of themselves as the bad guy.
ReplyNobody goes into a battle thinking of themselves as the bad guy.