My Grandpa was in the Trenches in World War One

[mopaul]

as he told it, his folks sold him to another family for fifty cents, in virginia. and at age 14 he worked in the mines, for 7 years straight without seeing the sun. my mom has his hardhat with a carbide light on the front. then he joined the army and was sent to france. i've seen the photos of him in his uniform.

there's a famous world war one story that many, many people have told, and i've even heard it repeatedly on history shows, about a christmas eve truce between the american and german soldiers under a calm, starlit night. i first heard this story from my grandpa when i was a boy.

he said they were blasting away in the middle of the night until right about midnight when the shooting got quiet and then stopped. he wondered what the hell was going on, and then they saw germans with bottles of booze walking slowly toward them, unarmed.

and you know the rest, they all got together in the trench, not knowing each other's language and drank and sang carols and smiled and laughed and cried, and the germans left, and the shooting didn't start again until sunrise.

i love that story.

[doodadem]

1. Mine too!

My mom's dad talked about being waist deep in water, fighting in the trenches in the Argonne Forest. We have an antique looking picture of him in uniform.
Isn't this also the timeframe for one of my favorite movies, "Legends of the Fall", where mustard gas figured prominently?

[mopaul]

4. he told me they ate rats, and were told they were squirrels

they were skinned, and they were hungry, and found out later. i never knew if gramps was lying to me or not, that's the beauty of being old.

yes, the germans were the first ever to use the horrible chlorene gas.

[leftofthedial]

2. I don't give a shit about your story

I ain't singing no Christmas carols with the freepers

I don't care how much wine they bring with them

[mopaul]

3. schnaps? vodka? absinthe?

come on, it's christmas..

[leftofthedial]

7. LOL

The alcohol (and LOTS of it) would have to come first

[fishnfla]

5. yeah, the famous "christmas eve truce"

Man were the generals pissed! My grandad was a machine gunner from a small town in Wi. When him and another guy from town shipped out, the guys mom made him promise that my grandad would take care of him. One night after a patrol, the dude didnt come back from no mans land, my grandad left his post and went out there looking for him all night, alone. Found him wounded and got him back to the front lines.

WWI was a fucking mess man.

[MisterP]

18. the White (politically) army officers made sure something like that never

happened again: can't have them getting to know each other and questioning Paris or London or St. Petersburg or London or Washington (Vienna, Bucharest, Athens, Rome, Belgrade . . .)

[FreedomAngel82]

6. That's so beautiful

Makes you cry. :cry: I've never heard that story before. Thank you for sharing.

[SteppingRazor]

8. It was British and Germans, for the record

happened in 1914, which precludes the possibility of American involvement.

Ok, the geeky history buff in me will shut up now.

And that other poster is right. World War I was a mess. Tops my list of wars I would want to avoid -- you've got old-school tactics such as marching in close formation -- combined with new stuff like machine guns, which make marching in close formation a very, very, bad idea.

[mopaul]

10. my frikkin' grandpa also told me he WON world war two

so there

[gorrister]

12. I remember

Paul McCartney's Pipes Of Peace video which depicts the "Christmas Truce."

http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Christmas-truce

[fishnfla]

14. Talk about effed up!

My least favorite story of that mess comes from "The Guns of August" dont quote me on this but, the book describes how the whole war was almost avoided by diplomacy very early on (even cool people were called progressives back then), but the Kaiser and Von Bulow were so gung-ho to kill people. They were besides themselves with grief that their "shithead plan" or whatever killing game they had planned, could go not forth. I bet the devil puts a shovel full of hot coals up their soulholes every hour for that.

Yeah and man met modern warfare, what a frickin' slaughter

[ulysses]

9. so was mine.

143rd Machine gun infantry of the 36th division. I doubt either of them would have seen a Christmas truce unless they were there as volunteers before the US got into the war, though. Commanders pretty much put a stop to them after 1914.

[MadHound]

11. WWI, the first real modern, nightmare war

WWI was the first war where modern tech really came into play. Tanks, planes, widespread use of machine guns, chemical weapons, targeting of civilians with WMD, all that and more in the list of horrors resulting from modern warfare all got their start in WWI.

What made it worse was you had a bunch of military leaders that were trying to fight this modern war on an old fashioned basis. Calvary charges, straight into machine gun nests, infantry charges against tanks, and other such madness.

Casualties on all sides were enormous. In fact it was so bad that the French death toll in WWI led directly to the French surrender in WWII. The French leaders in WWI, seeing the amount of carnage going down amongst their ranks, and thinking ahead, created special leaves for their soldiers to go home and procreate with their wifes, girlfriends, or whomever. A whole generation of French men were virtually wiped out in WWI, and in spite of the leaderships' best efforts, this lost generation didn't reproduce nearly enough to make up for their loss. The French tried to compensate between wars, building the Maginot Line, an modern line of armed fortifications stretching the length of France, but in WWII, Germany simply went around the line, through Belgium. Their main defense breached, France simply didn't have the manpower to do much fighting, all due to the tremendous loss of life experienced in WWI.

[ulysses]

13. makes you want to resurrect Haig

just so you can kick him to death.

[Lisa]

16. in some ways, it was worse than WWII

Tens of thousands of troops killed within a single day -- cavalry and infantry charges against barbed wire, poisoned gas, machine guns, and tanks, because commanders didn't understand that technology had changed so much. And there weren't as many people back then, fewer than 2 billion worldwide, so the social and economic impact was much higher. The US took heavy casualties, but it was even worse in Europe, where the war had been going on since 1914. Colonial troops from places like Canada, Australia, and West Africa were thrown into the meat grinder too.

The war ripped a chunk out of the population pyramids of the countries involved -- it lasted for the rest of the century. The emptiness shows up in the works of writers ranging from J.R.R. Tolkien to Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

27. The French Army had Senegalese, West Indians, Vietnamese,

Moroccans, Algerians, among other colonial troops. The Senegalese at the very bloody Chemin Des Dames, (where the French lost about 120,000 casualties in two days alone) were particularly heroic. They got slaughtered as they attacked the heavily-entrenched Germans.

In a rare color photo of World War I, here are Senegalese soldiers of the French Army.

[alcibiades_mystery]

28. Wow! That's amazing

Just checked out the other color shots on the page. Never seen anything like it and didn't think it existed. Very cool. Thank you.

[applegrove]

15. They made a movie about that story. Cannot remember the name of

it though.

[Lannes]

17. He had trenches?

My grandpa would have loved to have a trench.

[HuskiesHowls]

19. "All Quiet on the Western Front" came out of that war

and its one of the best anti-war books I've ever read.

[Stephanie]

20. My grandpa was there too

He was a medic.

[Goldmund]

21. I googled it up

Never knew about it, it's a fascinating story. Thanks!

[Mr. McD]

22. My dad fought in WWI

My grandfather was in the Civil War. He fought for the Confederacy.

[LoneDriver]

23. WWOne was the beginning of a very sad century

and we are still living with it's fallout.

THE PARABLE OF THE OLD MEN AND THE YOUNG

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they journeyed both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son-
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Wilfred Owen

He died 2 weeks before the end of that war.

[alcibiades_mystery]

26. Actually, it was only 1 week

Wilfred Owen was killed in action while leading his men on the Oise-Sambre canal, November 4, 1918.

[alcibiades_mystery]

24. Unlikely...the last Christmas truce was 1914, long before the Americans

entered the war. Oh, OK, there may have been small informal truces for Christmas, but the main (and legendary) Christmas truce took place on the Somme sector of the line between German and British forces, not an American in sight - 1914. Moreover, since most American units weren't in place on the front lines until early 1918, and the war ended in November 1918, there were not a whole heckuva lot of opportunities for "Christmas" truces between Americans and Germans - the two sides not really facing each other during any given Christmas of the war.

Not to diss granddad's story, but he was probably taking the famous story of the Christmas truce of 1914 and putting himself in it to make it seem more real to his grandson. Which is, of course, admirable, since the LESSON he wants you take from the story is much more important than the facts of the case. What unit was he with, if you don't mind me asking. Most First World War units have excellent chronologies that would place him on the line at Christmas 1917 (although this is very, very unlikely: even the famous Teufelhund - or "Devil Dog" - Marine units that whipped the Bosche in the Bellau Woods didn't arrive on the line until January 1918; most American units saw their first combat with the German Spring Offensive of 1918).

[Goldmund]

25. LOL

My grandfather was a young partisan in Yugoslavia during WW2. He told me so many war stories when I was a kid, with himself as the main Rambo-like character, that at one point when I was 5 or 6 I asked him: "Grandpa, why did they need the other partisans?". :D

[REP]

29. Mine Was Too (Rainbow Patrol)

His stories were ... grimmer, though there was one funny one:

He and a friend went on leave from France to (I forget where) and when they returned to their unit, they slogged through France on foot. They came across a farmhouse, and parched dry, his friend asked the woman of the house if she had a bucket. She didn't understand, so he tried in French: "Havez vous un bucket?" He repeated this many times, to the woman's bewilderment. Finally, in disgust, the buddy said, "Goddamn, don't the French understand their own damn language?"