What really happened in the Christmas truce of 1914? | Hacker News Reader

What really happened in the Christmas truce of 1914?

bbc.co.uk

128 pointsjstewartmobile47 comments

If anybody hasn't listened to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History series on WW1 called, "Blueprint for Armageddon," I can't recommend it highly enough. He goes into very good detail about the war, including the Christmas Truce, and it is fascinating.

Blueprint for Armageddon is currently in the RSS feed, but if you wait too long you'll need to drop some $ to buy it. I listened to it for free but paid the man anyway because it's incredible.

There's some challenges to the accuracy of his analysis. [1]

Robert Newman in his History of Oil [2] proposes an interesting alternative interpretation / explanation of the events around the start of WWI. Also very highly recommended.

[1] https://amp.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/3v63nh/dan_carl...

[2] https://youtu.be/Qu47fIkIsY8

The first 20 minutes is far below Carlin's usual standard - I skip it every time. The funny thing is, after he's done telling the assassination story, he admits that the war was already lined up and that anything could have set it off.

The only challenges to the accuracy of Carlin’s showa are pedantic and nitpicky.

I agree. You can tell he puts a tremendous emphasis on accuracy and quality, but sometimes you make mistakes when you are operating on a shoe-string budget.

Overall his stuff is pretty accurate. When doing a series that's like 20 hours long, you're bound to say something inaccurate from time to time. While he does do a tremendous amount of research for the shows, and he tries hard to be accurate, he is also a master story-teller.

I surprises me a little that he didn't make a big deal about it. I would think he would correct it. In fact often he opens a podcast with correcting any errors from the previous one. Not sure I fully buy that. Would like to hear Dan's side of the story.

Interesting. I'll check it out. Thank you!

My computer locked up so I didn't finish the whole video, but I did find it interesting. The list of inaccuracies seemed fair, but I don't think any of those ruined the overall message and mood he was trying to set. The Robert Newman video was interesting (and funny), but the bashing of the US seemed a little over the top, and I think he has some marxist tendencies (which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I agree with many of marx's criticisms of Capitalism. I'm just not convinced there's an alternative with less greed/corruption/power seeking politicians). Will probably finish the video when I get a chance. Thanks again for the reference.

I m no longer convinced by that. Not a socialist...but any well designed gamified System with a realistic outlook on human nature ought to do.

What a weird and needless article, it clearly had the agenda of de-romanticizing the truce events, but basically goes on to confirm that everything, you think happened, actually happened.

Obviously you can view history from different social constructs, but for me at least, this article did little but waste the time it took to read. I do realize that having studied history and being interested in this event in particular, I was probably going to know what the article contained, but I was still disappointed by it.

> Obviously you can view history from different social constructs, but for me at least, this article did little but waste the time it took to read.

Well, the fact that these were some of the LAST temporary truces and that the high command was actively terrified by these kinds of events and raised them to court martial offenses was something I hadn't known before.

There's also - not mentioned in the BBC piece - a class/political component to that.

The left end of the political spectrum was holding on to "proletarian internationalism", and agitated for workers of one nation refusing to shoot at workers of another.

The fears of the top brass came into being in Russia, where the Bolsheviks used the war as the main lever to gain power in November 1917, because the democratic parties didn't end the war in the February revolution.

(Unexpectedly, really, the prime target for revolutionary upheaval was industrialized Germany.)

Yeah I suppose that's true for me as well. I had heard that the officers were pissed and basically threatened to execute in the field any men caught doing that, but I didn't know that it had effectively worked at eliminating these kinds of event.

From what I read about WWI (not what I learned at school in France), high ranking officers were terrified of insubordination and thought that the lack of result was due to a lack of motivation from the soldiers (and not the fact that germans were the first to massively use machine guns which completely changed engagements).

Some soldiers were court martialed pretty much randomly just as a mean to terrorize the soldiers into obeying orders.

The truce was the basis of today's Doctor Who Christmas episode. This appears to be aligned with one of the most watched shows every year to provide a bit of background for curious Whovians.

I think that's a little unfair. It gives a fair bit of context that probably is unfamiliar to most readers.

Glad you saved me the time to read it. Ultimately I think the world can tolerate and in fact needs more examples of coming together despite adversity

> Back in Britain, German battleships shelled the coastal towns of Whitby, Hartlepool and Scarborough, killing 122 and injuring 450 civilian men, women and children.

My grandparents had a piece of one of the shell mounted on the wall in the dining room, and it’s now in mine. Someone made a small hexagonal wooden plaque and mounted a bit of shrapnel in the middle of it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_on_Scarborough,_Hartlep...

Putting a recommendation here for the "Extra History" cartoon video series, which has a couple new videos about the Christmas Truce:

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUlPNWDvk-c

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Pey-HmXGfs

The artwork is fun and the creator treats the historical material with a decent amount of respect (which might be surprising considering the cartoon nature of it).

While i love the series, and their orignal Extra Credits series on gaming, i can't shake the feel that the quality has been sagging as of late. Their latest show, Extra SciFi, comes across as almost "metaphysical".

I always like to plug my favorite YouTube series The Great War, they had an episode on this: https://youtu.be/SpqVblMPRB4

I had the honor this month of playing a bugle call in a production of All is Calm, which is a musical/radio show about the Christmas Truce. Essentially all of the dialog comes verbatim from the journals and letters of the soldiers who were there. If you're interested, I suggest listening to the recording of the original production: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCF720B19AE784B23

A British supermarket chain (Sainsbury's) created an expensive Christmas advert on this topic in 2014:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWF2JBb1bvM

If I understood correctly there's no evidence for such a football game. In the new Doctor Who episode from today – funnily being set around this event – they show a scene in which soldiers play football together.

No evidence of a full game, but "kick arounds" are mentioned as having happened.

Doctor Who, both by nature and by design, has always been rather loose when it comes to historical accuracy.

Clickbait title, but apparently has some interesting material.

The best things, however, remain the letters and memories of soldiers.

> The few reports of a football match between forces have endured for a century, but what has contributed to the focus on this part of the story?

Because it's passed down through generations, told in schools, appeared in the video for Paul McCartney's hit song Pipes of Peace and is a remarkable example of humanity and unlikely camaraderie in an otherwise monstrous 4-year slaughter.

Very modest of the BBC to suggest it's because of a BBC comedy series from 1989, though, which I don't remember even depicting a football game.

The Blackadder episode in question is renowned for being seen as so poignant it was repeated as part of BBCs Armistice Day coverage that year. I can't find viewership numbers but I'd be surprised if the Paul McCartney video in question has been viewed anywhere near as much. If anything many have accused the Blackadder series in question of largely shaping modern perception of WWI

You don't remember it depicting a football game because it didn't - it comes up as one of the characters reminisces about the Christmas truce.

That said the article gives that as just one of a number of examples of how the story has been perpetuated.

Well, I want to avoid spoilers, but I want to tell you that one particular (or 'special') visual creation that aired today has something related to a part of this subject.

I think I haven't ruined it, have I?

It's a long way to Tipperary? By Christmas 1914 the war's brutality was not yet in full effect. Within one year of the Christmas truce neither side would be particularly interested in splitting a bottle of Sherry. Poison gas came on the menu instead. By 1918 they were shooting at each other within minutes of the scheduled final ceasefire, when there was literally nothing to be gained beyond watching an enemy die one last time.

I'm not sure why the Christmas Truce continues to fascinate...it amounted to nothing in the grand scheme of the conflict other than to expose the final shred of naivete on both sides.

Not sure why you were DV'd. We all have some insight on events that happened a long time go and yours is not unreasonable.

It fits the narrative of "young men who don't know each other sent to die by old men who do know each other".

"This content is currently not available on this device. Please try again later."

VPN time I guess...

(Location: Sweden)

Working from New Zealand - I have a VPN specifically for BBC content but it’s not on at the moment.

Maybe it's a Commonwealth thing? :)

<humor>There's plenty of opportunities for former members (e.g. USA) to re-apply to join in the post-Brexit world. One of the many benefits could be access to the BBC iPlayer !</humor>

I’m sure this has been said before, but iPlayer is a bit of an abomination, but the content is excellent. The BBC have this weird thing where content expires, which is annoying. I rate that up there with my local library that lets you ‘borrow’ books digitally, but they ‘expire’ after a couple of weeks. If you forget to ‘return’ them you get a notice and a reminder to destroy them. How did this happen?

Having experienced various streaming services in the US, I find iPlayer to be anything but an abomination. Don't think I've ever experienced lag with it, and the ability to watch live shows is really very impressive.

I am genuinely glad that my TV licence is being put to good use (in the UK, public broadcast TV is paid for: we pay a licence fee to own a TV, currently £147) There are around 60M people here in ~27M households(do the maths)

The BBC (Beeb, Auntie) is an anachronism in the modern world but it works. For example Blue Planet II is an example of cutting edge journalism that I don't think could have happened if Netflix, Amazon were the only game in town.

Blue Planet II is great, but is it really journalism?

I’ve never watched anything live, but the combined action of adverts and interface gets me.

It doesn’t seem to remember where I left off, they stick to the weekly schedule, they ‘expire’ content and the navigation is nowhere near the Netflix standard. It is a load better than my local offering (Lightbox) which is not good. Audio sync being my current pain point.

Adverts? For iPlayer?

We will be happy to accept application for statehood from England. I expect Scotland to rejoin the EU.

󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿?

OT: I wonder why there’s a skull/question mark overlapping where the reply button should be? Something something Unicode, but for static text like “reply”? iOS 11 on an iPhone 6.

EDIT: page refresh and the reply button shows up, still with the unrendendered Unicode bit.

It's a sequence of Unicode characters that's supposed to render as the Welsh flag. The first character U+1F3F4 BLACK FLAG seems to be missing (at least when I copy and paste it); that's followed by "tag letters" from the U+E0061-U+E007A spelling "gbwls". See https://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#valid-emoji-tag-sequences

I think the BLACK FLAG is getting removed by HN's emoji filtering, but the modifier characters after it are remaining.

Thanks for the explanation. On my phone, so tools for diagnosis are lacking, but it sounds like you might know your Unicode better than I do anyway. :-)

Scotland saying F-U to the UK and joining the EU would be so neat!

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