Christmas soccer game world war

Also because they featured soccer. Officers on both sides opposed the fraternization, which is why some contemporary histories of the war downplayed or ignored the magnitude of the event.

British commanders threatened to discipline some who participated, fearing it would rob soldiers of their will to fight. On the German side, Crocker said an Austrian-born corporal refused to leave his spot in the trenches, believing the truce to be disgraceful. His name was Adolf Hitler. But letters the men wrote home, many of which were published in local newspapers and later collected in museum archives, speak in glowing terms about the truce. However, there were far fewer references to soccer.

There is also a lot of discussion about the possibility of having games, conversation between enemies about professional football back in Britain — a significant number of Germans had lived in the UK prior to the war — and also reports of games taking place on Christmas Day between British regiments behind the lines. Soccer was also used as a morale-booster and recruitment tool on both sides, so the sport was hardly a stranger to the troops. Moreover, FIFA, the world governing body for international soccer, had been created just a decade earlier and the German and English national teams had played one another four times in the six years preceding the war, with England winning three times and the other match ending in a draw.

They were out there because they recognized their enemies as people. One firsthand account of a game, from Cpl. So football in the firing line between the British and Germans is the truth, as I was one that played. British officer Peter Jackson, in an interview with the Imperial War Museum nearly a half-century after the conflict, also clearly remembered a Christmas Eve game.

There are varying accounts of what happened in the trenches along the front lines. Some diaries of British soldiers say they heard calling from across the way from the German line saying, "if you don't shoot, we won't. It's unclear who stuck their heads up first -- the British or the Germans? But before long troops were flooding out of trenches on both sides of the line and moving through the wire into 'no man's land,' and boys being boys, pretty soon, a ball appeared.

They are described in dozens of letters, regimental histories, diaries, contemporary British newspapers and postwar memoirs. According to all these sources, the following narrative emerges.

The troops had gone to war in August expecting to be home by Christmas. That didn't happen. Many, in fact, would never come home. By Christmas , stunning modern killing machines had left about , people dead. In December, the German high command, hoping to boost morale, sent thousands of little Christmas trees to the trenches. The aim was to keep the soldiers' hearts in the battle. Instead it had the opposite effect. Christmas highlighted similarities between Christian nations in opposite trenches.

Near the French village Fleurbaix, British soldiers in their trenches saw Christmas trees hung with lights advancing into No Man's Land. The Germans were making a seasonal gesture. The Brits responded. As well as sharing Christmas, the soldiers had gotten to know the enemy.

In some spots the trenches were barely 50 meters apart. You could see enemy soldiers shaving in the morning. Often there were informal truces while stretcher-bearers went around No Man's Land collecting the dead. Few French or Belgian regiments participated in the Christmas truce. They had more reason than the Brits to hate the Germans, who had invaded their countries. But for hundreds of miles along the British-German lines, there was fraternization. It began spontaneously, and slightly differently in each sector, and yet a coherent story emerges.

Germans would raise sheets with texts scrawled on them like, "You no shoot, we no shoot. Suddenly German soldiers would be walking in No Man's Land. Britons left their trenches to meet them.

Everywhere enemies shook hands, wished each other merry Christmas, and arranged not to shoot the next day. Together they fantasized about the war dissolving in a burst of brotherhood. In the surviving photographs -- one of which appeared in several British newspapers on January 8, -- they still stand huddled together in No Man's Land.

British commanders threatened to discipline some who participated, fearing it would rob soldiers of their will to fight. On the German side, Crocker said an Austrian-born corporal refused to leave his spot in the trenches, believing the truce to be disgraceful.

His name was Adolf Hitler. But letters the men wrote home, many of which were published in local newspapers and later collected in museum archives, speak in glowing terms about the truce.

However, there were far fewer references to soccer. There is also a lot of discussion about the possibility of having games, conversation between enemies about professional football back in Britain — a significant number of Germans had lived in the UK prior to the war — and also reports of games taking place on Christmas Day between British regiments behind the lines.

Soccer was also used as a morale-booster and recruitment tool on both sides, so the sport was hardly a stranger to the troops. Moreover, FIFA, the world governing body for international soccer, had been created just a decade earlier and the German and English national teams had played one another four times in the six years preceding the war, with England winning three times and the other match ending in a draw.