The Last War Christmas

Peter Harmsen, PhD, author of The Darkest Christmas, writes about how Christmas was celebrated during the height of World War II.

The photo above depicts a GI dressed up like Santa Claus handing out presents to Polish children at an American base in India, Christmas 1944 (via National Archives).

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Anyone traveling around the world in December 1944 would realize that Christmas meant different things to different people. Most hoped that this would be their last Christmas at war. A significantly smaller number – primarily the Nazi elite – desperately hoped otherwise.

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s diabolic minister of propaganda, noted with satisfaction that some of the most powerful military units left to defend the Third Reich had been committed to a determined counterattack in the West – what was later to be known as the Battle of the Bulge.

“Our offensive has regained force and caused an extremely depressed holiday mood to spread among our enemies,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. “The offensive in the West is described as the most beautiful present that the Fuehrer could have possibly given the German people.”

Part of the reason for the rapid German advance was overcast weather which prevented the Allies leveraging their air superiority. This frustrated American General George Patton, a devout Christian, who used his Christmas prayer, distributed among his troops, to ask for better weather:

“Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for Battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies and establish Thy justice among men and nations.”

He got what he asked for. Christmas brought clearer skies and an opportunity for the Allied planes to attack the German columns. Goebbels was immediately informed and understood the consequences. “The Christmas atmosphere is completely gone,” he wrote in his diary.

While the fighting was fierce on the Western Front, on the Eastern Front there was a temporary lull during Christmas. Hitler received news from his intelligence service that the Soviets were preparing a massive offensive for January 12, but he did not believe it.

“It’s the greatest bluff since Genghis Khan,” the German dictator said dismissively. He would find to his chagrin that his spies were right – down to the exact date of the offensive.

At Auschwitz concentration camp – the special hell created by the Nazis in occupied Poland – the prisoners sensed that liberation was imminent. Perhaps the camp authorities, knowing that retribution was coming, decided to relent a little on the murderous discipline that had prevailed during each of the earlier war Christmases.

Some of the prisoners were permitted to hold a discreet Catholic mass, and at a camp hospital, female prisoners handed out roughly crafted toys to the children.

On the other side of the world, in the Pacific, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz made sure that every island controlled by American forces received two decorated Christmas trees, dispatched from Hawaii “with the highest priority possible.” Phonographic records of Christmas carols were also distributed, primarily to submarines, which had received them well before the holiday, The New York Times reported.

In China, too, American forces were made to feel almost like at home. At the 23rd Fighter Group, Staff Sergeant Art Goodworth wrote a letter to his parents, describing a holiday of plenty. The dinner consisted of “canned turkey, no bone, potatoes, beans, cranberry sauce, bread, jam, cocoa, mince pie, tangerines, walnuts and cashews, and open packs of cigarettes on the tables.”

A Red Cross tent had a big Christmas tree with parcels under it, containing a little notebook and a pencil, a package of chewing gum, playing cards, two packs of cigarettes, a fig bar and two packages of candy. In the next tent there was coffee with good cream, chocolate nut cake, cookies, two kinds of fudge and a mixture of candy. [1]

A nation that could afford this level of luxury in the middle of a global war possessed an immense material superiority unmatched by any other power in the world. At the American home front, too, there was an affluence that the other belligerents could only dream of.

And yet, it was not a happy Christmas for all. After three years of war, many American homes had to pass the holiday forever changed, knowing that a family member had given his life on overseas duty and would never return.

“Preparations for another joyous Christmas for the children must go on in many homes where sorrow has visited during the past months,” First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her syndicated column My Day.

“If on this Christmas Eve, men and women who sorrow, can think primarily that those who have gone, went gladly, just as Christ did in the hope that something better would come to mankind, then with this conviction in their hearts, they can feel that there is a purpose and a reason in living.”

[1] Carl Molesworth, Sharks over China: The 23rd Fighter Group in World War II (Washington and London: Brassey’s, 1994), 249-250.

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Peter Harmsen, PhD, is the author of Darkest Christmas: December 1942 and a World at War, a kaleidoscopic description of how soldiers and civilians passed the most important holiday of the year in the middle of global conflict. Most recently, he has published Fury and Ice: Greenland, the United States and Germany in World War II.