January 25, 2004

WEEKLY FEATURE



A soldier alone on the battlefield, after one of the deadliest days of World War II

Encounter with the Enemy

By Roy Shull
Aiken, South Carolina



I was a 21-year-old corporal in the US Army, on patrol in the remote Kasserine Pass in the mountains of Tunisia. Earlier that night, February 20, 1943, a full North African moon had lighted up the arid landscape, but now heavy clouds created a wall of darkness. I strained to see what might be in front of me.
With my rifle cradled and ready, I stepped forward a few paces, then waited, trying to listen. Any mistake could bring sudden death. The darkness that covered me could also hide German soldiers.
That day the First Division of the US Fifth Army, known as the Big Red One, had been attacked by the full force of Field Marshal Rommel’s famed Afrika Korps. “Hundreds are dead,” we were told. Hundreds more had been taken prisoner. But no one knew what Rommel’s—the “Desert Fox”—next move would be. The men in Company B frantically dug foxholes and set up defenses. Our commander called four of us to his tent. “Find the Germans,” he said. “Learn their plans.” We saluted and went out into the night, out into the no-man’s-land between us and the enemy.
After a while I became separated from the others in the darkness. I was on my own for an hour or more. In my slow pursuit I’d encountered only scrub brush, rocks and sand. Then I realized the clouds were parting again. The brilliant light of the full moon swept over the ground. My stomach knotted. I froze in place. I was a sitting duck, a perfect target for the enemy. I carefully scanned the landscape in front of me.
There! A figure in the moonlight. Only yards in front of me. The light glinted off the swas-tikas on his shoulder patches. A German soldier!
He raised his arms, aiming his machine pistol directly at me. I jerked my rifle around and fired at him. The sound of bullets cracked back and forth through the air. A blow to my hip knocked me to the ground. My rifle went flying. I couldn’t move my legs. Dear God, is this where I’ll die? I looked up. The German slowly approached, his pistol aimed at me. I waited for death. The soldier stared at me, and lowered his gun.
“Corporal,” he said, speaking to me in perfect English, “how badly are you hurt?”
“I’m not sure. I feel numb from my waist down.”
He looked at me silently. I could see the soldier clearly in the bright moonlight. We seemed to be about the same age. He was more than six feet tall, and strongly built. The border on his shoulder patches meant he was a corporal, just like me. “I know where a British aid station is,” he said. “I’ll take you there.”
I must be dreaming. The soldier holstered his pistol and reached down to grab my arms. He raised me to my feet. “Can you walk?” he asked. I shook my head. The feeling hadn’t returned to my legs. He took hold of my right arm, and slipped his other arm under my right leg. “Up you go,” he said. He swept me onto his shoulders, and secured me in a fireman’s carry. Then he started walking.
The walk was a blur as I drifted in and out of consciousness. How far we went, I will never know. But the soldier breathed heavily under my weight, growing tired. Several times he stopped to rest, lowering me to the ground. Then he hoisted me up on his shoulder, and we set out again.
The soldier talked as we stumbled on. “I am Alois Wagner,” he said. “My home is in Germany.” I told him my name. “What do you do in America?” he asked. “I like to fish,” I said, “and hunt.” “For me, the same,” he said. How could this man be my enemy? I wondered. He was more like a brother.
Clouds covered the moon again, bringing more darkness. The German corporal slowed, moving cautiously, searching for the best way forward. I became aware of lights and the shadowy shape of tents.
“Halt!” A command was shouted out in the night. Corporal Wagner shouted back: “I am a German soldier. I have an American here who needs help.” I heard British voices. Dim figures emerged from the darkness and surrounded us.
Corporal Wagner carefully lowered me to the ground and then stood tall beside me. He stunned me with his words: “I surrender!” We were put on cots side by side in a medical tent, and our wounds were treated. My shot had grazed his ribs. I’d be taken to a hospital to have bullets removed from my hip. We’d both be all right. “Gott ist mit uns,” Corporal Wagner said. “God is with us.” I looked at my rescuer. “Not all Germans agree with Hitler,” he said quietly. Before he was taken away, he tore off a shoulder patch from his uniform, and handed it to me. “A memento of our meeting in Kasserine Pass,” he said.
Eventually I tried to trace Alois Wagner through the POW camps. I learned he was first sent to England, and then to Canada. But there the trail reached a dead end. I believe he survived the war, and I hope he’s had a good life. Gott ist mit uns, as he said. I still have his shoulder patch. The swastika was originally an ancient image of the cross before Hitler and the Nazis corrupted it and turned it into a symbol of pure evil. Yet Christ said, “Love your enemy.” For some reason, Alois Wagner did.

Hope you don't mind me adding this onto your thread...your story reminded me of one I had read and kept.

---

Christmas has always been hard on soldiers who are far away from home. But only once did they actually lay down their arms and stop a war for it.

That was Christmas Eve 1914.

It was the first months of World War I. The British and German troops facing each other in muddy Flanders were as close to home geographically as wartime enemies on someone else's territory ever get. London was 60 miles away across the English Channel. The German border abutted on Belgium, which the Kaiser's army had invaded. Yet the muck, and the crisscrossing waterlogged trenches and the barbed- wire entanglements separating the two armies, as well as the constant firing by machine guns and artillery, made the distance seem far, far greater.

A Royal Engineer, Andrew Todd, wrote to the Edinburgh Scotsman newspaper that soldiers were "only 60 yard apart" at some places on the front lines. To make it feel more like Christmas, governments on both sides had prepared small Christmas gift boxes for each soldier, with snacks and tobacco. The German troops, accessible from home by land, also received small Christmas trees with candles attached.

The law of unanticipated consequences went to work. On Christmas Eve, the Germans set trees on trench parapets and lit the candles. Then, they began singing carols, and though their language was unfamiliar to their enemies, the tunes were not. After a few trees were shot at, the British became more curious than belligerent and crawled forward to watch and listen. And after a while, they began to sing.

By Christmas morning, the "no man's land" between the trenches was filled with fraternizing soldiers, sharing rations and gifts, singing and (more solemnly) burying the dead between the lines. Soon they were even playing soccer, mostly with improvised balls.

According to the official war diary of the 133rd Saxon Regiment, "Tommy and Fritz" kicked about a real football supplied by a Scot. "This developed into a regulation football match with caps casually laid out as goals. The frozen ground was no great matter... Das Spiel endete 3:2 fur Fritz" ("The game ended 3-2 for Fritz").

But the high commands on both sides felt they could not let this continue. In the national interest, the war had to go on. War is easier to make than peace. Under threat of court martial, troops on both sides were to ordered to separate and to restart hostilities. Reluctantly, they drifted apart.

As Gen. Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien ordered the British 2nd Corps from his cushy rear-area headquarters: "On no account is intercourse to be allowed between opposing troops. To finish this war quickly, we must keep up the fighting spirit."

In most sectors, prearranged signals ordered men back or confirmed the close of the truce.

"We parted," Pvt. Percy Jones of the Westminster Brigade wrote in his diary, "with much hand-shaking and mutual goodwill."

Rifleman George Eade of the 3rd London Rifles reported a German soldier saying to him, "Today we have peace. Tomorrow you fight for your country; I fight for mine. Good luck."

By New Year's Day the shooting had restarted. Attempts at other Christmas truces failed. Millions more would die before the final armistice in November 1918.

Today, governments continue their efforts to make Christmas for troops away from home as palatable as possible. The food is briefly festive, and efforts are made to put a bit of holiday spirit in the atmosphere.

But truces no longer seem likely. An English friend who was an army officer in Italy in 1943 recalled the Germans ringing bells on Christmas Eve from a church high up on a hill nearby.

"Can we stop shooting?" he asked a higher-up. "Not on your life!" he was told. Peace and goodwill are difficult to generate toward the other side when one is educated, pragmatically, to hate his enemy.

It becomes even more difficult when the cultural divide is vast. There could have been no shared Christmases with the Japanese in the Pacific war between 1941 and 1945.

Nor can it be easy now to share values, or festivities, with zealous Islamic combatants at Christmas in Iraq or Afghanistan.

A Christmas truce seems an impossible dream, almost a myth, from a more simple, vanished world. Peace is harder to make than war.

~Stanley Weintraub