Unofficial truces

Lately I've been dabbling in some ww1 history, and I'm fascinated by the Christmas ceasefire. Are there other examples of this? In any war across history?

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There were some medical truces during WW2.

Nothing? It's that unusual? Shameless self bump

Looked into it a bit, thanks

There are some similar sort of truces that were in the Civil Wars of the Late Roman Republic. Caesar records his soldiers in "De Bellum Civilium" mingling with the camp of the Pompeians a number of times, swapping stories and food.

What makes it different from the christmas truce was that it was probably favored by Caesar as a way to mitigate fighting a battle, and gain a propaganda win. The truce ends when the commanders of the Pompeian forces return, and then freak the fuck out, ordering the massacre of the Caesarian forces in the camp. Caesar astutely uses their brutality to paint them in a horrible light.

my feels

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I remember reading an interview by a french historian, who studied these moments of ceasefire on the western front, mostly between germans and french units ; And his conclusion was that they were everything but unusual.
These ceasefires were normally permanent and negociated through tacit ways ; Mostly it was to prevent them from killing each other when they weren't ordered. It was also used to allow the retrieving of wounded, or to do the tasks that officers forced the soldiers to do ; No one wants to get shot while you dig the trenches or fix the barbed wires. When a french unit was relieved of duty, they quickly gave the conditions of the "ceasefire" to the new soldiers, like "don't shoot the boches who come during the night to fix the barbed wire, don't be spooked". If the ceasefire was breached through any incident, then it would greatly complicate things and would be responded with much more violence, especially when there will come a day of great offensive.

It's a bit hard to find information on them. The Hurtgen Forest truces (depicted in the painting) are probably the best known examples but even then they were usually informal truces arranged at small unit levels, meaning they don't often appear outside of personal memoirs.

>General Cota would have been furious, but individual soldiers took it upon themselves to stop the firing. The Americans watched in silence while the wounded were brought back under the gaze of their enemies, who stood at the entrances of their bunkers, with their rifles at the port.
Battle Of Hurtgen Forest - Charles Whiting

There were similar truces in Normandy, allowing litter bearers to clear wounded, which is what prompted American medics to start painting crosses on their helmets.

>Aid men and litter bearers began painting their helmets with large red crosses framed by round fields of white, speculating this provided a heightened level of protection. One division reported that their “medical aid men had everything to gain and nothing to lose by painting their helmets,” because experience showed that when litter bearers with marked helmets appeared on the field enemy fire ceased.
Infantry Combat Medics in Europe, 1944-45 - Tracy Shilcutt

So this was more or less a "sanctioned" truce then?

You do know that only happened until 1916, right?

youtube.com/watch?v=5fwrw9e9094

Seems like wars without some level of fraternization are the exception.

It was sanctioned by the fact that Caesar let his troops cross over to the Pompeian camp, while the Pompeian commanders were not there (hence why they freaked out when they got back and saw troops from the Caesarian camp chilling out, fearing a mutiny or betraying to the Caesarian cause).

It was fundamentally organized by the opposing Centurions though, so theres that too.

However brief it might be, I'm simply interested in that "human" component. Two men on opposing sides, trained to kill the other, instead sharing booze and smokes and playing games. It's fantastic to think about, and with the current state of modern warfare, it may very well never happen again.

Late WW1 there were plenty of examples of Russian troops leaving their position to surrender which started a chain of Russians walking up to the massed crowds at the front, even armed and chatting with the Germans. War was pretty much over for them at that point.

Also recall an incident of where Austrian troops stopped firing at a botched Italian charge and telling them to move back to their trenches and not throw away their lives.

After the Russian revolution the ruskies were weary of the war and didn't really want to fight anymore. Memoirs from German diaries say that more Russians were killed by friendly fire, men shooting their officers when ordered to attack than by the Germans in some later battles. Others show Russians crossing the lines and sharing drinks with their Herman counterparts. So much so that the Germans worried about the influence communist Russian soldiers were having on the Germans in the trenches

There were quite a few things like this during the Gallipoli campaign in the summer, because of the rotting bodies they needed ceasefires to bury them so neither side got sick (or at least was less likely to anyway) and there tended to be a bit of fraternization during those times. Gallipoli gets really weird even when they go back to fighting there would be duels between individual riflemen in opposite trenches with bets taken

Was that during the second war of Italian independence? Reminds of the how the Mexican army released the last few FFL' s after their last stand.

The Christmas ceasefire is an overmemed event that was certainly not universal and way overcovered.

Just like everything else about WW1 it has been blown out of proportion and romanticised.

Fair enough, its just a question of how rare it is. People have been fighting for a long time, and it's worth noting if and when the odd fraternization happens, even if it's to an insignificant extent.

The reason why there is such little academic information on this is simply because when this kind of thing happened, it was almost always kept secret. The low-level officers who organized this kind of thing didn't want the higher-ups to know what they were up to, you see. So we know that these incidents definitely happened with surprising frequency because soldiers wrote about it in their diaries, but there isn't a lot of really good records of it.

A lot of it depended on what part of the front you were stationed at. If you were in an high-action area where intense fighting is going on, you're not going to see very much of this. But if you're in a low-action area that the higher-ups don't pay as much attention to, then you'll get more incidents like this. Keep in mind, though, it was relatively rare for the 2 sides to just completely stop fighting. Usually, they'd at least pretend to be fighting each other. A common sort of example would be an unofficial agreement that both sides would not fire mortars at a particular time of day. This allowed soldiers on both sides an opportunity to do simple human things like piss, shit, eat, and sleep without worrying so much that they might get blown up in the next few minutes. Shitting might not seem like such a big deal, but remember, trench toilets (they weren't actually toilets, more like ditches) were a favorite target for enemy mortar teams throughout the war. Something as simple as emptying your bowels often carried with it the risk of being killed.

This type of thing wasn't always organized by officers. Sometimes it came from the spontaneous actions of individual soldiers that then got reciprocated by the enemy. Even at Gallipoli, perhaps the most bitter front of the entire war, there were incidents of Turks throwing fresh food into Australian trenches, and vice versa. It's really hard to understand what motivated these food-sharing incidents, because it could come down to simple boredom.

No this was WW1

I apologise for being rude earlier with my post. It was not very gentlemanly of me.