Season’s Greetings My Dear Readers!!!!
Wherever you are, I wish you a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and a Happy Holiday Season. With 2022 coming to an end, I hope you are all able to enjoy a slower pace of life and spend time with your family, loved ones, and friends. If you are a new subscriber, welcome! I’m so excited you have joined me.
At this time of year, many of us have classic children’s stories like Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer playing on TV for the kids. Another perennial favorite is A Charlie Brown Christmas. Even adults love this one. We grew up watching it, but we can never grow out of the Peanuts gang. But today, I want to tell you about another Charlie Brown Christmas set in WWII, based on a true story that embodies the real meaning of Christmas. What’s more, it’s a Christmas truce story. It is incredible and heartwarming, so do read on below.
I don’t actually watch animated Christmas stories on TV anymore, but there is a Christmas movie that has become a tradition in my home. In 2019, during the Christmas holiday shortly before everything closed down due to the pandemic, my husband and I went to see a live production of Irvin Berlin’s musical The White Christmas. I’ve heard the song before many, many times, but this was my first time watching a performance of the story. And of course, I was thrilled when I learned that the main male characters were veterans of the Battle of Anzio, and there was even a scene of them at war in Anzio.
My husband and I loved the story. The following Christmas in 2020, with everything still mostly shut down, we watched the old 1954 movie version at home. We enjoyed it so much, we decided we would make it a family tradition to watch it every Christmas.
If you’re looking for a feel-good Christmas movie with a dose of WWII nostalgia, why not join me this Christmas and watch it too? White Christmas is available on both Netflix and Amazon Video.
Until next year. My best wishes to you for a Happy New Year in 2023!
Alexa Kang
A WWII Charlie Brown Christmas
Most of us are familiar with the incredible WWI Christmas truce story that happened on Christmas Eve in 1914, when the British and German troops put down their weapons and halted their fighting for one night, and came out of their trenches to wish each other Merry Christmas. They sang carols together, and traded cigarettes, and toasted wines. As it turned out, there was an equally awe-inspiring, but much less well-known Christmas truce story that happened in WWII.
Four days before Christmas in 1943, American second lieutenant Charlie Brown (yes, that is his real name) of the USAAF 8th Air Force was flying a B-17 bomber (known as the Ye Old Pub) retreating to England after a mission in Bremen, Germany, where they suffered a fierce counterattack by enemy fighters. The bomber sustained severe damages. Its #3 engine was down, and only one of its four engines was fully functional. Its internal oxygen, hydraulic, and electrical systems were all damaged. Many of its crew were seriously to critically wounded, and one was KIA; but the morphine syringes on board were frozen and their radio had been destroyed. All hope for Lt. Brown to escape alive with his crew seemed lost when a Luftwaffe M109 flew next to the bomber. Lt. Brown closed his eyes, certain that this was the end.
But miraculously, the M109 did not fire on them.
From the M109, German pilot Franz Stiegler of Jagdgeschwader 27 looked out and saw the U.S. bomber’s machine guns had been blown apart, and the American crew could not fire back to defend themselves. The B-17 was barely staying in the air, having lost its rudder and nose cone. Through its damaged frame, Stiegler could see the bomber’s crew were injured and incapacitated. At that moment, he couldn’t bring himself to fire upon the American plane. Instead, he tried to tell Brown from the window to divert to land in Sweden, a neutral territory, to get medical assistance. Brown, however, couldn’t understand him. Unable to get his message through, Stiegler flew along side Brown so other German planes wouldn’t target the bomber, and escorted them out of German airspace before he left them with a salute.
Later on, Stiegler explained, “To me, it was just like they were in a parachute. I saw them and I couldn't shoot them down.” You can hear the two pilots recount this story in their own words in this 15-minutes video:
What Franz Stiegler did that day was a serious risk to his own life. For one thing, the Americans could’ve misunderstood his intentions, and shoot him from inside the plane. Also, if anyone from the German military had seen what he did, he would’ve been court-martialed and punished by death. But in a rare moment during the war four days before Christmas, the spirit of mercy and compassion triumphed through him.
Charlie Brown did make it back to England. He reported the incident to his superiors, but the U.S army decided to keep it secret to prevent it from influencing how American Air Force units might react if similar situations occurred again. They could not risk their pilots thinking their enemies might not fire on them. Franz Stiegler, of course, could not disclose what he did to his own army.
This story remained hidden until forty years later when Charlie Brown decided to search for the pilot who spared his life in 1943. He found Franz Stiegler had moved to Canada after the war, and the two men reunited and became good friends. He also learned that Steigler, though a member of the German military during WWII, was never a Nazi. Stiegler’s parents had voted against Hitler before the Nazi regime came into power. After that, the Nazis abolished democratic elections. Stiegler himself never joined the German National Socialist Party.
I was awestruck by this amazing story. As always, there is so much we can learn from WWII. As we head into a new year, we may hear a lot of talks and noises about discourse and divisions. But I think the story of Charlie Brown and Franz Stiegler, as well as numerous other stories of unsung heroes and little-known tales of care and compassion of WWII, shine a light for us to find our way into the future.
If you are planning to cozy up to read something WWII during the holidays, and would like to know more about this Charlie Brown Christmas, you’re in luck! You can read about all the riveting details in A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II.
More Real-Life Wartime Holiday Stories?
I know many of you are WWII fiction readers because you have family members who served during the war. Do you have any wartime Christmas/Hanukkah or other stories about your parents or grandparents you’d like to tell? If so, please share them with me and my other subscribers in the comments. I would love to hear what happened. My newsletter is live on Substack on the internet, so you’ll be able to share their stories to the wider public too. This way, we can keep the memories of those who lived through WWII alive.
For New Subscribers
Readers who have followed me for a long time are familiar with these books already. But if you’re a new reader of mine, these are the wartime Christmas short stories I had written in past years":
Christmas Eve in the City of Dreams is a spinoff short story from my Rose of Anzio series. It is a a prequel of sort about Jesse Garland, a main character in that series, and what he did on the Christmas Eve before he reported for the draft. You should’ve gotten a complimentary copy when you signed up for my newsletter. If not, be sure to check your spam folder. This story is also available for 99c on Amazon.
Wartime Christmas Tales is an anthology of WWII flash fiction. It was a collaborate effort by me and a group of WWII fiction authors in 2020. The anthology was our gift to readers to give them something positive during the Covid pandemic and lockdown. It is still free for download on Amazon and all major ebook retailers.
Christmas in Love is also a multi-authors flash fiction anthology. There are stories of different genres, but mine is a WWII story. It is another Rose of Anzio spinoff about a secondary character, the soldier Warren Hendricks. This one is also free on Amazon.
You can find these and all my books on my author page on Amazon.
Also, if you missed my WWII horror short story The Reckoning during Halloween, you can still read it here on my Substack. This story was inspired by the writing prompt: the runaway train.