The Evening Star (December 25, 1944)
Maj. Eliot: Season of memories
By Maj. George Fielding Eliot
The Christmas season is always a season of memories.
This is a war Christmas – the sixth war Christmas for most of our Allies (though it is the ninth for the Chinese); it is our fourth.
On our first war Christmas, the nation was still reeling under the shock of the disaster at Pearl Harbor. We are not likely to forget that Christmas for a long time. Looking back on it we realize how little we then understood the magnitude of the task and of the sacrifices which lay before us.
On our second war Christmas, matters were a little better. We were beginning to turn the tide in the Pacific and in Europe. On our third, we could speak with some confidence of the future – it was clear that we were not going to be beaten, but the road still seemed long and difficult.
Our fourth war Christmas comes to us in the midst of the last desperate enemy effort to check our victorious advance in Western Europe. We have succeeded in landing the full might of America and Britain on the continent of Europe, we have smashed the famed Atlantic Wall, we have brought our armies to the western frontiers of Germany itself, we have liberated France, and we have compelled the enemy to throw his last stake upon the board. We are engaged, on this Christmas, in a mighty struggle to destroy this final enemy countereffort, into which he has put his all.
Solemnly in this Christmas season, we may reflect on the sacrifices our sons and brothers and dear ones are making along the Western Front from the valley of the Meuse down through the hills and woods of the Ardennes and in the little towns of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. We know that in the surrounded garrisons behind the wave of the current German advance, our men are having no very cheerful Christmas, that the airborne K rations form the bulk of their Christmas dinner, that they will spend the hours of Christmas Day not in happy relaxation, but in bitter struggle with a desperate enemy.
But we know also that from the north and from the south the divisions of the Allied armies are gathering on the flanks of the German effort; we know that the German attempts to fan out to north and south have been checked at every attempt; we know that German progress westward means only additional peril to the irreplaceable German armored divisions as long as they cannot swing right or left to exploit their gains. For the counterblows, when they come, will strike at base of the German penetration, cutting the supply roads by the lifeblood of the German effort flows to the westward.
And we know that a kindly Providence has given our fighting men the very best Christmas present that they could have asked for. the Christmas gift for which they must have prayed during the days of fog that helped the Germans so greatly – two days of clear weather in which our airmen can strike against the German armor, the German supply columns, the German troop formations. Friday was clear and Friday was spent very largely in overcoming the resistance of the Luftwaffe; Saturday likewise dawned clear, with fewer German planes in the sky, more time therefore for our airpower to hit the Germans on the grounds.
If Christmas Day is likewise clear, we may begin to hope that the tide has been turned.
This writer has seen some war Christmases in earlier days – the Christmas of 1915, when we lay in Egypt licking our wounds and counting the vacant places in our ranks after the terrible defeat of Gallipoli; the Christmas of 1916, when we were reckoning the awful cost and the tiny gains of the great Somme battle; the Christmas of 1917, when the bloody mud of Passchendaele had filled men’s hearts with something very like despair. This is no such Christmas of bitter reflection and uncertain promise. It is a Christmas season in which we may look back with pride upon the accomplishment of the year just ending; when we may look forward to a future bright with hope, a year which certainly will see one of our enemies brought to defeat, a year which will just as certainly see the other reeling under the blows of our concentrated power as we and our Allies close in upon it.