Monthly Archives: December 2024

By Michael F. Duggan

110 years ago tonight, British soldiers manning their trenches in Belgium and northern France noticed lights along and behind the German lines. It appeared that the enemy was planning a Christmas Eve attack, and some of the British units went to a posture of “stand to” as a light snow fell.

It soon became apparent that the lights were from ad hoc Christmas trees that the Germans had put up in their own trenches. Germans and Brits exchanged carols and eventually some of the bolder men on both sides stuck their heads above the parapets. Eventually large numbers of men from both sides emerged and ventured into No Man’s Land to exchange greetings, tobacco, and drink, and to bury the dead.

The British General Headquarters (GHQ) and German Supreme Army Command (Oberste Heeresleitung) made sure that the event was never repeated, but it is telling that if it had been up to the men in the trenches, the war would have ended that day. It was still early in the war and many of the men who participated in the truce would not survive the war. That entire generation is gone now, but one can imagine them yet, the men of 1914, in a Yuletide Valhalla in the narrow, blighted strip between the lines.

In Jay Winter’s 1996 documentary, The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, critic and historian, Paul Fussell, observes that the Christmas Truce of 1914, was perhaps the “last twitch of the 19th century”–a final public moment when the assumption was that people, even one’s enemies, were essentially good. Of course the English and Germans of 1914 were culturally similar, and it is difficult to imagine this kind of spontaneous event happening, say, in the South Pacific during WWII.

The 1969 film, Oh! What a Lovely War, has a scene that captures this event in miniature. It was also the subject of Stanley Weintraub’s book, Silent Night (2001), and the movies, Joyeux Noel (2005), and Christmas 1914 (2014). There was also a bittersweet children’s book published in 1993, titled War Game, about the truce including a soccer match played in No Man’s Land between British soldiers and some of the Germans they faced.

Whenever I find myself getting too hardbitten in my realism about human nature and the world, I remember this true (if somewhat mythologized) story of Christmas on the Western Front. In these troubled times, it is good to remember historical episodes like this one. But we should also not forget the five months that preceded it, and the nearly four years of hell that followed.

By Michael F. Duggan

By December 1944, it looked as if the Germans were on their heels, although the Battles of Aachen and the Hürtgen Forest that fall suggested otherwise.

On December 16, 1944-, eighty years ago this coming Monday, 30 German divisions with around 410,000 men, 1,400 armored vehicles, and 2,600 artillery pieces, broke through the Allied lines in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium, northern France, and Luxembourg, in an effort to make a beeline to take the port of Antwerp. It had been a quiet sector (who would think of attacking through the thick forests of the Ardennes, as the Germans had done in 1940?), and the U.S. First Army under General Courtney Hodges, was caught off guard. The Germans advance quickly and established a 60-mile deep salient, or “bulge,” in the Allied lines.

The 101st Airborne “Screaming Eagles” Division was surrounded in the crossroads town of Bastogne (and were know afterward as the “Battered Bastards of Bastogne”). When asked to surrender by the German general, the American acting division commander, Anthony McAuliffe, replied with a singe word: “Nuts!” The siege of Bastogne was relieved by Patton’s Third Army the day after Christmas, 1944. The paratroopers of the 101st said that they had not needed to be rescued, that they were surrounded and therefore had the Germans just where they wanted them.

Initially, bad weather prevented the Allies from capitalizing on their considerable air superiority and precluded air resupply drops. US soldiers were poorly equipped for winter combat, and it wasn’t until January 25, 1945 that the Battle of the Bulge finally ended.

With roughly 81,000 casualties, including 19,000 dead, The Bulge was the bloodiest battle the U.S. would fight in Europe in WWII (keep in mind that the USSR lost an average of between 14,000 and 17,500 solders every day between 1941 and 1945, so the entire Ardennes Campaign would have been a bad Saturday on the Eastern Front).

In retrospect, the German Ardennes Offensive was a desperate, last ditch effort by the Wehrmacht in the west (and, also in retrospect, it would have been in Germany’s interest to let the Americans and British in before the Soviets). To the U.S. soldiers in Bastogne and Malmedy, it was a frozen hell.

By Michael F. Duggan

I have a love/hate relationship with boxing. On the one hand, it is one of the most subtle of sports. On the other hand, it is assault and is bad for its participants (this is to say nothing about the corruption it has frequently attracted). There is also a kind of grace and beauty to traditional boxing that is so conspicuously missing in extreme fighting and mixed martial arts. To me these bouts look more like something along the lines of a bar fight: throw a lot of leather while exhibiting minimal defensive skills, affect a takedown and then choke or beat into submission. Ah, art.

Having not seen a heavyweight match in a while, I went to a local sports bar to watch the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul “Fight of the [yawn] Century.” I got to the place early to get a good seat. I then sat through three preliminary cards (along with a fair amount of hype that rounded out the four hours leading up to the main event). All of the initial fights were decent. The Taylor-Serrano fight was especially furious, but I didn’t like Katie Taylor’s head-butting. Serrano showed real heart and kept coming back.

But the Tyson-Paul bout? Well, now, that was a lackluster fight–quite possibly the most widely-watched waste of time in streaming history. On the one hand, it was impressive to see a 58 year-old man go toe-to-toe with someone 31 years younger. On the other hand, Tyson in his prime would have destroyed this guy in under a minute.

I’ll admit it, I wanted to see the old Tyson. I reasoned that if anybody in the foothills of 60 could make a comeback, it was Tyson (or Foreman): power is the last thing a fighter loses. Speed is the first. Like so many people, I was quietly hoping that he would not get hurt. But back in the late ’80s, the man was a juggernaut

I think that Ali, in his prime would have frustrated Tyson. Liston, Foreman, and Shavers might have thrown individual punches as hard or harder than Iron Mike, but nobody ever threw combinations of hard punches like him. He’d walk up to his opponent, leading with both hands, get inside and throw a flurry of 5 or 6 punches–uppercuts and hooks, any one of which could knock out most fighters, even if landed as a body blows–and in most cases, it was “good night sweet prince.”

The guys who did the best against Tyson, were big, powerful men with a long reach, who could keep him on the outside and frustrate him (Buster Douglas, Lennox Lewis). Of course, during the early years, Tyson defeated most of his opponents before they even stepped in the ring.

So what about this fight? At first Tyson seemed to be punching with some of his old power. But the speed wasn’t there. Soon he was sucking wind and punching air. Without speed, he couldn’t get inside (Tyson was the ultimate inside fighter and was not much good when kept out with his 71-inch reach relative to Paul’s 76). He only landed 18 out of 97 punches, as Paul sniped from the outside. And so one of the greats of yesterday suffered the indignity of losing on points to an Internet “influencer” for an impressive payday.

I offer Mr. Paul my congratulations on his victory over Mike Tyson and the suggestion that, for his next “Fight of the Century” spectacle, he take on the ghost of Jack Johnson.

By Michael F. Duggan

Have you noticed the proliferation of horribly contrived commerce-related sales and spending days after Thanksgiving in recent years?

Years ago people noticed the panicked rush of millions of Americans to stores the day after Thanksgiving.  This phenomenon was the result of the day-after-Thanksgiving Day sales—i.e. marketing—the fact that many people are off from work on the day after the holiday, and the unsettling reality that Christmas was only four weeks away.  It may have also may have been the unintended result and unforeseen side effect of the massive amounts of tryptophan ingested the day before. It was a kind of temporary insanity triggered by a turkey hangover. 

On “Back Friday,” Americans were entertained with news stories showing crazed citizens storming into stores when they opened in the early morning darkness, trampling the weak or slow before them. We were treated to the rare spectacle of women punching or tackling each other in order to obtain the last mass-produced item of a particularly trendy kind in the store.

With the rise of the Internet and online shopping, the Monday after Thanksgiving became “Cyber Monday.”  Whether this was a complete gimmick or a “real thing”—a naturalistic trend—is unclear, but the term was supposedly devised by the National Retail Federation in 2005.

Following in suit, we saw the creation of Small Business Saturday in 2010, allegedly the brainchild of Jessica Ling, a corporate type at American Express. Although I like and support small and medium-sized businesses and companies—and believe that an economy based on them would be far superior to one of monster banks and mega corporations—the completely contrived nature of this “day,” and the blind obedience of people to embrace it, rubs me the wrong way.

Given all of this Holiday manipulation and spending going on, it is only natural that charities would want to get in on the action. In 2012, the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan and the United Nations Foundation, declared the arrival of “GivingTuesday” (the day after “Cyber Monday,” although not limited to one day). If all this hype is going to happen anyway, I am not cynical about charities wanting to cash in on the action/hysteria.

All the same, please be sure to take off hump day this week in celebration of “A Fool and His Money Wednesday,” in anticipation of the day in January when your credit card bill arrives.