Christmas, 1941

I've been running events from 21 and 41, as anyone who stops in here knows which unfortunately means that 2021 has more posts than any prior year.  I didn't mean for that to happen.

Anyhow, this post, which was written before December 25 and set to pre post, is one that I thought about not putting up at all. The reason for that is that posts on Christmas during World War Two tend to take on an ultra sappy character, and also tend to yield to the odd recent American trend of turning every day into Veterans Day, something we don't like and wish to avoid.

Be that as it may, as we have been looking at events of eighty years ago fairly regularly here, and as it would be sort of odd, in that context, not to discuss that here, we'll have a post about Christmas, 1941, but it's going to be a little different.

Christmas, Christ's Mass, is a Christian holiday dating back to the early history of the Church. Contrary to the modern net baloney that likes to make un-cited claims to the contrary, it seems to have been celebrated very early on and indeed is based on an early calculation of the date of Christ's birth.  Those who like to cite competing Roman holidays as the source fail to note that in fact the most commonly cited contender was established after Christ's Mass was.  Indeed, there's a term for it which I've forgotten, but if some borrowing went on, it may well be that Roman pagans were borrowing from Roman Christians in this regard, and not the other way around.

Anyhow, Christianity is the largest religion in the world, and it was in 1941, although it's actually larger now than it was then.  Christians were citizens of every single country in the war, including even Japan, which we don't tend to think of in this context, which even had one general officer who was Catholic.  This doesn't mean, by any means, that Christians were well treated in every combatant country. Quite the contrary.

The largest Christian denomination in the world is the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church, which was also the largest Christian denomination at the time.  Americans, who live in what is essentially a Protestant country, tend not to realize this, but it's quite true.  Of the nations involved in World War Two in 1941, the nation with the largest single Catholic population under repression was Poland.

Nazi Germany also contrary to what some armchair crabs like to claim, was virulently anti-Christian.  Indeed, by 1941 the Nazi regime had already attempted to co-opt the Lutheran Church and had failed.  It was hostile to Christianity of all types, and in Poland this meant an outright war on the church. The practice of the Catholic faith in Poland was essentially band and the German government was murdering priest.  It's one more black spot on the German people in regard to their conduct during the 1930s and 1940s.

Perhaps the second-largest oppressed Christian population in the warring countries was that of Germany's.  It remains an ultimate irony that in much of Germany Christianity was strong with it being particularly strong in the German Catholic south and west.  In the rest of the country the Lutheran faith predominated and a long history of association with the German monarchy had accordingly weakened it following the fall of the German Empire, but it remained very influential nonetheless.  Its surprising strength, moreover, caused the Nazi regime to hold off on full co-opting of the Lutheran faith which it had planned to do as part of an effort to completely replace Christianity.  Lutheranism reacted so strongly that the government had to back off.

Both Lutheran and Catholic clerics suffered during the war, but the Catholic ones far more as an overall percentage.  Unlike the right wing governments in Spain and France the Nazis did not see Christianity as party of their cultural heritage and sought to wipe it out.  By 1941 this was already causing a struggle in the Catholic regions of the country.  It would come into full fruition in 1944 when the July 20 plot saw an attempt to kill Hitler in which a large percentage of the actors were Catholics motivated by their faith (with this also being true of some of the Protestant participants).

Nazi Germany's hostility to Christianity was second only to Soviet Russia's, which is one of the odd was the extreme right wing government of Germany was similar, if perhaps only superficially, to the extreme left wing government of the Soviet Union.  While the German's liked to repeatedly claim that they were acting to save Europe from Bolshevism, in this aspect of their beliefs they were as hostile as the Communists were to the defining element of European civilization.

This takes us to the millions of people living under Soviet Communism.  In one of the numerous ironies of World War Two, the Allied Soviets were as murderous towards their Christian populations as the Nazi Germans were to theirs.

Russia, of course, was home to the largest population of Orthodox Christians on earth, with the Orthodox being the second-largest body of Christians.  The Soviets had been busy suppressing, often lethally, the Orthodox Church, or in their case Orthodox Churches, since 1917.  Beyond this, substantial bodies of Eastern Catholics lived withing the border of the Soviet Union which were completely suppressed and who were practicing their faith underground.  168,300 Russian Orthodox clergy of the then already heavily suppressed church were arrested in 1937 and 1938. Of these, 106,300 were shot.

In spite of this, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church had asked for Russians to support the war effort almost immediately after the Germans invaded the country.  The Germans in turn lifted the suppression of the Russian and Ukrainian churches on the territory they captured.  This created the supreme irony of the murderous German regime, which was suppressing Catholicism heavily in Poland and also suppressing Catholicism and Lutheranism in Germany, lifting the suppression in the USSR where they occupied portions of it.  Stalin in turn lifted the suppression of the Russian Orthodox Church in September.  So in 1941, Orthodox Christians in Russia, while suffering enormously due to the war, were nonetheless experiencing the freest Christmas in terms of being able to practice their faith since Red victory in the Civil War.  As the Orthodox used the "old calendar", Christmas however fell on a different day of the year.

In the rest of occupied or fascist Europe, Christians were left largely unhindered to practice their faith, although their relationships with their governments varied by country.  Christians were very closely watched, however, in the fascist countries or those which were part of the far right, although their relationship with their governments varied considerably by country.

In the largest Christian country in Asia, the Philippines, the suppression of the Catholic faith that would come under Japanese occupation had not yet arrived.  This would be the last Christmas in which the practice of Christianity would be unhindered by Japanese occupation, with the Japanese strongly associating Christianity with the West, and the Church constantly acting on behalf of the suppressed population.  Next to the Philippines, China had the next largest Christian population in Asia at the time, with that population suffering the hard ravishes of war that Japan had imposed upon all of the Chinese.

In the Allied countries, outside the Soviet Union, freedom of religion was unhindered and Christmas was generally normal, if very much constrained in countries that were at war.  In the United States, the big gift giving Christmas was already a thing, and had been for some time. In more materially constrained regions of North America, such as Canada, which had gone right from the Great Depression into World War Two, this was not nearly the case, with gifts, such as in my mother's family, often limited to one gift, often a book, and fruit, the latter being hard to get in the winter.

For most Americans and Canadians, Christmas meant attending Church. For Catholics and Orthodox it universally did, but it also did for members of most Protestant faiths.  In Mexico suppression of the church was being relaxed, starting in 1940, and the Church was reviving.  In the United Kingdom the Christmas seasons was a major seasonal event, although regular church participation by the British population had declined fairly substantially in the 20th Century.  Nonetheless, England remained strongly Anglican in character and Scotland strongly Presbyterian.  The then very conservative Lutheran churches of the Scandinavian countries had large-scale participation and impacted the celebration of Christmas in those countries.

What might be noted is that while celebration of Christmas was universal, it had strongly regional expressions everywhere at the time.  Everything was much less uniform than it is now, and much less Americanized as well.

For people like my folks, this day would have been a fairly normal Christmas for the regions where they lived.  My father's family would have gone to Mass, if they had not the night before, and would have opened up their presents in the early morning.  My mother's family would have done the same, but with there being less in the way of presents given the material constraints that Canadians were living under.  In both families there would have been a special Christmas dinner, likely consisting of ham or turkey, I suspect, in the case of my father's family even though they were in the beef and lamb industry.  My mother's family would likely have had ham as well, and both would have had a potato side.  My father's mother was a good cook and made candy and fudge, which undoubtedly would have featured in the Christmas meal.  My mother's family lived on the same block as her paternal grandparents and aunts and uncles, and they likely would have had a fairly large family presence at their Christmas celebration.

For the events of the day, on this day in 1941 Bing Crosby's song White Christmas was sung on NBC's Kraft's Music Hall.  Crosby had not yet recorded it as a single as he wasn't impressed with the song.

The North Platte Canteen was formally established in North Platte, Nebraska.

Hong Kong fell to the Japanese, which resluted in a formal British surrender in the afternoon.  Japanese entered St. Stephens Hospital in successive groups, first murdering a two doctors who went out to meet them, then killing wounded British and Canadian soldiers, and then finally raping the nurses and then murdering them.  Such behavior was already common for Japanese soldiers in China and would be repeated by them throughout the war whereever they went.

Hitler relieved Guderian of his command.  Guderian was flat out ignoring his orders in an effort to fight an effective defensive battle.

Sir Alan Brooke became Chief of the British General Staff.