A Special Christmas Blog In Memoria et gratia
Forty years of marriage felt like no time at all. Forty years of marriage left so much yet to explore, to share, to learn—together. There was a time in our own American history, when forty years was the life expectancy at birth. From that perspective, forty years was a lifetime. I should be grateful that I had the gift of a forty-year marriage, and I am.
Generally I dedicate my last blog of the year to some aspect of Christmas, and its message is meant to be joyous. Those sentiments seem out of reach right now, and so I have turned to my husband for inspiration. John, during the last decade of his life, took up writing, with an ever-growing passion. He was particularly fond of writing military/espionage short stories, many of which were based on a true tale. At this time of year, he wrote about Christmas, sometimes with ribald humor and at other times with a military theme. What follows is an example of those two ends of the spectrum of his storytelling—a light-hearted piece from 2021, entitledChristmas in Connecticut, and a deeper, darker story from 2018,Frohe Weihnachten, (translated from German: Happy Christmas) based on a true story that he and I were told around 1990. At the time, John was with Kidder Peabody, and I accompanied him on a business trip to the company’s Portland, Maine office. The office manager shared with us that his mother owned a summer house on nearby Long Island (in Casco Bay) and wintered onshore. One late spring, in 1943 or perhaps 1944, she arrived to open her house and found in kitchen a number of used tins of food with German language labels. From that snippet of information, John crafted an emotional Christmas story—not unlike “Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce.” The two stories follow.
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Christmas in Connecticut
John D. Chadwick©
Because Christmas fell on a Saturday this year and because there would be so many of us, we made the decision to have our family dinner on Sunday the 26th of December at our home. The trouble began early. Around ten o’clock in the morning, Grandpa set out on foot to CVS for a pack of bubble gum which had replaced chewing tobacco in his life. To be honest, we forgot about him until we heard his labored breathing as he trudged up the walk, pulling a wagon piled high with paper which turned out to be his CVS receipt. We now have a 50% discount on shaving cream, razor blades, eyeglasses, body lotion, prophylactics (small size only), deodorant, toothpaste, dietary supplements, large disposable diapers, pipe cleaners, sunscreen, hand wash, eye scrub, stool softener, and moisturizing cream.
At about this time the telephone rang. It was Uncle Harold and Aunt Isabel calling to say they were in a traffic jam. A truck carrying cooking grease had overturned on the Throgs Neck Bridge and all traffic was being diverted onto the Whitestone Bridge. They were at JFK Airport and hadn’t moved in an hour. Auntie had to go to the bathroom very badly. She wasn’t sure she could hold it. Dad suggested she walk up to the next exit and find a McDonalds. Unknowingly, he had advised her to take the road to the airport which was a mile away. She told us her cell phone was running out of juice; they probably wouldn’t call again.
While the women were preparing the Christmas dinner, the men went into the den to watch the football game. The Giants would be playing the Jets. For the rest of the country that game was a snooze. Before the kickoff, there was an advertisement for a medication to cure Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. You were not to take the medicine if you were pregnant, wished you were pregnant, had thought about being pregnant, your mother had been pregnant, or the children’s gerbil was pregnant. Furthermore, you could experience a serious reaction if you had arthritis, dementia, mumps, typhus fever, heart problems, chicken pox, diphtheria, gonorrhea or a cold. If so, call 911 or go to the nearest hospital.
At this point, the announcer came back saying that the first quarter had ended with the score tied and with the Jets on the Giants’ four-yard line. All at once, the TV flickered, the lights went out, and we lost power. Dad was so angry, he left his chair to go to his office to get his shotgun which he was going to use to shoot the TV. With our back-up generator broken, we searched the house but could find only birthday candles. Flashlights would have to do. Fortunately, Mom came in to announce dinner was ready. Unfortunately, in the dark she tripped over Rover’s tail. The turkey slid off the serving platter landing on the gravy boat which overturned, spilling the gravy into Uncle Sam’s lap. He leapt back, not realizing he had tucked the tablecloth, and not his napkin, into his trousers. Luckily, the glassware remained upright; however, the cranberry sauce fell onto the new white carpet. Rover stepped in it before running to the kitchen. To no one’s surprise, Mom started to sob. Dad, to his credit, called the Club and made a dinner reservation for us all.
At that very moment, my brother walked through the door breaking the news that he and his girlfriend had called it quits, so he would be having supper with us. Someone called to warn us that the service warranty on our car was about to expire. Dad said it was time for Plan B. Sis reminded him that we already had Medicare. Mom offered to call Joe Namath the next day to check for sure. What more can I say? We’ll see how dinner goes.
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Frohe Weihnachten
John D. Chadwick©
A sliver of moon no wider than a string bikini hung in the western sky, a beacon to the German submarine U-239 as it crept into the east facing cove of Schuler Island, a pile of rocks that stood by itself 30 miles off the coast of Maine so small that it only appeared on navigational maps. The sole structure on the island was a large, with perhaps 11 bedrooms, house that had served as a summer gathering place for the Schuler clan for more than a century.
Several sailors pushed a rubber raft into the icy water and paddled to the Island’s dock. They quickly made their way up to the house, shoved open the front door, and searched each room. The house was deserted, as they expected, having watched it through the sub’s periscope for a day. Going outside, they flashed the letter “C” back to the boat indicating that all was clear. The crew on board gave a collective cheer, scrambled into the ship’s lifeboats, and came ashore. The naval engineers strung a power cable from the U-boat to the house’s electrical circuit board. A few lights were turned on as the crew moved swiftly through the house, stripping the blankets from the beds and nailing them over the windows to block the light.
The water is deeper in this part of the ocean than you might suspect. The submarine was backed out of the cove and submerged to where the deck was slightly awash. The conning tower was still riding high. Search planes were unlikely to be overhead on December 24th or 25th and that possibility was particularly improbable now that a major snowstorm was forecasted for the Boston area beginning at midnight. A skeleton crew was left on board, but otherwise all the sailors came on shore. As there were not enough beds for everyone to sleep at the same time, a rotation schedule was set up so that all the crew had an opportunity for sleep.
It was Christmas Eve, 1942. The men had been looking forward to this very party since sailing from the Normandy port of Brest the week before. Tonight would be a time of drinking and singing, and tomorrow’s meal would be the traditional Christmas dinner of goose with all the trimmings. In Germany, Christmas Eve is generally not a time for high merriment. The boisterous celebration takes place the following day. However, the sailors decided that, since they were not in Germany but in the United States, they were free to have a rollicking good time on the Christmas vigil. The wurst food was brought out: liverwurst, bratwurst, and weisswurst along with sauerkraut. Captain Hoffmann had also secreted over an ample supply of schnapps, despite the proscription regarding alcohol on board the submarine. And a case of vodka also mysteriously appeared. The WBZ radio station in Boston played its traditional Christmas Eve broadcast. The words were in English, but those traditional melodies were familiar to the sailors, both friend and foe.
The following morning, much to everyone’s joy, it was a white Christmas, and the snow fell softly throughout the day. Captain Hoffmann, who was renowned for achieving the impossible, had secured ten geese which had been slow-roasting while the submarine was making its way across the Atlantic Ocean, offering an unlikely, but gratifying, aroma on board. The geese were transported to the house and wrapped in blankets to keep them warm while vegetables were boiled on the stovetop. Christstollen—a must have at a German Christmas meal—was set on a table for dessert. Captain Hoffmann offered a prayer for their safety and that of their loved ones. He also added a prayer for the Shuler family.
To accommodate their numbers, the crew had to eat in shifts, but there were no complaints, only joy on that Christmas day in that house on a tiny island off the coast of Maine. And there was gratitude for being alive and feeling safe—for the moment. The war could not be forgotten, but for a brief time it seemed far away. As night approached, the men took care in washing the dishes, the cutlery, and the stemware and returning them to exactly where they had come from. The blankets were folded and put back on the beds. The garbage was bagged and taken out to the submarine to be disposed of at sea. The power cable was unplugged. As a final gesture, Captain Hoffmann left a note which read:
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Dear Schuler Family,
On behalf of the entire crew of submarine U-239, I want to thank you for your Christmas hospitality. We spent a splendid Christmas eve and Christmas day at your house. We were careful not to break anything and we cleaned up as best we could. Perhaps we will have a chance to meet one another someday. The bottle of schnapps is a gift of thanks.
Captain Hans Hoffman
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Two at a time, Commander Arnold Schuler sprinted up the steps of the German Naval Ministry. He had been assigned to Berlin immediately after the War and his tour of duty was coming to an end. There was one more inquiry he needed to make. Turning into the Navy records room, he asked the woman at the desk if the German Navy kept individual logs for all their ships. She gave him a look that said, This is Germany, of course we do. “I would like to see the log for the submarine, U-239. I knew someone aboard her in the last war and I wanted to see what became of the ship.” It was a lie, of course, but not a big one. Schuler’s mother had written to him about the discomforting surprise when they arrived on the Island in the early summer of 1943. The Commander wished he had spent the Christmas holiday as comfortably as the submariners had. Strangely, he felt a certain closeness to Captain Hoffmann. However, beyond that, he was curious. For the last three years of the War, he had served on a destroyer in the North Atlantic, and during that time, they had destroyed many a German submarine. Might U-239 be among them?
Schuler’s heart sank when the receptionist returned with a rather slim volume. He flipped to the last page and looked at the final entry. “January 20, 1943. Temperature -2 Centigrade. Turning west at 50 degrees North latitude. Destroyer on the horizon. Diving to 40 meters.” There was a final annotation: Lost at sea January 1943. Now it was time for Schuler to pay a visit to the U.S. Navy War Records Department. The log of his own ship was sure to be there. What had its battle action been on January 20, 1943?