Christmas at war: A cabin in the Hurtgen Forest

Story by Stephen J. Thorne

The Christmas Truce of 1914, as the London Telegraph described it, was “one of the most remarkable episodes ever to take place in the history of armed conflict.”

Three decades later, however, in a cabin in a forest just across the Belgian border into Germany, a much smaller but just as improbable truce took place, the details of which read like something out of the Brothers Grimm.

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Britain scores the first WW II sea victory

On Ontario farmland safely inland from Second World War bombing, a town sprang up to house 9,000 people working at a munitions factory that produced 40 million shells for the Allied war effort.

The town was named Ajax, after a ship in a little-remembered sea battle off the coast of Uruguay in 1939, the first Allied sea victory of the war.

Great War armistice terms forbade Germany from building classic warships, so instead it produced heavily armed cruisers the British called pocket battleships.

One, the Admiral Graf Spee, attacked merchant shipping in the South Atlantic, but the Royal Navy’s South American Naval Division had trouble finding it.

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December 12, 1942

An arsonist burns down the Knights of Columbus Hostel in St. John’s;
99 die and 109 are injured. German sabotage is suspected.

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