Brighten Your Day

This Is A True Story From An 84 Year-Old WW2 Veteran. It Will Move You To Tears

May 23, 2015

Jack Tueller, an 84 year-old WWII Veteran, tells an amazing true story about two "enemies" uniting over a song.

"I thought to myself, that German sniper is as lonely and scared as I am. How can I stop him from firing? So I played that German's love song, 'Lilly Marlene,' made famous in the late '30s by Marlene Dietrich, the famous German actress. And I wailed that trumpet over those apple orchards of Normandy, and he didn't fire."

The next morning, the military police came up to Tueller and told him they had a German prisoner on the beach who kept asking, "Who played that trumpet last night?"

"I grabbed my trumpet and went down to the beach. There was a 19-year-old German, scared and lonesome. He was dressed like a French peasant to cloak his role as a sniper. And, crying, he said, 'I couldn't fire because I thought of my fiance. I thought of my mother and father,' and he says, 'My role is finished.'

"He stuck out his hand, and I shook the hand of the enemy," Tueller said. "[But] he was no enemy, because music had soothed the savage beast."