December 1941 (42 page)

In unoccupied Vichy France, it was reported that, under the pretext of the charge of subversion, eleven Frenchmen were shot by Germans. Elaborating, the Associated Press story stated, “Reports from the occupied zone said police made mass arrests in southern France and ear-marked hundreds of Jews and ‘Communists' for concentration camps.”
⁹⁹

While diplomats in Berlin were going through the formalities, the Nazis were less formal and cordial to American journalists and citizens. In retaliation for the arrest of German nationals in America, the Third Reich arrested the precise same number of Americans residing in their country, including four Associated Press correspondents.
¹⁰⁰
Tit for tat, the government there announced that for every German arrested in America, they would arrest an equal number of U.S. citizens.

As of the eleventh, U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle announced that the Justice Department and the FBI had picked up “865 Germans, 147 Italians and 1,291 Japanese as enemy aliens.”
¹⁰¹

There was also the very real problem of what to do with the possessions of the Axis Powers that had fallen into American hands. After delivering the message of war from Mussolini, members of the Italian embassy were furiously trying to sell their cars. Embassy officials were also stocking up on American vitamins by having a delivery boy from a nearby pharmacy make repeated trips to and from the facility, loaded down with “boxes of vitamin pills.”
¹⁰²
Several days later, an exchange of journalists took place between Germany and the United States, although a
New York Times
reporter, Guido Enderis, was exempted by the Nazis and allowed to stay on in Berlin.
¹⁰³

A new government office, similar to the Alien Property Custodian agency set up during “World War I” was created in the U.S. to handle the property of the soon-to-be leaving foreign diplomats as revealed by the
Washington Post
. The
Post's
use of a numbered war was possibly the first iteration in print.
¹⁰⁴

The nation's capital was expanding its scope and realm of inquiry. “The Department of Justice turned its attention today to disloyal Americans,” which the
Boston Evening Globe
referred to as “potential Benedict Arnolds.”
¹⁰⁵
The
Los Angeles Times
called them “quislings.”
¹⁰⁶

The notion of Nazi spies let loose in America became a preoccupation of not just the FBI but also of popular culture. This was epitomized by the release of the farcical, “You Nazty Spy!”, a Three Stooges short subject film, produced by Columbia Pictures in January 1941, in which the hapless ringleader Moe Howard actually performed an astonishingly realistic imitation of the führer. As far as these three Jewish former vaudevillians were concerned, satire was the best way to answer the absurdities of Nazism.

Now that war was official, the movie moguls in Hollywood—the vast majority of them Jewish—eagerly embraced what they saw as their patriotic duty and shed any inhibitions they may have had about taking on Germany. These immigrants (mostly from poor provinces in Russia) also saw the war effort as their golden opportunity to prove their
bona fides
as assimilated American citizens. Americans were about to be inundated with a sea of flag-waving, patriotic celluloid, much of it stridently propagandistic.

The phrase “Fifth Columnists” kept coming up in news dispatches. The expression had its roots in the Spanish Civil War and referred to subversive elements inside a country who were working with outside agitators or revolutionaries. The worry in America was that Fifth Columnists were working clandestinely to help the Axis Powers through sabotage and subversion. But Biddle said that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had assured him there were no Fifth Columnists operating in the United States.
¹⁰⁷
Yet in Miami, officials discovered a train trestle wired to explode with dynamite, its wires and batteries set to detonate.

The Justice Department contradicted itself and said that no lawful American could be arrested, though for what it was not specific.
¹⁰⁸
It also decided to suspend the naturalization citizenship of over 450,000 Japanese, Germans, and Italians born in America.
¹⁰⁹

Tensions mounted in the country, and sometimes it seemed as if everyone was a suspect. Brush fires on the coast of Washington State were suspected by local police to be signal fires for approaching planes. “The fires were in the form of arrows” pointing to a naval base and Seattle.
¹¹⁰

No one was yet using the word “paranoia” in describing Americans after December 7. After all they'd gone through in just a scant several days, their skittishness was understandable. The Navy Department announced it had mined the New York Harbor and warned commercial vessels to take care while approaching and departing the port.
¹¹¹
It also announced that due to the constrictions of war, fallen sailors and marines would be temporarily buried “where they died . . . They will be buried with full military honors.”
¹¹²

The nation's capital was just as skittish. In addition to armed navy guards posted at all federal buildings, machine-gun nests went up around town as well, including on the Memorial Bridge, which connected the town to Arlington National Cemetery and Virginia. Civil-defense units were organized in all cities, big and small, all locales nationwide.
¹¹³
In Atlanta, “Immediate organization of an Atlanta Emergency Defense Corps, dedicated solely to the protection of the lives and properties of Atlantans” was urgently reported by the
Atlanta Constitution
.
¹¹⁴
To answer the propaganda campaigns being ginned up by Tokyo and Berlin, it was urged “that men trained in public relations and publicity work [could] constitute a counter-force against subversive propaganda.”
¹¹⁵

Though under martial law, military and civilian officials were incrementally loosening things in Hawaii. Stores had begun to open, and though the naval facilities of Ford Island and Hickam Field were smoldering still, there was only light damage to civilian areas. A phone call was even allowed from a man on the islands to his brother in California, but it was closely monitored by navy censors. “He was given permission to talk to his brother on condition that nothing was said about the weather, military conditions on the island, cables, letters, or the war in general.”
¹¹⁶

Following the scares of two days earlier, newspapers began publishing guidelines for the dos and don'ts of civilian defense. Helpful tips included “Don't believe or spread rumors . . . Don't mention air raids in the presence of small children . . . Don't rush into the street if an air raid should come.”
¹¹⁷
A columnist for Baltimore's
The Sun
told readers, “Fear is one of the most contagious of diseases, and the individual should remember that, if he breaks down, the man next to him is very likely to follow suit.”
¹¹⁸

Other news stories contained helpful suggestions on “How to Teach Yourself to See Better in Blackouts.” “Blackout seeing is practically the reverse of daylight seeing. It is done not only with a different part of the eye—but with a different and special set of nerve endings.”
¹¹⁹
It was urged that children's energies be focused on “knitting and dishwashing.”
¹²⁰
And, “Don't expect all news to be good. We are at war. Mistakes and accidents are inevitable, some battles may be lost.” At this point and for some time, all American military battles would be lost.
¹²¹

Only four days into a great new world war, America was losing. Terribly.

So it was well-received news when the songwriters of America began churning out quickie songs to boost the national morale. “Tin Pan Alley's batteries, featuring saxophone and fiddle rather than bugle and drum, are ready to open fire on Japan.” The papers reported that thousands of songwriters were flooding the offices of song publishers with tunes like, “You're a Sap, Mr. Jap” and “The Jap Won't Have a Chinaman's Chance” and “Good Bye Mama, We'll See You in Yokohama.” The president of Broadcast Music, Inc., which put out the call, was Sam Lerner, who had a slightly more famous brother, Jay.
¹²²

Anti-Japanese sentiment was manifesting itself in other ways as well. The annual Japanese Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington was changed instead to the “Oriental Cherry Blossom Festival.” Vandals also cut down four Japanese cherry trees, originally planted in 1912 as a gift from Tokyo, along the Tidal Basin in the nation's capital. Inscribed on the trees was “To Hell with the Japanese.”
¹²³
Two of the destroyed trees had been planted when Mrs. William Howard Taft attended the ceremonies commemorating the gift. When FDR ordered the building of the Jefferson Memorial in 1939, some outraged Washington women chained themselves to the trees one cold morning because some would have to be bulldozed before the memorial could be built. An enterprising government staffer took steaming pots of coffee to the tree huggers, who drank the proffered liquid happily and excessively. The staffer then waited for nature to take its course at which time the bulldozers moved in.
¹²⁴

Department stores across America were taking Japanese products off their shelves, “some of which were destroyed and the remainder placed in storage. Some merchants were rebuked by patrons for displaying ‘Japanese' goods, which were, however, Chinese, as proved by the ‘Made in China' label. Dance bands were not playing ‘Japanese Sandman.' At the Freer Gallery of Art, Nipponese paintings, sculptures, and representations were removed. The gallery had been “world famous for its Oriental collection.”
¹²⁵

G.C. Murphy, a national chain of five-and-dime stores, was one of the first to remove all their goods manufactured in Japan. At another, Woolworth's, a clerk laughed about burning up a Santa Claus made in Japan.
¹²⁶

Other welcome news that helped distract Americans was that Hollywood was continuing to churn out flicks. Walt Disney, a genius and true American original who had invented the color cartoon and feature-length cartoon, had just released
Dumbo
when his studio was commandeered by the military on December 8. (It was adjacent to the vital Lockheed air plant, and his site was needed as a primary defense station.) He halted most other work at his studio to finish his next feature-length cartoon
Bambi
before accepting a commission from the Naval Bureau of Aeronautics to make twenty animated training films. These were the first in a flood of Disney films in aid of the war effort (both live-action and cartoons).
¹²⁷

Greta Garbo and Melvin Douglas were starring in a new racy comedy,
Two-Faced Woman
(it proved to be a flop and Garbo's last movie),
¹²⁸
and gossip columnists spotted Walter Pidgeon, Richard Ney, and Greer Garson taking a respite from the filming of their new British wartime movie,
Mrs. Miniver
.
¹²⁹

Baseball legend Babe Ruth was headed to Hollywood “to play in the Lou Gehrig picture
[Pride of the Yankees].
It will be an enriching experience, no doubt,” said the Bambino.
¹³⁰
A new comedy was released,
Look Who's Laughing
, starring Edger Bergen, the famed ventriloquist and actor, and popular comedic actress Lucille Ball. Millions of Americans went to the movies each week to see cartoons, serials, newsreels, and feature presentations—in 1941, the greatest source of popular visual entertainment.

But these distractions did not negate the horrific reality unfolding across the globe. After announcing their “death pact,” the three Axis allies strengthened their agreement by also announcing a “no separate pledge.” In essence, “the agreement bound them not only to make war indissolubly together, but also to make peace after it in a common front.”
¹³¹
FDR also made a pact, but with Chiang Kai-shek and his forces in China battling the occupying army of Japan. He told the generalissimo they had a “common enemy.”
¹³²

The speculation that German planes had been used at Manila and in other battle zones was regularly dispelled now as experts began asking rational questions, including how the planes would have gotten to the Far East anyway, what with the British naval blockade and the very remote possibility they had been flown all the way from Germany to Japan. It was established shortly thereafter that no German planes or pilots had participated in any battle in the Pacific, nor had four-engine bombers been used at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. The Germans weren't needed, as the Japanese seemed to be doing a thorough job all by themselves.

Manila, Luzon, and other parts of the Philippines were under sustained and numbing attack by round-the-clock Japanese bombing, despite the whistling-past-the-graveyard talk of “Dugout Doug” MacArthur.

The psyche of the country was badly battered. Since the morning of the seventh, all the news had been dire, except Roosevelt's spectacular declaration of war against Japan. The daily reports of Nazi gains, of British losses, of false alarms, of casualty reports, of rumors, innuendo, gossip, indecision, inaction, roundups, cancellations, and detentions, were wearing down a population that had been battered for over a decade since the onslaught of the Great Depression.