Pearl Harbor Christmas
Read Pearl Harbor Christmas Online
Authors: Stanley Weintraub
Tags: #History, #Military, #World War II, #United States, #20th Century
Table of Contents
December 24, 1941 - Christmas Eve
December 25, 1941 - Christmas Day
December 31, 1941 - New Year’s Eve
January 1, 1942 - New Year’s Day
ALSO BY STANLEY WEINTRAUB
A Stillness Heard Round the World:
The End of the Great War, November 1918
Victoria: An Intimate Biography
Long Day’s Journey into War: December 7, 1941
Disraeli: A Biography
The Last Great Victory: The End of World War II, July-August 1945
Uncrowned King: The Life of Prince Albert
MacArthur’s War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero
Edward the Caresser: The Playboy Prince Who Became Edward VII
Silent Night: The Remarkable Christmas Truce of 1914
Charlotte and Lionel: A Rothschild Love Story
General Washington’s Christmas Farewell:
A Mount Vernon Homecoming, 1783
Iron Tears: America’s Battle for Freedom,
Britain’s Quagmire, 1775-1783
Eleven Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944
15 Stars: Eisenhower, MacArthur, Marshall
General Sherman’s Christmas: Savannah, 1864
FOR RODELLE
Prelude
I
N TOKYO ON THE MORNING of December 21, 1941, the
Asahi Shimbun
published on its front page the first photo received of the attack on Pearl Harbor. It had been flown in by a dive bomber from the strike force returning to the Home Islands. Approaching Hawaii on its last leg from Washington was an investigating commission appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and chaired by Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts. It would be the first of many hearings on the worst military catastrophe in American history. As its plane approached Oahu, smoke, although no longer in billowing black clouds, rose from the wreckages in the harbor area. At aircraft height the upturned hulls of the capsized
Oklahoma
and
Utah
resembled beached whales.
Justice Roberts would convene his inquiry the next day, as across the nation the President expected Prime Minister Winston Churchill for dinner at the White House. Pearl Harbor had made them open wartime allies. One small logistic problem intervened, however. Late that morning the Prime Minister was still at sea. The battleship
Duke of York
was plowing through winter winds and heavy swells as it approached Chesapeake Bay. By radio, assuming a calmer Atlantic, Churchill had accepted Roosevelt’s invitation. On docking in the upper Chesapeake, it would be only a 120-mile drive to Washington. Yet, increasingly anxious at the warship’s slow progress, the PM was, as his personal physician, Sir Charles Wilson,
1
recalled, “like a child in his impatience to meet the President. He spoke as if every minute counted. It was absurd to waste time. He must fly.”
Front page of the December 21, 1941, morning edition of
Asahi Shimbun
with the first picture of the Pearl Harbor attack, showing bombed Hickam Field by Japanese planes.
Courtesy
Asahi Shimbun
U.S. battleships under air attack at Pearl Harbor, as photographed by a Japanese pilot.
U.S. Navy
Radioing his ambassador, the Earl of Halifax, the PM requested help. “Impossible to reach Mouth Potomac before 6:30 P.M. which would be too late.... I should like to come by airplane to [a] Washington airfield reaching you in time for dinner.” Halifax telephoned the White House, which ordered a squat twin-engine Lockheed Lodestar to Hampton Roads, where the battleship would dock. Churchill, his close adviser Lord Beaverbrook (proprietor of the
Evening Standard
and Minister of Supply), and several aides boarded the aircraft for the forty-five minute flight up the Potomac. The others awaited a special train to Washington sent by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, which would bring them to the capital by midnight.
Early winter darkness had fallen. Emerging from years of blackouts—ships also traveled without running lights to evade German submarines—the party aboard the transport plane was amazed to see the spectacle below. Few Americans anywhere had yet to follow recent blackout instructions. It was Christmas.
The Anacostia Flats Naval Air Station was across the Potomac from the new National Airport. Awaiting at the tarmac was a long, black limousine that the Treasury Department had confiscated from Al Capone. The Chicago gangster was now in prison. Roosevelt had been sitting in the car, waiting. “Please on no account come out to meet me,” Churchill had radioed. As the aircraft taxied to a stop and Churchill emerged, gripping a walking stick to which what the English called an electric torch was attached, for use in navigating blackouts, the President was lifted out and was standing, leaning against the limo, propped by his locked leg braces and a cane. “I grasped his strong hand with comfort and pleasure,” Churchill recalled.
WHEN RADIO REPORTS that Hawaii had been attacked reached England, Churchill was at his official residence, Chequers, at dinner with Lend-Lease administrator W. Averell Harriman and Ambassador John G. Winant. “I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan,” the PM wrote in his memoirs, “but at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all!” Curiously, Adolf Hitler was equally delighted about his prospects once Pearl Harbor had given him Japan as a partner. “We can’t lose the war at all,” he thought. “We now have an ally which has never been conquered in 3,000 years.”
After the news of Pearl Harbor, Churchill claimed to have “slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.” Actually, he stayed up until three talking with Winant about what to do next, and he determined to go to Washington. Seven months earlier, on May 3, feeling increasingly isolated and with German submarines strangling British lifelines worldwide, he had desperately cabled Roosevelt pleading for immediate American entry into the war—a plea he had made even earlier, in June 1940, as France surrendered to Hitler. In neither case could the President intervene overtly. Americans were unready, and Congress would have resisted. Roosevelt had to inch his way toward rescue, as he did symbolically when Britain’s new envoy arrived in January 1941.
GREETING CHURCHILL PERSONALLY remained an unusual honor for a head of government, especially when proffered by a long-incapacitated president, who had done so only once before—and then, too, to emphasize his solidarity with Britain. Ambassador Halifax, once of the influential appeasement fraternity in England, had crossed the Atlantic on the battleship
George V
and was greeted in Chesapeake Bay, six miles from Annapolis, by the presidential yacht
Potomac,
with Roosevelt aboard. Viscount Halifax then traveled into Washington with FDR. It was a precedent-shattering gesture, and Halifax was ever afterward “Edward” to Roosevelt.
What the public did not know was that the pair, however effective their relationship would be, was a brotherhood of the disabled. Roosevelt had lost the use of his legs to polio in 1921, and the tall, lean Edward Wood, then heir to his father’s title, had been born with a withered left arm without a hand.
“Now that we are as you say ‘in the same boat’ wouldn’t it be wise for us,” Churchill had cabled on December 9, “to have another conference?” They had met at sea, on Placentia Bay off Newfoundland in early August, initiating what would become after Pearl Harbor a formal military alliance. “We could review,” Churchill now suggested, “the whole war plan in the light of reality and new facts, as well as production and distribution. I feel that all these matters . . . can best be settled on the highest executive level.” He could leave “in a day or two” by warship and bring with him “necessary staffs.” In a draft of his war memoirs the PM wrote, then expunged, “I thought of staying in the British Embassy, as I did not know how stiff our discussions might be.”
Startled, Roosevelt would have opted for more time to see how war mobilization was going and the situation in the Pacific was “more clarified.” He planned to respond that way in a draft he never sent. In a second response, on December 10, also unsent, he wrote that a meeting would be “more useful a few weeks hence than immediately. However I will wholeheartedly and gladly accept your opinion on timing.” The President’s advisers realized that the British would come with carefully drafted proposals and a substantial wish list of war materiel before the White House could scramble to create its own strategies and review its production goals. Also there was concern over the hazards to the top levels of British government. The North Atlantic was a shooting gallery for German subs, and the Luftwaffe flew reconnaissance from French and Norwegian bases.
The third presidential reply, actually sent later that day, began, “Delighted to have you here at White House.... My one reservation is great person[al] risk to you—believe this should be given most careful consideration for the Empire needs you at the helm and we need you there too.” Having postponed sailing while keeping a convoy at the ready, Churchill notified those who were to travel with him and packed his bags.
His formal invitation to stay at the White House came via Lord Halifax while Churchill was at sea. Although he had invited himself, a strong hint to do so had come from the President in a telegram announcing Congress’s formal declaration of war on Japan on December 8. “Today,” Roosevelt had written in the naval metaphors both leaders shared, “all of us are in the same boat with you and the people of the Empire and it is a ship which will not and cannot be sunk.” The “same boat” image was echoed in Churchill’s cable to Washington.
Ambassador Winant in London telegraphed Harry Hopkins at the White House via Secretary of State Cordell Hull (the proper protocol): “Our friend asked me if the house was large enough to permit him to have with him a secretary and his valet.” The PM (soon “the Prime” to the President’s staff) had accepted while at sea, enlarging his personal entourage at the White House to his confidant “Max” Beaverbrook, John Martin (Churchill’s principal secretary), two security men, and the PM’s valet. The rest of the party, including Averell Harriman, were to be housed nearby at the Mayflower Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue rather than at the more distant British Embassy.