Pearl Harbor Christmas (2 page)

“At first,” Roy Jenkins, a later Cabinet minister, has written, “Churchill had intended to stay only about a week, but as his visit lengthened, he became near to a real-life version of
The Man Who Came to Dinner
.” In the hit comedy of 1939–40 by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, the radio personality Sheridan White-side, mellifluous and charming at the microphone, having apparently broken his leg on departing the home of a socially prominent Washington couple, is rushed back indoors to heal in a wheelchair, becoming an insufferable long-term guest.

The worldwide disasters of the weekend of Pearl Harbor made it urgent for the Prime Minister as well as the President to pool global strategies. “As soon as I awoke” the morning after, Churchill claimed, “I decided to go over at once to see Roosevelt.” He feared that the immediate impact of Pearl Harbor would be a retreat into an “America-comes-first” attitude in Washington, withholding aid to Britain and Russia while concentrating resources to strike back at Japan. In solidarity with Japan, Adolf Hitler would make that “Europe last” likelihood moot by declaring war on the United States, but isolationists who had inveighed against involvement in European wars were still influential in Congress, and the attacks on the United States had come in the Pacific. Roosevelt’s cordial invitation to the White House put a new slant on everything.

Before the PM embarked on December 12, he engaged in strategy sessions with his advisers, who recommended continuing the careful language they had employed with America before the new dimension to the war. Sir Alan Brooke, the new chief of the imperial general staff, recalled that Churchill turned to one in the cautious circle “
with a wicked leer in his eye
” and said, “Oh! That is the way we talked to her while we were wooing her; now that she is in the harem we talk to her quite differently!”

That open cynicism would be dispensed with in Washington. The Japanese were winning everywhere on the Pacific Rim. Across the Atlantic, embattled Britain, supplied largely by sea, was losing as many freighters to U-boats as were being built to replace the sinkings. Malaya was being overrun, and its 220-square mile island appendage, Singapore, was unlikely to hold out. Hong Kong had been invaded and had no hope of survival; Wake Island had been attacked and Guam quickly occupied; and in the Philippines the Japanese were already on Luzon and bombing Manila. Australia seemed threatened, and Hawaiians worried that, with the navy and air forces on Oahu decimated, the Japanese might return.

After much politics-as-usual debate about the appropriate age for draft registration, Congress on December 19 had timidly settled on twenty for induction and eighteen for registration. On both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, the services had hurriedly set anti-aircraft guns on the roofs of buildings and alongside docks. Some weapons were obsolete, others wooden fakes, there to instill spurious confidence. Sentries, often bearing 1918 -vintage rifles, were posted at railway stations and armaments factories. Although the only interloper likely over the American skies at Christmas was likely to be Santa Claus with his sleigh and reindeer, a twenty-four-hour sky watch in the Northeast was ordered for the holidays by Brigadier General John C. MacDonnell, air-raid warning chief for 43,000 volunteer civilian observers. “Experience in war,” he declared, “has taught that advantage is taken of relaxation in vigilance to strike when and where the blow is least expected.” Lights remained on almost everywhere.

Anxiety on the Pacific coast about Japanese air raids, however absurd, had already panicked San Francisco, thanks to the paranoia of Fourth Army commander Lieutenant General John DeWitt at Fort Ord. Every Japanese fisherman and vegetable farmer along the coast was suspected of covertly warning nonexistent enemy aircraft, and the hysteria resulted in the relocation of the New Year’s Day Rose Bowl extravaganza from California to somnolent Durham, North Carolina, where Duke University would play Oregon State.

On war maps in the press, limited to much less than the actual facts, a dismal Christmas loomed, but it did not appear that way in shop windows across America. Enhanced by holiday lights, the street lamps and store fronts glittered, and a plethora of merchandise long vanished from high streets in Britain awaited shoppers now benefiting from jobs created by proliferating war contracts and a burgeoning army and navy. Christmas trees were plentiful, seldom priced at more than a dollar or two, and in the traditional holiday spectacle at Radio City Music Hall in New York, the star-spangled Rockettes, in mechanical unison, high-stepped away any war gloom. In newspapers across the nation the Japanese were thwarted in the
Terry and the Pirates
comic strip, and in film Gary Cooper as Sergeant York was defeating the Germans single-handedly in the earlier world war.

The hit book for Christmas giving, at a hefty $2.50, was Edna Ferber’s Reconstruction-era romance
Saratoga Trunk
. For the same price, war turned up distantly yet bombastically in a two-disc set of Tchaikovsky’s
1812 Overture,
performed by Artur Rodzinski and the Cleveland Orchestra. In New York gift crates of oranges and grapefruit from Florida were $2.79 at Bloomingdale’s. A new Ford or Chevrolet, both soon to be unobtainable, cost $900. Hattie Carnegie’s designer dresses began at $15. The upscale Rogers Peet menswear store offered suits and topcoats from a steep $38. (At recruiting stations nationwide, the army was offering smart khaki garb at no cost whatever to enlistees.) Henri Bendel featured silk stockings at $1.25 a pair; stockings in the current wonder weave,
nylon,
sold for $1.65. By the following Christmas nylons would be almost unobtainable. The fabric would be the stuff of parachutes.

Among the long-prepared Christmas toy glut, shops across America advertised a remote-control bombing plane at $1.98, which ran along a suspended wire to attack a battleship. The Japanese high seas
Kido Butai
had not needed suspended wires at Pearl Harbor, nor in the Philippines, Malaya, or Hong Kong. The Royal Navy’s principal warships on the Pacific Rim were at the bottom of the Gulf of Siam, and the depleted Pacific Fleet, with seven battleships sunk or disabled at their anchorages, had only two destroyers available to patrol the long coastline between Vancouver and San Diego. As Churchill would put it, “Over all this vast expanse of waters Japan was supreme, and we everywhere [were] weak and naked.”

On the other side of the continent, thoroughly open to attacks if there were to be any, the Prime Minister, having embarked from the River Clyde in Scotland on December 14, was already in the mid-Atlantic on the new battleship
Duke of York
amid violent, frigid gales. Aware from his office of her husband’s falling behind schedule, Clementine Churchill cabled him from London on December 19: “You have been gone a week & all the news of you is of heavy seas delaying your progress—plans to change into planes at Bermuda, so as to arrive in time, & then those plans cancelled.... May God keep you and inspire you to make good plans with the President. It is a horrible World at present. Europe overrun by the Nazi hogs, & the Far East by yellow Japanese lice. I am spending Christmas here . . . & going to Chequers on Saturday the 27th.”

In Washington the American brass worried even before Churchill departed about having the PM at Roosevelt’s elbow, where, despite Britain’s weak hand getting even weaker, he could employ his glib persuasiveness and imperial visions.

En Route

C
HURCHILL AND HIS STAFF had taken the overnight train from London to Greenock on the Clyde. They reached the
Duke of York
on the morning of December 13, three days after its sister ship,
Prince of Wales,
and heavy cruiser
Repulse,
had been sunk by Japanese torpedo bombers off Malaya. Vice Admiral Sir Tom Phillips had rushed both warships north toward the enemy invasion fleet without any air cover. The shock and humiliation were great, and the strategic loss was irreversible. Still, the Prime Minister could claim confidence that American involvement—and American industrial potential—would inevitably reverse the Axis tide.

By radio aboard—and twenty-seven code clerks working round the clock—the PM kept in touch with events. The Germans were deep into Russia but slowed almost to stalemate by stiff resistance and heavy snow. Blaming faltering commanders for the crisis, Berlin radio reported, Adolf Hitler had assumed supreme command of the
Wehrmacht
. The Japanese were already exceeding their own expectations in Malaya and the Philippines and intent on driving the Dutch from the oil fields of Borneo. Hong Kong’s invaders, ordered to take mainland Kowloon and the island in ten days, were experiencing unexpected resistance, but there were no escape routes. While the sandbagged and surrounded Repulse Bay Hotel on the beautiful eastern shore, packed with frightened guests and refugees and defended by grimy, nearly sleepless, soldiers, was being shelled, an English lady who had paid a steep £10 a day for her stay complained loudly, “What are all those Chinese people doing here?”

From the start the
Duke of York
and its passengers and crew endured a rough crossing. Swept by gales and high seas, the splashed decks were off limits for the first three days. Over the protestations of Dr. Wilson, Churchill dosed himself below with Mothersills Seasick Remedy (“Stops travel nausea on your vacation trips,” the label advertised), and he began offering seasick stories to his queasy companions. At the dining table, when the PM chatted gaily about the special-purpose buckets he had once seen on the bridge of a destroyer, Sir John Dill made a queasy exit. There was no stopping the former First Lord of the Admiralty, who told about the desperate passenger on an ocean liner who was rushing to the nearest rail when a steward warned, “But sir, you can’t be sick here!”

“Oh, can’t I?” said the passenger as he kept going.

Reaching the Azores without incident, the Churchill party could transmit business there safely by radio. A hundred miles farther out, plowing ahead of buffeted light escort vessels, which were forced to turn back, the battleship maintained outgoing radio silence, but events did not make that easy for the Prime Minister. “Our very large deciphering staff,” he recalled, “could of course receive by wireless [radio] a great deal of business. To a limited extent we could reply. When fresh escorts joined us from the Azores they could take in by daylight Morse signals from us in code, and then, dropping off a hundred miles or so, could transmit them without revealing our position. Still, there was a sense of radio claustrophobia. . . .”

IN WASHINGTON radiograms brought in increasingly bad news. In the central Pacific a handful of marines and marine pilots had held off the Japanese at isolated Wake Island after repelling a landing on the eleventh, but after another attempt, their overwhelmed remnants were buckling. The nation had been electrified by a brash radiogram from Wake, “Send us more Japs!”—but it was at best an imaginative misreading of a much more gloomy message. Although the isolated garrison was doomed, it had accomplished a feat never repeated during the war—fending off an amphibious force with coastal guns.

In the doomed Philippines on the twenty-second, General Douglas MacArthur, having boasted before Pearl Harbor that he was ready to meet any Japanese thrust, sat in his headquarters in an historic old fortress in Manila near his hotel penthouse flat as alarming reports came in about troop withdrawals. Forty-three thousand Japanese began swarming ashore at Lingayen Gulf in central Luzon, although MacArthur prepared defiant communiqués claiming otherwise.

Like the British in Malaya withdrawing southward on the four hundred-mile-long Kra Peninsula toward theoretically invulnerable Singapore, protected by the natural moat of the Strait of Johore, MacArthur’s ground forces were unprepared, under-equipped, and quickly shorn of air and naval support. American subs off the Philippines had attacked enemy transports, but their poorly designed torpedo fuses did not work. Much of the air force on Luzon had been destroyed on the ground, although MacArthur had received ample warning about likely attacks. But for sporadic air raids met with futile anti-aircraft weapons geared in altitude settings for an earlier war, Manila was quiet. Its population, with nowhere to go, was passive and anxious. Preparing to leave for the tadpole-shaped “rock” of Corregidor in Manila Bay, considered as impregnable as Singapore, the general drew up a proclamation, its release still withheld, declaring Manila an open city. By the laws of war ignored by the Japanese elsewhere, the declaration meant that by Christmas the city would be undefended and thus exempt—on paper—from bombardment.

MacArthur then sent for Lieutenant Colonel Sid Huff, a retired naval officer who had become a personal assistant commissioned on the general’s behalf. “Sid,” said MacArthur, “I’ve forgotten to buy Jean a Christmas present.” Whatever would be purchased would be less than useless on Corregidor, but Huff was to think of something for Mrs. MacArthur. Philippine money would also be useless, and the general had plenty of it to lavish on Manila shops. Loyally, Huff went off to places he knew Jean patronized and would know her size (twelve), returning with boxes of dresses and lingerie bound with Christmas ribbons. MacArthur crossed the street from venerable, walled Intramuros in Calle Victoria, took the elevator to his Manila Hotel penthouse flat on the sixth floor—with seven bedrooms and a state dining room and a ten thousand–volume military history library built for him in 1935. He advised Jean to open the gifts right away. Christmas Eve might be too late.