Pearl Harbor Christmas (4 page)

Isolated Hong Kong had been penetrated from its Kowloon Peninsula and New Territories appendages on the mainland. Its fall was expected by Christmas. The outcome was never in doubt. At Sandy Ridge in Lo Wu in the New Territories, Lieutenant Colonel Robert A. MacPherson lay among twenty casualties. Sadism was far from uncommon among Japanese soldiery, especially when they tasted victory. The wounded were savagely beaten with rifle butts, roped together in threes, and bayoneted. Sergeant Major Matthew C. Hamlon, with three riflemen of the Royal Rifles of Canada were captured at Eucliff. Stripped of their weapons, their hands were bound behind their backs. Prodded forward with bayonets to the edge of a cliff, they were made to sit down, seeing below the bodies of previous dead, some beheaded. Colonel Roji Tanaka ordered a firing squad forward and all were shot, but Hamlon rolled down the cliff and survived to testify at the war crimes trial of the colonel years later.

Realizing only that the entire Hong Kong scene was an irreversible tragedy, Churchill wrote, “Although one knew it was a forlorn outpost, we expected that they would hold out on the fortified island for a good many weeks, possibly for several months.” But “fortified” exaggerated the reality. For a token defense, a British historian has written, absorbing as many casualties as would happen before surrender was absurd. “At the very most all that would be required was a[n infantry] company, bugler, flag corporal, and a suave governor with a knighthood, double-barrelled name, stiff upper lip–and a tie from one of the lesser public schools.”

After landing in Malaya nearly unopposed, the Japanese were moving southward toward the Johore Strait and Singapore. The British had nearly no navy left in Singapore, and what remained of its pathetic air force was so obsolete that Lieutenant General Arthur E. Percival’s forlorn attempt to hold the northern Kra airfields was senseless. The Japanese had, Churchill conceded, “an unlimited power of reinforcement.” Their timetable specified crossing the broad Perak River on the 15th; the occupation of Kuala Lumpur, the major city in Malaya, a month later; arrival at Johore Baru across the strait from Singapore on January 31; and the taking of Singapore itself on February 11, the date chosen because it was the anniversary of the coronation of the mythical Emperor Jimmu in 660 BC. The schedule was only slightly more ambitious than the reality. By December 21 they had reached the Perak River. To the east, Burma had been penetrated, and Thailand quickly occupied with hardly a shot fired.

Escorted by the cruiser
Pensacola
, the American convoy of slow transports that had been lumbering southwest from Honolulu to reinforce the Philippines could no longer get there and had been rerouted toward Australia. (It reached Brisbane on the 22nd.) The western Pacific had become a Japanese pond. The five thousand troops, seventy planes, forty-eight 75-mm guns, 340 trucks, six hundred tons of bombs, nine thousand barrels of aviation fuel, and 3,500,000 rounds of ammunition had nowhere else to go. Troops on Luzon still thought that all of it was coming their way. The MacArthur propaganda line from rapidly emptying Manila, voicing false optimism, empty hope, and certain victory, was being echoed in the American press and had to be cautiously addressed to deflect dismay. As a result, MacArthur, having done almost nothing, was becoming a hero for fighting a rear-guard action in terrain he had never visited. Yet to Churchill, “The entry of the United States into the war is worth all the losses sustained in the East many times over.” The British were coming to Washington, which had made the war sustainable, to plan the long road back.

December 22, 1941

F
OR THE JAPANESE, “X-Day” had been the simultaneous attacks across the Pacific and Southeast Asia on December 8, Tokyo time—December 7 across the International Date Line at Pearl Harbor. In his diary Admiral Matome Ugaki, bullet-domed chief of staff to Isoroku Yamamoto, planner of “Strike South,” referred to December 22 as “X + 14.” Responding that day to the congratulatory message of Yoshiki Takamura, Yamamoto explained, “That we could defeat the enemy at the outbreak of the war was because they were unguarded and also they made light of us. ‘Danger comes sooner when it is despised’ and ‘Don’t despise a small enemy’ are really important. I think they can be applied not only to wars but to routine matters.”

Both admirals’ flags flew from the battleship
Nagato
in Kure harbor, below Hiroshima on the southern end of the big island of Honshu. “At 0500,” Ugaki wrote—it was still the 21st in the United States—“our Philippine Assault Forces entered Lingayen Bay and landed there safe and sound.... They encountered no enemy resistance. I sense that the enemy has lost her fighting spirit.” Smaller landings in the north of Luzon had been unopposed. Japanese newspapers quoting sources in the West, Ugaki reported, “say the United States will defend Singapore even after they abandon the Philippines. But can those who once have abandoned the Philippines keep Singapore? I very much doubt it. And Hong Kong has not many days left. I don’t doubt that Singapore will fall sooner than we expect.”

At 2:35 A.M. Wake Island time, according to American accounts, the Japanese were engaging marines on the beaches in clashes that, Admiral Shigetaro Shimada, the naval minister wrote, “would have made the gods weep.” American Task Force 14 under Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, steaming to the rescue from Hawaii, was more than four hundred miles away and was ordered, uselessly, by Admiral William Pye, who was in temporary command at Pearl Harbor, to remain at least two hundred miles distant to protect the carrier
Saratoga
from enemy bombers. A red flare from the shoreline signaled to Japanese transports that the first wave had landed. The marines at Wilkes Island (claw-shaped Wake was the central island of three small reefs) had only 2 three-inch guns as well as their Thompson subma-chine guns to fire at the landing barges in the predawn darkness. In the glare of their two searchlights the invaders kept coming.

Many of Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma’s landing craft at Lingayen on Luzon included bicycles (as in Malaya) as well as troops, as he was confident from fifth-columnist reports that soldiers could pedal down toward Manila without much resistance. To ensure that, although the skies were dark and an intermittent rain falling, fighter planes machine-gunned the handful of defenders in beach barrios. Then light tanks and motorized artillery lumbered ashore from succeeding landing craft. Troops that had landed earlier at Aparri to the north moved down to meet them, running into resistance only from Filipino training squads fifty miles inland, then firing and bayoneting through. In a few instances overconfident Japanese units marched southward in parade formation, with Rising Sun flags flying and bands playing, and scattering when a few American P-40s attacked. Reorganizing, the Japanese plodded on until nightfall.

IN FRIGID MOSCOW Anthony Eden’s private secretary, Oliver Harvey, noted in his diary, “We left the station [for Murmansk] at 6”—evening in Russia, morning in America—“after A.E. had a final goodbye meeting with Stalin. [Foreign Minister V. M.] Molotov saw us off and we got back into the same train which had brought us. Bands and guards of honour as before. Our meals on the train got rather mixed up. We had what we thought was a cold Sunday supper about 7—and then it turned out only to be tea and we were threatened with a large dinner at 8.30. This we refused, and went early to bed.”

Long warned not to send Christmas cards, as Nazism was in effect the new religion of the
Reich
, Germans were now forbidden to waste valuable paper by sending New Year’s cards, which had become a covert substitute. As minister of information and czar of public communication, Joseph Goebbels had already forbidden radio stations to play traditional Christmas hymns, with “
O Tannenbaum
” excepted, as its words made no reference to the holiday. Small tabletop Christmas trees had been a tradition for more than two hundred years, but trees were scarce, and their decoration—even with rationed candles—would create suspicion.

IN WASHINGTON on Monday morning, December 22, the President, armed with newspapers, mail, and messages, planned to breakfast, as usual, in bed. Eleanor—as she was not on her own elsewhere—arrived at his bedside to tick off her own itinerary. FDR’s confidential messages were far more dreary than the trio of headlines in the
New York Times
, which published what was released to reporters and wire sources, or had passed army and navy censorship:

80 JAPANESE TRANSPORTS APPEAR OFF LUZON

U.S. SANK OR DAMAGED 14 U-BOATS IN ATLANTIC

HITLER OUSTS ARMY HEAD, TAKES FULL CONTROL

The Japanese were landing 43,000 troops at Lingayen Gulf, and MacArthur’s communiqués were nothing but boastful fiction or damage control to prepare the public for the worst. Army personnel on Luzon numbered about 15,000, plus 65,000 poorly trained and inadequately armed Filipinos, the best of them the Philippine Scouts. The German subs sunk off the Atlantic coast were equally fictitious, nothing more than depth charges dropped near suspected quarry that might have been fish. Hitler had indeed taken control of the
Wehrmacht
to forbid further withdrawals on the frigid Russian front. The newspapers set before the President would not report the end of resistance on Wake Island for two more days, but Admiral Ugaki’s diary on the 23rd—nearly a day earlier in Washington—recorded epic resistance by the overwhelmed marine garrison:

One of the hardest nuts to crack, the attack on Wake Island, might have been finished this morning, but contrary to my expectations, no report has come out. Not only the senior staff but all of the staff were almost impatient. At last, about 1100, a telegram message came that the attacks had been made. They approached the coast at 0035, began to land against furious enemy resistance, besides high seas. At about 1100 the occupation . . . was finished. This is a great relief.

It had been an unexpectedly difficult episode and did not conclude as rapidly as reported. The Japanese had lost twelve times as many dead as had the Wake defenders, a submarine sunk with all hands, and also the destroyer
Hayate
. Ugaki added his sympathy for the commander of the Fourth Fleet “for the awkward position into which he was thrown.” He feared the admiral’s suicide.

The new giant battleship
Yamato,
at 73,590 tons displacement, the largest capital ship afloat, with long-range 18.1-inch guns, had just completed its shakedown trials and had entered Kure harbor, anchoring west of the
Nagato
. Ugaki went aboard to inspect it. He was not satisfied. It had been designed with “old ideas.”
²
Airborne torpedoes had sunk the
Prince of Wales
and the
Repulse
in “the Malay Sea Battle,” but the admiral mused hopefully that “big guns will have their chance some day.”

The President’s chief butler, Alonzo Fields, reaching Roosevelt’s bedroom, was surprised to hear, floating out the door, Mrs. Roosevelt’s normally correct if not affectionate voice objecting, “Why didn’t you tell me? I can’t find Mrs. Nesbitt anywhere. If only I had known . . .” Henrietta Nesbitt was the White House head cook—
chef
was a term too elevated for her menus.

Roosevelt noticed Fields waiting warily at the door and lowered the emotional temperature slightly. “Now, Eleanor, all that little woman would do even if she were here is to tell Fields what we can tell him ourselves right now. Fields, at eight tonight we have to have dinner ready for twenty. Mr. Churchill and his party are coming to stay with us for a few days.”

Both Roosevelts expected the Prime Minister and his party, but because of their delays at sea and the understanding that he would cruise up the Potomac from his anchorage, Churchill was scheduled to arrive the next day. Yet his impulsive request for a plane had altered matters. For security reasons, the President had not wanted to alert the White House staff too soon, and Mrs. Roosevelt fussed that she had not yet allocated rooms nor arranged for a dinner with the additional high-level guests her husband wanted. The PM’s arrival was also cutting into her scheduled press conference at 9:30. She was extraordinarily busy, writing a syndicated newspaper column (“My Day”), giving speeches as First Lady, making inspection tours, representing a wheelchair-bound president, and working as unpaid assistant director (under the feisty and controversial Fiorello LaGuardia) of the Office of Civil Defense.