Pearl Harbor Christmas (6 page)

Much was on Churchill’s figurative plate as he prepared for a late dinner at the White House. Despite her outburst at breakfast, Eleanor Roosevelt had greeted him and her husband warmly as they emerged from the elevator on the second floor. Weary from attending pre-Christmas activities all over Washington through the day, she had returned to oversee room arrangements for Churchill and his small airborne party. She showed Lord Beaverbrook to a bedroom, the PM’s deputy Tommy Thompson to another, the Yellow Bedroom, and John Martin, the PM’s private secretary, to the Small Blue Bedroom. The two Scotland Yard shadows were given a joint room and Churchill’s valet a dressing room adjoining Churchill’s quarters. The Monroe Room, Eleanor explained to Churchill, had been emptied of furniture to serve as his map room, to parallel his planning domain in the Cabinet War Rooms, underground below buildings at the corner of Great George Street and Storey’s Gate. (He would shortly have the Monroe Room covered with maps and colored pins, showing the movements of British troops and ships.)

A tale more likely apocryphal is that she showed him to the fabled Lincoln Bedroom, which he proceeded, without informing her, to dislike. Once she left, he allegedly tried out beds in other rooms and selected for himself the Rose Bedroom, next to Thompson’s room on the east end of the floor. It was decorated with Victorian scenes and, whether or not he knew its history, had been used by Queen Elizabeth on her visit in 1939. According to Harry Hopkins’s close friend and FDR speechwriter Robert Sherwood, however, Churchill was “installed in the big [Rose] bedroom across from Hopkins’ room, and as the two of them walked back and forth to visit one another they had to pick their way through great piles of Christmas parcels.” Hopkins, a widower and FDR’s trusted intimate—almost his second self—lived in the White House with his daughter, Diana, then nine. Son of a harness-maker in Sioux City, Iowa, he had been described to Churchill warily, in traditional Tory fashion, before he met and bonded decisively with Hopkins, as “the old nonconformist conscience of Victorian liberalism.... He does not believe that a world in which some live in the sun and others in the shadows makes sense.”

Mrs. Roosevelt had invited the advance party to “tea” at 8:15 in the ground floor Red Room while dinner was being prepared, but recognizing Churchill’s lack of eagerness for the signature British beverage, FDR was already seated at a small table prepared to mix more potent drinks. The PM emerged in one of his characteristic guises—the blue cap and (over a ruffled shirt) the double-breasted coat of an Elder Brother of Trinity House, the venerable guild chartered by Henry VIII and headquartered at Tower Hill, still supporting lighthouses and navigational aids. To be one of the thirty-one elite Elder Brothers was a valued royal, naval, or political distinction.

The President prized his special martini recipe, although its mild relative proportions were often considered by guests to be unfortunate, and he also offered other mixed libations, including one with dark Haitian rum. Gin concoctions were long associated with Britain and, indeed, the empire, but Churchill’s tastes ran to sherry, whiskey, brandy, and champagne, beginning on awakening, and none adulterated by flavored, nonalcoholic ingredients. As additional guests arrived, the President had a trolley rolled in with caviar, smoked turkey, smoked clams, and assorted cheeses, all now rarities in London.

Dinner was served in the long dining room. Ambassador Lord Halifax had arrived, joining Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Mrs. Hull, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles and Mrs. Welles, Harry Hopkins, Lord Beaverbrook and several close Roosevelt friends, such as Mrs. “Bertie” Hamlin. Henrietta Nesbitt, whose bland cuisine often caused presidential invitees to pass up a White House dinner, furnished broiled chicken and vegetables, with a dessert of strawberry shortcake and vanilla ice cream. (As the war wore on, because chicken did not require soon-to-be issued meat-ration coupons, she would serve fowl in some form almost daily.) Closing the light banter over dinner, the President raised a goblet of champagne. “I have a toast to offer,” he began, “—it has been in my head and on my heart now for a long time—now it is on the tip of my tongue—‘To the common cause.’ ”

It was already ten o’clock. As the waiters and maids began collecting plates and glasses, the President wheeled his chair about and was propelled toward the green-carpeted Oval Office, with Churchill, Beaverbrook, Halifax, Hopkins, Welles, and Hull following and taking seats on the brown and green leather chairs once salvaged from Theodore Roosevelt’s yacht
Mayflower.
A general discussion began, as prologue to meetings scheduled for the morning of December 23. Churchill knew the answer before he asked his initial question: Would the President concede to public desire to go directly after Japan? The PM knew that distances, and resources, made that impractical. The priority, he was assured, was “Europe first.” Both agreed that Americans had to get into some action that was not wholly defensive as soon as possible, and that meant across the Atlantic—probably French North Africa, whether or not the puppet Pétain regime in Vichy resisted. Georges Mandel, Minister of the Interior until the armistice with Germany, described the aged Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain ironically as “
le conquistador,
” playing on “
le con qui se dort
”—the fool who is asleep.

As the Oval Office emptied at about midnight, Churchill recalled, “I wheeled [the President] in his chair from the drawing room to the lift as a mark of respect and thinking also of Sir Walter Raleigh spreading his cloak before Queen Elizabeth.”

EARLY EDITIONS OF the morning newspapers had been delivered, and those in the White House knew much more than the press was permitted to print. One problem that would plague American war industry could not be concealed and had already made the front pages. Welders and other laborers in San Francisco Bay–area shipyards were striking. The army had to be called in to “prevent molestation” of those willing to work. The Japanese already in Luzon were moving, more rapidly than reported, south from Lingayen Gulf and north from Lamon Bay, closing in on undefended Manila. Handouts from MacArthur about the capital contended otherwise.

Outnumbered but feisty marines on Wake Island were close to surrender. Commander Winfield Scott Cunningham radioed Admiral Pye and Admiral Fletcher tersely: “ENEMY ON ISLAND. ISSUE IN DOUBT.” Pearl Harbor ordered Task Force 14 to reverse course and return. Marine pilots on the flight deck of the
Saratoga
banged their fists against their planes and wept openly. Major James Devereux on Wake sent orders where he could: “Cease firing and destroy all weapons. The island is being surrendered.” On its Wilkes outcrop, unaware of the grim situation on Wake itself, sixty marines fought on uselessly with their bolt-action 1903 Springfields. A chunk of shrapnel scraped the scalp of Private First Class Artie Stocks after ripping off his British-style World War I–vintage helmet and lodged in the bank behind him. He picked it up. Embossed on the fragment was the identification, “Made in Ohio USA.” American companies until ordered to cease had profited from scrap metal sales to Japan.

Frustration abounded. U-boats had begun torpedoing tankers so close to the brightly lit Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico seaboards—fine target background not yet blacked out—that watchers ashore could see ships ablaze. (And five more submarines would leave pens on the Bay of Biscay on Christmas Day.) Hong Kong’s beleaguered and backtracking garrison was still gamely “holding out.”

According to published reports from General MacArthur, American and Filipino troops had the situation in Luzon “well in hand,” which was, as Washington knew, unrealistic at best, as was his claim that many Japanese troop transports had been sunk by coast artillery and tanks. No artillery had defended the landing sites, and no tanks. Only carefully vetted reports from correspondents were permitted through MacArthur’s censorship. For the North American Newspaper Alliance, Royal Arch Gunnison reported under a Nichols Field dateline—the airbase had been devastated by Japanese bombers—that he was permitted to state that Nichols Field had been “lightly bombed” and that the morale of ground crews was “excellent.” He saw “three mud-covered green-dungaree boys” lifting a wounded comrade out of a machine-gun pit. It was “nothing much,” the injured soldier told Gunnison, “just a slight burn here in the side.” One of the others in the ground crew “cursed the Japanese in the most complete manner I have ever heard anyone told off”—perhaps a clue to what really occurred at Nichols Field, soon to be abandoned.

MacArthur’s own regal communiqués, largely self-aggrandizing fantasy, made him a headlines hero. Of 142 issued by his headquarters before his escape to Australia on March 11, 1942, 109 communiqués identified only one person—Douglas MacArthur.

FROM HIS BEDROOM Churchill dictated to John Martin a telegram to the British War Cabinet in London. “There was general agreement,” he noted,

that if Hitler was held in Russia he must try something else, and that the most probable line was Spain and Portugal en route to North Africa.... There was general agreement that it was vital to forestall the Germans.... The President said that he was anxious that American land forces should give their support as quickly as possible wherever they could be most helpful, and favoured the idea of a plan to move into North Africa being prepared . . . with or without [Vichy French] invitation.

It was agreed to remit the study of the project to Staffs.... It was recognised that shipping was plainly a most important factor. . . . In the course of conversation the President mentioned that he would propose at forthcoming conference that United States should relieve our troops in Northern Ireland, and spoke of sending three or four divisions there. I warmly welcomed this, and said I hope that one of the divisions would be an armoured division. It was not thought that this need conflict with preparations for a United States force for North Africa.

Lord Halifax returned to his embassy worried about “how remote my mind and thoughts are from Winston’s and Max [Beaverbrook]’s.” Realizing how unprepared the United States remained, Churchill’s positive slant on future operations as he intended to guide them appalled Halifax. He worried whether the PM by force of personality and experience of war, however flawed, could impose his strategic ideas on the Americans. Churchill had failed in Norway in 1940 and again in Greece, to even heavier losses, earlier in 1941. Events had thrust Halifax from prewar Appeasement, but he harbored doubts about what might be done, where, and how fast. It was quite enough, the PM thought, that the Americans, with their potential, were now in the fight. “I was terribly shocked by Winston’s growth in the egotistic habit of thought. ‘I can do this: I won’t do that, etc., etc.’” Halifax retired to sleep, as did the denizens of the White House. Churchill could not.

December 23, 1941

A
BOARD THE DESTROYER
Akigumo
in the Pearl Harbor strike force returning to Japan, Lieutenant Commander Sadao Chigusa, the executive officer (later a rear admiral), wrote in his diary just after dawn on the 24th (a day earlier across the Date Line), “At last we are in the very day of our arrival at our motherland. It was very fine weather after a typhoon had passed.” The fleet was poised to enter Bungo Suido Channel between the southern islands of Shikoku and Kyushu en route to Kure on Honshu, and by 7:30 he could see, dimly, the mountains of Shikoku. He felt “deeply moved.” By 9:30 patrol aircraft from the mainland were “dancing in the air over our fleet.” General Quarters was called so that crew not immediately needed could crowd the decks to savor the homecoming. It was a happy gathering. They had already learned that the Hawaiian voyage had earned each seaman a bonus of two months’ pay over his regular salary.

Sailors had their lunch at noon and an hour later entered the Inland Sea, casting anchor at the Hashirajima berth in Hiroshima Bay. Chigusa’s ship was the last destroyer to dock. “With great relief I could feel refreshed in body and mind and took my first bath in over one month.... All officers gathered in the wardroom and drank a toast to our success in the Battle and congratulated each other. . . .”