Pearl Harbor Christmas (14 page)

Lilies on the altar, the
Washington Post
observed, were in memory of the President’s mother, Sara. Roosevelt and Churchill sat in the fourth pew as the minister prayed for “those who are dying on land and sea this Christmas morning” and for his special guest from Britain who was leading “his valiant people even through blood and sweat and tears to a new world where men may dwell together, none daring to molest or make afraid.” The congregation sang “O’ Little Town of Bethlehem,” which the PM had never heard before Christmas Eve. The lyrics were by an Episcopal priest, Phillips Brooks, rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Philadelphia, in 1868, with music by his organist, Lewis Redner. The lines had a special resonance in wartime:

Yet in thy dark street shineth
The everlasting light;
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.

Churchill—not a churchgoer at home—told Dr. Wilson that the service was “uplifting and restful.”

Both Roosevelt and Churchill spent much of the afternoon reading and sending radiograms. Hong Kong had fallen, a not unexpected but costly embarrassment for Britain. Churchill had drawn a Canadian brigade for the indefensible colony, more to boost local morale than to bolster security. Two thousand Canadians were among the casualties—and the PM was planning a quick trip to Canada, where he would have some explaining to do. He reported to John Curtin, the Australian Prime Minister, that Roosevelt had agreed to divert weapons and troops earmarked for the Philippines to prop up Singapore if they could not be forced through to MacArthur and “to send substantial United States forces to Australia, where the Americans are anxious to establish important bases for the war against Japan.”

American lines of communication to Australia, as a base of operations to defeat Japan, had become the only realistic priority on the Pacific Rim. Washington had no intentions of pouring troops down a Singapore sump and could not alter the finality of the Philippines. But when Roosevelt’s alleged intentions, embroidered by Churchill, reached General Marshall—the military leaders on both sides were working through the holiday—he called in Hap Arnold and Ike Eisenhower and took them with him to Secretary Stimson’s office to protest the apparent selling out of the Philippines, none of them realizing that MacArthur had just abandoned Manila, effectively relinquishing Luzon and soon the rest of the Philippines, to Japan. Without thinking through the reality that no American replenishment of Singapore nor of the Philippines would happen and that the President’s radioed offer to MacArthur was largely rhetoric, Stimson telephoned the White House. Reaching Harry Hopkins, he declared that if the President was going to agree to “this kind of foolishness,” he would have to get a new secretary of war.

Meeting with Stimson and the service chiefs at the White House, Roosevelt would downplay as a “misrepresentation” an alleged arrangement with Churchill to send American troops to Singapore. He had only ordered the redirection toward Singapore of an American ship carrying British troops to Ceylon. Hopkins assured the American chiefs that the White House would prevent further Churchillian misunderstandings, and Roosevelt offered on the record to build up a presence in Australia “toward operations to the north, including, of course, the Philippines.”

Late on Christmas afternoon the chiefs of staff and their deputies convened in the refurbished World War I relic of the Old Munitions Building, a meeting that would break up at 5:20. Psychologically and strategically, whatever the losses anticipated on the Pacific Rim, Roosevelt had emphasized that he wanted “to have troops somewhere in active fighting across the Atlantic.” His priorities unchanged, he proposed a Germany-first war while holding what could be held in the Pacific. MacArthur would claim that the President was cajoled by Churchill into emphasizing Europe, but in a redraft of British proposals prepared on the voyage across, General Marshall and Admiral Stark had summed up the American position in two blunt paragraphs that reiterated pre–Pearl Harbor policy:

1. At the A-B [American-British] Staff Conversations in February 1941 [well before Pearl Harbor], it was agreed that Germany was the predominant member of the Axis Powers, and consequently the Atlantic and European area was considered to be the decisive theatre.

2. Much has happened since . . . , but notwithstanding the entry of Japan into the War, our view remains that Germany is still the prime enemy and her defeat is the key to victory. Once Germany is defeated, the collapse of Italy and the defeat of Japan must follow.

Secretary Stimson was well aware of that, but in misinterpreting the redirection of a single American troopship transporting no Americans, he wrote in his diary, “I think he [FDR] felt that he had pretty nearly burned his fingers and had called this subsequent meeting to make up for it. All things considered, this has been a strange and distressful Christmas.”

Both allies were proposing strategies to relieve pressure upon Russia by forcing the
Wehrmacht
to withdraw some divisions to the West. Churchill pressed his military chiefs to consider another landing in Norway, where he had already failed, at Narvik, in 1940. To the alarm of the British, Roosevelt had suggested to Churchill a costly feint toward occupied France, which at the least would get Hitler’s attention. Something had to be done. It was crucial to keep Stalin from pursuing a separate peace, which could divert millions of the enemy toward the West. Easier pickings, with the same outcome, the British continued to suggest, would be Vichy French Africa.

Discovering from talks with Marshall, King, and their deputies that Roosevelt only conferred with his service chiefs as he felt necessary rather than on a regular schedule, John Dill cabled Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, with concern that American military cohesion “belongs to the days of George Washington.” On the civilian side of running the war, FDR’s managerial style was to employ a plethora of people squabbling over their overlapping responsibilities. It was not so with the military dimension. General Marshall was fully in charge. FDR respected his judgment and largely left him to run the war. He may have overruled Marshall only once or twice during the entire course of planning. Churchill, however, as Dill well knew, constantly interfered in strategic matters, exasperating the PM’s military chiefs, yet he contended that he was entitled to do so as self-appointed Minister of Defence.

ROOSEVELT’S DRAFT of a declaration by the “Associated Powers” linked with the United States and Britain, first drawn up by Cordell Hull, and now conflated into a joint statement by Churchill, had been radioed to London on Christmas Eve. By the next afternoon the White House had received a cable from Clement Attlee on behalf of the War Cabinet, conveying its surprise at the sweeping concept and hoping that all allies willing to sign it should be given that opportunity. The advice from London was that such participation would furnish proof “that this war is being waged for the freedom of the small nations as well as the great powers.”

Despite that achievement, in which Secretary Hull could take pride, another and smaller ongoing event rankled him. While he was struggling to maintain ties with wretched Vichy, a formal Christmas Day plebiscite had been arranged by Admiral Émile Muselier for the seized islets of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, specks under the French flag twelve miles south of Newfoundland. Despite contrary assurances of their integrity by Charles de Gaulle’s London-based Free French, a small force of three corvettes and a submarine the day before, without firing a shot, had upset the status quo. Its few hundred male citizens (females were excluded) voted 98 percent in favor of adhering to Free France. However arbitrary the occupation and its confirmation of the ambitions of de Gaulle, whose relationship with Roosevelt would never be better than sour, territory and people had been liberated for the first time in the war. It seemed an unexpected holiday gift.

Only a one-star general, de Gaulle had assumed for himself the mantle of the leaderless French resistance and was demonstrating that he would not be a pawn. Tall and imposing, he was still little known in France, but Vichy, nevertheless, anxious about his growing mystique, portrayed him in press caricatures as short and fat. Pleased with the small but symbolic coup, the
New York Post
wrote of “great joy this Christmas Day.” Invoking French literature, the
New York Times
editorialized about “a [military] display of style and manners in the best tradition of Alexander Dumas.” The
Christian Science Monitor,
praising “an initiative and flair that have often been lacking in Allied strategy,” titled its commentary “
Beau Geste
.”

A week earlier an aide to Rear Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, head of the Bureau of Navigation at the Navy Department Building on Constitution Avenue, had picked up the office phone and heard the caller ask, “May I speak to Chester?” It seemed undignified to Lieutenant Howell Lamar until the voice added, “This is the President. Put him on the phone.” Two hours later Nimitz returned from the White House with orders to command what was left of the Pacific Fleet, and on December 19 left with Lamar, both in civilian clothes and under assumed names, by rail from Union Station to the West Coast. (Nimitz was advised not to chance flying across the country in winter weather.) Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, tarnished by unreadiness at Pearl Harbor, had been sacked. He was ordered to remain in Hawaii, as was Lieutenant General Walter C. Short, also replaced, for Justice Roberts’s hearings.

At seven on the grey Christmas morning Nimitz’s Catalina (PBY) flying boat landed in the east loch of the harbor. Nimitz was still in civilian garb. The whaleboat taking the party to shore was splashed with black oil seeping from sunken ships; everyone stood awkwardly. “What news of the relief of Wake?” Nimitz asked, and learned that reinforcements had been recalled as hopeless and that the atoll had been surrendered. Remaining silent, he grimly watched the floating debris and oil slicks, and the bloated corpses still surfacing from submerged wrecks.

WITH THE WEATHER NOT COLD ENOUGH for a white Christmas, a light drizzle was now falling in the Capital environs. Soon after six the Marshalls, who did little formal dining at Fort Myer, entertained some of the ranking British contingent not invited to the White House: Ambassador and Lady Halifax, Lord Beaverbrook, Admiral Pound, Air Marshal Portal, and Field Marshal Dill. When Katherine Marshall discovered belatedly, as guests were gathering, that December 25 was also Sir John Dill’s sixtieth birthday, she sent Sergeant James Powder, her husband’s paragon of efficiency, to find a cake and candles. Despite Christmas closings, he returned with both and also with miniature British and American flags as decoration. As they were popped into the icing, Dill confided that he had not had his birthday celebrated since he was a small boy. Removing some of the flags afterward to insert a knife into the cake, he discovered that they were stamped “Made in Japan.” When a Western Union messenger arrived to perform a singing “Happy Birthday to You” telegram—Powder had thought of everything—he was intercepted by a Secret Service detail. There was wartime security somewhere.

At eight Churchill dined with the Roosevelts at the White House. A turkey dinner for sixty using gold-plated flatware from the Grover Cleveland administration a half-century earlier hardly resembled a business meeting, although several presidential associates were seated as well as the Morgenthaus and Olav and Marthe of Norway. FDR had invited some cousins and some friends, among them financier Bernard Baruch and a former Under Secretary of the Navy Garrison Norton. Champagne was liberally served after each of many toasts, the President recalling in his toast to Britain that King George VI and Queen Elizabeth had dined in the same room in 1939, a beginning of the “coming together” of the nations, which, he vowed, would continue after victory.

Churchill asked for Johnnie Walker in his glass and seemed silent and preoccupied. Bad news kept coming—and despite all of it he had to deliver a stirring address the next day to an unpredictable audience. Garrison Norton recalled that after dinner, newsreels and the film adaptation of Dickens’
Oliver Twist
were shown. As the reel was being changed, Churchill rose and explained, “I must prepare for tomorrow.” He was working on his speech to Congress and would continue long into the night and again in the morning.