Pearl Harbor Christmas (15 page)

The PM had begun drafting it as cocktail time approached—the President referred to the sacred interlude as “Children’s Hour.” Mixing and serving drinks from a seated position was one of the few physical activities he could accomplish with an audience. As a White House assistant put it, FDR “was trapped in that chair and could not go out and mix and mingle.” The “Children’s Hour” and his press conferences, where he could banter with reporters from his desk, were his opportunities to break out of the reality of confinement.

“At cocktail time,” Mary Churchill recalled from her father’s experience, “everything was beautifully stage-managed so that [the President] could be in control, despite his disability. He would be wheeled in and then spun around to be at the drinks table, where he could reach everything. There were the bottles, there was the shaker, there was the ice. It was all beautifully done. There was never an effort or scurry. He loved the ceremony of making the drinks; it was rather like, ‘Look, I can do it.’ It was formidable. And you know you were supposed to hand him your glass, and not reach for anything else. It was a lovely performance.”

Churchill was considering quoting in his address the next day a passage from the 112th Psalm. He knew the Bible as literature rather than from a pew. He wondered whether Roosevelt would approve of the choice. Dr. Wilson, accompanying Churchill, carried a copy to the libations, perhaps the first time that had been done in the years of the FDR presidency. “The PM took the Bible from me,” Wilson noted in his diary, “and read his quotation to the President, who liked it.” The verse was “He shall not be afraid of evil tidings; his heart is fixed, trusting in the Lord.” It fit the circumstances.

December 26, 1941

I
N THE PHILIPPINES the armies of General Homma were moving relentlessly toward Manila, where the anxious population awaited the inevitable. As telephone communication with Corregidor still existed, MacArthur called Carlos Romulo to unseal the proclamation declaring Manila an open city. Then Romulo was to slip across the bay to join the staff. Separately, MacArthur sent Sid Huff back to Manila to search in the general’s bedroom for his prized old campaign hat and the Colt .45 he had carried in France in the last war. (He would wear both on his only brief trip across the bay to Bataan, which he made on January 10, stolidly leaning on his cane. A wax museum on Coney Island, eight thousand miles eastward, would soon feature a display, “MacArthur at Bataan.”) “I think if you look in the dining room,” MacArthur added, “you may see a bottle of Scotch. Just as well to bring that, too. It may be a long hard winter over here.” Huff left in one of the fast PT (torpedo) boats remaining at the Rock.

Hoping to prevent the Japanese from seizing Jorge Vargas, Manuel Quezon tried using international law as it applied to local officials, telling his executive secretary by telephone, “Jorge, you are appointed Mayor of the City of Greater Manila.” But Vargas not only had no paper evidence; the Japanese seldom respected international law. Yet because they wanted what would be the slim authority of a national official, he was recognized as mayor and requisitions would be issued in his name without notifying him.

“Open City”placard hoisted by Manila residents theday after Christmas,1941.
United StatesArmy Center ofMilitary History

The withdrawals of American and Filipino forces into Bataan would be a litany of hardship. The puny Philippine excuses for divisions had little to fight with. American regiments were undermanned and underarmed. Captain Russell W. Volckmann of the 11th Infantry was ordered to leave behind the equipment his troops could not carry through open country. No roads existed to move his trucks and other vehicles. His men had to conduct a defensive retreat with no food, supplies, equipment, or ammunition other than what they could carry on their backs. Volkmann found that thirty miles of the route followed railway trackage, and he located on sidings eleven freight cars and a nearby engine. Fortunately his regiment, like the others, lacked numbers. He jammed his men into the freight cars until there was little breathing space, then ordered truck drivers to follow gingerly, bumping along the crossties.

Another understrength regiment, the 26th Cavalry, ordered to withdraw and to destroy seven bridges as they did, lost one-third of its personnel and animals killed, wounded, and missing in accomplishing the mission. Three hundred Philippine Scouts from Fort McKinley in Manila were ordered south, rather than to Bataan, to help the frail 1st Philippine Division hold back the Japanese moving toward the city from Lamon Bay. The Scouts hailed taxicabs to drive them to the rapidly receding front but could do nothing useful and retreated on foot. In Manila itself, walking wounded at military hospitals were taken by water to Bataan; 350 more critically injured at the army’s Sternberg Hospital were abandoned. Nihro Katsumi, the Japanese Consul General in Manila, still in deliberately loose custody, made arrangements by radio for safe passage of the
Mactan,
a Philippines interisland ship, to evacuate to Australia the unwanted casualties, accompanied by one American doctor, one American nurse, and several Filipino doctors and nurses.

Rank had its dubious privileges. Evicting the Corregidor staff, MacArthur’s entourage moved into Topside, the clutch of houses at a six hundred–foot elevation near a concrete barracks. The arrangement lasted until showers of air raids forced them into quarters in the Rock’s mile-long Malinta Tunnel, the headquarters of last resort.

As the venerable four-stacker destroyer
Pillsbury
left Manila Bay for the Indies, a flashing light signal came from Corregidor, “Proceed on mission assigned. Good luck and God’s speed.” Passengers taken on included, J. Daniel Mullin noted in his diary, “Admiral Hart’s excellent Purple Code Gang.” The navy in September 1940 had broken the Japanese diplomatic cipher, codenamed “Purple,” but—unfortunately—had not been able to read the parallel Admiralty code in time to prevent Pearl Harbor. Taking on passengers by launch was the four-stacker
Peary,
also headed for Balikpapan.
Peary
had been hastily patched together after the Cavite raids, having lost twenty-three crew dead and missing, a foremast severed, and its antennas and rangefinder destroyed.
Pillsbury
had lost twelve dead and missing, a guywire to the mainmast severed, a torpedo tube mount destroyed, and a fuel tank punctured below the waterline. Two days later, with its damaged tank sealed, it moored in Borneo and at a half hour before midnight took on 103,807 gallons of fuel.

When the launch from the Rock pulled away,
Peary
took aboard its nine evacuees. Lieutenant John M. Bermingham, its captain, advised Ensign Philip Joyce, “In event of action at the Bay’s entrance, have them assemble in the forward crew’s quarters. Get a complete list of names, file or service numbers for the log.” Bermingham had been deputy to Lieutenant Commander Harry H. Keith,
Peary
’s former captain, who had been wounded in both knees at Cavite and hospitalized. Already thirty-six and a 1929 Annapolis grad, Bermingham had waited a long time in the slow-to-promote peacetime navy for a command.

Destroyer
USS Peary. Naval Historical Center

Seaman Lester Harris, the navigator, an old China hand who had seen Japanese mistreatment of women, looking up from the inland charts he had ironed out after their immersion in Manila Bay at Cavite, remarked, “I thought that the boat would bring some of the nurses out. It’s a shame to leave them.” MacArthur kept them at Corregidor, where, after months of bombardment, they would become prisoners of war on May 7, 1942. (The general, his family, and his personal staff had been evacuated south on four PT-boats on March 11.)

Brought aboard
Peary,
its white surface frills of peacetime now being repainted in camouflage green to be less visible from the air, were “cryptographic aids” (apparently codebooks), a “Purple” coding machine, and a radio receiver—“all welcome equipment.” Seamen were especially grateful to be able to pick up the BBC, as it was, they had learned, “the most reliable and truthful,” however disheartening. As the destroyer began moving out, the C.O. directed a signalman to flash, “Passengers and cargo aboard. Request permission to proceed on mission assigned.” One guest was Rear Admiral F. W. Rockwell, Hart’s deputy, who had dodged Japanese bombs at Cavite, losing everything but the sweaty clothes on his back. He “half smiled” at the signal, “for the ship could be seen as already underway.” Permission was granted, with a “Good luck and safe harbor.”

IN MALAYA, on small boats and rafts, the Japanese began crossing the broad Perak at nightfall. Moving tanks and heavy vehicles across the river would require sturdy bridges. The blown spans had to be repaired or replaced. Infantry awaiting orders to take Ipoh and Kuala Lumpur were as reluctant to move as their officers were impatient. On their way through rubber plantations as they advanced, Japanese troops had caught monkeys in the trees by offering them fruit and were amusing themselves by watching them. Others had bathed in emptied oil drums. Soon soldiers from the 5th Division and the Imperial Guards Division were across the Perak, British headquarters reporting three full divisions massing against them. Only a third of the Imperial Guards had arrived in Malaya, one regiment of the 5th was still in Shanghai, and most of the 18th Division was still awaiting shipment. Effectively, Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita had only eight regiments pushing down the main trunk road and the western coast road toward Malacca. The underwhelmed British forces backing into Singapore continued to be reinforced by troopships docking into irrelevance, and worse.

“Boxing Day” to the British, the traditional post-Christmas holiday, meant nothing in occupied and ravaged Hong Kong; yet in doomed Singapore colonists and troops celebrated with toasts empty of meaning but stimulated by wine or whiskey certain otherwise to fall to the enemy. Across the time zones in isolated Malta, surviving despite daily air raids and a Mediterranean swarming with Axis submarines, J. Q. Hughes wrote indelicately about his sloshed superiors, “Sgt. Major Hunt and Sgt. Sandy were quite incapable and more often than not unconscious for two days.” They had begun drinking on Christmas Day. “One officer attended a Court Martial in which all the members were drunk, and the proceedings were thus postponed for several days.”

The
Ford
’s log in Surabaja reported on the day after Christmas, “Minor repair work being accomplished on
Pope
and
Ford
by tender personnel. Liberty for both ships. Ensign Cross had some errands to carry out.... On his way he passed several shops near the Hotel Oranje. He saw a very beautiful mixed Dutch and Indonesian girl. This was too much. After passing several times, he worked up courage and introduced himself. Her name was Wente, and like many, spoke passable English. She was agreeable to having dinner with Cross and his roommate for whom she would find a friend, a couple of days hence.” For the moment it was a good war.