Pearl Harbor Christmas (16 page)

AT
Wolfsschanze
—Wolf’s Lair—Hitler’s concealed but lavish headquarters bunkers near Rastenburg in East Prussia, Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge announced the dismissal from his tank command of armor expert General Heinz Guderian, whose
Blitzkreig
had quickly beaten France the year before. Retreating to save his 2nd Panzer Army, Guderian had defied orders to halt in place. Summoned to the Führer on December 20, he endured five hours of admonishment for timidity and for having “too much pity” for his troops. The ground was frozen to a depth of five feet, Guderian explained. Hitler knew it. He had already confessed publicly that there was such a shortage of winter uniforms that Goebbels had mounted a massive “Winter Aid” appeal, urging Germans to send warm clothing and shoes of any sort, especially ski wear, to collection points for the East. On national radio Goebbels had declared, less gently than had Hitler, that “people at home would not deserve a moment’s peace if a single German soldier was exposed to the harshness of winter without articles of warm clothing.” Film, theater and sports figures were sent about the country to promote the effort, inadvertently publicizing the failure to win the Russian war, as once predicted, before winter.

The hurried campaign, due to have ended symbolically at Christmas, would be extended to January 11, amassing 67 million articles, much of the collection unusable or beyond any means of transporting and distributing it to the front. Hitler had ignored the implications of the “Winter Aid” promotion in berating Guderian. “Do you think Frederick the Great’s grenadiers were anxious to die?” he charged. “They wanted to live, too, but the king was right in asking them to sacrifice themselves. I believe that I, too, am entitled to ask any German soldier to lay down his life.” Later Hitler desperately needed Guderian and restored him to duty.

The Russian bear emerging from a Christmas tree decoration.
Cartoon from
Portsmouth, NH,
Herald,
December 26, 1941

GENERAL SIR ALAN BROOKE, Dill’s successor, convened a chiefs of staff meeting in London on Boxing Day morning, discussing “reinforcing of Far East and Fiji Islands etc.,” he noted in his diary, inexplicably pairing the two as if of equal consequence. “In afternoon rung up by Attlee,” he added, “to find out whether we were ready for a Defence Committee meeting to keep Australians quiet as they were fretting about [providing] reinforcements to Singapore.” Australians in Singapore destined for Japanese POW camps had their parallel in Canadians already captive in Hong Kong—imported to defend the indefensible.

Waiting until the day after Christmas, to drain less joy out of the holiday, Leon Henderson, Price Administrator and manager of wartime rationing, announced in Washington that as of January 3, ordinary motorists, including taxi drivers and traveling salesmen, would be prohibited from buying new tires without certificates validating need for essential services involving health, safety, and industrial operations. He made no reference to the ongoing Japanese seizure of rubber plantations in Southeast Asia or the sluggish and reluctant domestic production of synthetic rubber. Because milk and associated products were often trucked home-to-home along city streets, Henderson suggested pooling vehicles and routes for delivery services. Certificates would soon be needed even for purchasing retreaded and recapped tires. Shops would run short of rubber gloves, overshoes, floor mats, garden hoses, and even hot-water bottles—but not under-the-counter condoms.

Although it was the day after Christmas, most members of Congress had remained in Washington as Churchill was to address a joint session of the Senate and House. He had given much thought to what he should say and called in one of his secretaries, Patrick Kinna, to take dictation while the PM was still in his morning bath—as not a minute could be wasted. He kept submerging his bulk in the steaming suds, and when he “surfaced,” he would dictate a few more words or sentences. Soon, Kinna recalled, “he got out of the bath when his devoted valet, [Frank] Sawyers, draped an enormous bath-towel around him. He walked into his adjoining bedroom followed by me, notebook in hand, and continued to dictate while pacing up and down.” Eventually the towel fell to the floor. Unconcerned, the PM continued pacing the room, dictating all the time.

Suddenly, Kinna recalled, “President Roosevelt [in his wheelchair] entered the bedroom and saw the British Prime Minister completely naked walking around the room dictating to me. WSC never being lost for words said, ‘You see, Mr President, I have nothing to conceal from you.’”

Harry Hopkins, across the hall, learned of the incident and the President’s abortive attempt to apologize for the intrusion. He enjoyed retelling the story, which was assigned a variety of wrong dates. Hopkins’s friend Robert Sherwood, a Roosevelt speech writer, later asked Churchill about it. “I could not possibly have made such a statement like that,” Churchill insisted. “The President himself would have been aware that it was not strictly true.” To Churchill the episode had reduced his dignity.
⁶

From morning into night, the PM would carry a tot of brandy about, often refilling his glass. Late one evening when Hopkins and Churchill went to the map room for a briefing, the conversation got around to the PM’s liquid capacity. Hopkins picked up a pencil and calculated on the basis of the daily intake he observed how many tank cars of brandy Churchill had consumed in his lifetime. He offered a number. “Tank cars or tankards,” dismissed Churchill. “I thought I had done rather better than that.”

ROOSEVELT WOULD NOT ACCOMPANY the Prime Minister along Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. Churchill was to have the occasion for himself. FDR wished “the Prime” luck and planned to listen on the radio. “There seemed to be great crowds along the broad approaches,” Churchill wrote in his memoirs, “but the security precautions, which in the United States go far beyond British custom, kept them a long way off, and two or three motorcars filled with armed plainclothes policemen clustered around as escort. On getting out I wished to walk up to the cheering masses in a strong mood of brotherhood, but this was not allowed.”

As soon as the PM was seen being accompanied down the aisle in the House chamber toward the rostrum, a friendly roar could be heard on radios nationwide. “Congress Thrilled,” a
New York Times
subheading reported. “Prime Minister Warns of Dark Days but Holds Victory Is Certain.” He spoke through “a grille of microphones,” capturing his audiences from the start. “I had never addressed a foreign Parliament before,” Churchill recalled. “Yet to me, who could trace unbroken male descent on my mother’s side through five generations from a lieutenant who served in George Washington’s army, it was possible to feel a blood-right to address representatives of the great Republic in our common cause.”

He was “greatly honored” at the invitation, he began:

The fact that my American forbears have for so many generations played their part in the life of the United States, and that here I am, as an Englishman, welcomed in your midst, makes this experience one of the most moving and thrilling in my life, which is already long and has not been entirely uneventful. I wish indeed that my mother, whose memory I cherish across the vale of years, could be here to see me. By the way, I can’t help reflecting that if my father had been American and my mother British, instead of the other way round, I might have got here on my own. In that case this would not have been the first time you would have heard my voice. In that case I should not have needed any invitation, but if I had, it is hardly likely it would have been unanimous. So perhaps things are better as they are.

The informality and wit of his opening captured his audience, and the ringing cheers made it difficult to go on. He claimed to have found, in his few days in Washington, “an Olympian fortitude” and a sense of “inflexible purpose” as well as “confidence in the final outcome. We in Britain had the same feeling in our darkest days.” He did not want to project an easy optimism. “Some people may be startled or momentarily depressed when, like your President, I speak of a long and hard war. But our peoples would rather know the truth, sombre though it might be.” Whether “deliverance would come in 1942, 1943, or 1944” was up to “the grand proportions of human history.”

Churchill elicited another roar when he asked, about the Japanese, obviously on the minds of most listeners, “What kind of a people do they think we are? Is it possible they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?” He wondered why, as their “intricate preparations” for war had gone on so long, “they did not choose our [worst] moment of weakness eighteen months ago. Viewed quite dispassionately, in spite of the losses we have suffered and the further punishment we will have to take, it certainly appears to be an irrational act.... They must now know that the stakes for which they have decided to play are mortal.”

In a house full of stubborn isolationists now reluctant warriors, he did not hesitate to blame passivity in his host’s country as well as his own, particularly for the European war, because

Five or six years ago it would have been easy, without shedding a drop of blood, for the United States and Great Britain to have insisted on fulfilment of the disarmament clauses of the treaties which Germany signed after the Great War; that also would have been the opportunity for assuring to Germany those raw materials which we declared in the Atlantic Charter should not be denied to any nation, victor or vanquished. That chance has passed. It is gone. Prodigious hammer-strokes have been needed to bring us together again.

Because it was the season of Christmas, he concluded with an upbeat peroration calculated to appeal to the churched. Only a “blind soul,” he concluded, could not see “that some great purpose and design is being worked out here below, of which we have the honour to be the faithful servants. It is not given to us to peer into the mysteries of the future. Still, I avow my hope and faith, sure and inviolate, that in the days to come the British and American peoples will for their own safety and for the good of all wall together side by side in majesty, injustice, and in peace.”

As Churchill was escorted off the podium he raised his hand and flashed, with two fingers, his familiar “V for Victory” gesture. Frenzied cheers followed, and others in the chamber, including Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, returned the salute. “You could follow that fellow anywhere,” enthused Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland. “It was a clever speech, and one that generally will appeal to the American people,” isolationist senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana conceded. At lunch afterward with senior legislators whom he had not selected, he met Wheeler and told him that the speech downplayed criticism of prewar attitudes, for “if the present criticizes the past, there is not much hope for the future.” It was a conciliatory remark but contradicted by Churchill’s willingness to blame Western passivity. Leaving, he waved to crowds still waiting outside to see him. “Then the Secret Service men and their cars closed round and took me back to the White House, where the President, who had listened in, told me I had done quite well.”