Pearl Harbor Christmas (19 page)

AT THE WHITE HOUSE at 10:00 A.M., Stimson proposed that a joint Southeast Pacific command base be built up “sufficiently far back to be unmolested,” suggesting an area beyond likely seizure by the Japanese. Without mentioning Australia, it was clearly the site he had in mind. (Hoping for a more hands-on role for himself, Churchill had proposed instead a “Central Governing Body in Washington” to direct action in the Far East.) Marshall, Stimson, and Arnold all objected to Washington because of the time lag that distance would create. In Arnold’s words, “Twenty-four hours would be too late.”

Churchill, although tipped off by Hopkins, professed surprise at the suggestion of Wavell as joint commander. Roosevelt also proposed MacArthur—if available—although FDR conceded that no American had sufficient war experience to be “suitable for the post.” Arnold offered to “get MacArthur out of the Philippines” if he were the choice. Pride, however, dictated that MacArthur would remain where he was, as he refused to accept from his isolation on Corregidor that he had already lost the Philippines. Ignoring the news from beyond the Rock, about which he knew only from radio, he chose to believe encouraging if unrealistic resupply rhetoric from Marshall and Roosevelt and expected reinforcements to press through the Pacific and repel Japanese seaborne forces blocking shipping lanes toward Luzon. Assistance was indeed on the way—but slowly and obliquely and inadequately. Most of it would stop in Australia and remain there.

The dearth of alternatives left the conferees determined “to start out with Wavell” but—in deference to Churchill—to leave the sea dimension as it was. (The exclusion would not survive future sessions.) Arnold’s minutes recorded, with Australia obviously meant but unidentified, “One of the thoughts . . . accepted by all was that we must build up as soon as possible a base in the Far East from which we can gradually move northward, step by step, meeting the Japanese on better than even terms at each step, until ultimately sooner or later we drive the Japanese back from all their present conquests.” He might have written “present and future,” for the worst was yet to come.

Marshall’s proposal of Wavell would leave the British participants vocally worried about public opinion in the United States if events proved, as likely, disastrous, but Churchill contended that Britain should not “shirk the responsibility offered to us” and as a counterweight suggested that naval affairs be under American command in cooperation with General Wavell. Curiously, Australia itself, beyond Darwin, would be in all practical matters outside Wavell’s sphere of control, and his base in India would be given over to an acting deputy. With Japanese advances everywhere, Wavell would oversee a fluctuating and shrinking command and find the reality impossible. He would not last long in his dubious position, which the Japanese would quickly diminish and which officially dissolved on February 25, but the fact of such an appointment initiated what would be a global allied command structure.

As Stimson, Marshall, and Arnold prepared to leave the meeting, with Marshall agreeing to draft a directive to the proposed theater commander, Roosevelt asked Arnold to remain. The general had told him of his conversation the evening before with Lord Beaverbrook (whom
Time
called “dumpy and testy”) about war production, particularly the cautious aircraft estimates, Arnold’s area of expertise. The American population, with far fewer men under arms, was three times as numerous as Britain. What did Arnold think of the anomaly?

Arnold advised the President that without a collective will to reach industrial potential, Americans could not surpass British production. Still, Arnold cited a promising example. The Boeing factories expected to produce 37 B-17 bombers a month actually completed 50 and would reach 75 in January. More like that could be accomplished elsewhere. According to Arnold’s minutes of the conversation, “The President seemed to be greatly pleased by that.” In 1940 after the fall of France, Roosevelt had called for an annual production of 50,000 planes, yet implementation by a parsimonious prewar Congress had been sluggish. At the time of Pearl Harbor, the army in Hawaii had only 231 aircraft, half of them obsolete.

IN KENTUCKY AT 10:30 A.M. a B&O train pulled into Louisville Station. Waiting on the platform for the sleeper car
Eastlake
were four Secret Service men and a troop from the 13th Armored Division. Verner W. Clapp, chief assistant librarian, who had been aboard, watched over the unloading. The document containers from Washington were lifted into an army truck. Led by a scout vehicle and followed by a car with the four agents, the convoy entered Fort Knox. The cargo was checked in by the chief clerk at the Bullion Depository and placed in Compartment No. 24 on the ground level. The vault was closed at 12:07 P.M. It would not be reopened until late in 1944, for return of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and other founding manuscripts to the Library of Congress.

CHURCHILL AND FDR had lunch at one with Ambassador Litvinov at the White House, the subject the joint allied declaration—carefully worded, as Russia was not at war with Japan—on allied unity and goals. Litvinov thought that his government would object to a reference to “freedom of religion” but might accept “freedom of conscience.” It was the Christmas season, but the holiday hardly existed in Stalin’s domains. Roosevelt altered the term to “religious freedom,” which Litvinov suggested might work. He would try it on Moscow.

Just before the afternoon meetings of the chiefs of staff without FDR and Churchill and the luncheon with Litvinov, the President and Prime Minister had met at noon in the Red Room with the heads of diplomatic missions in Washington of nations at war with the Axis powers. The draft declaration of allied unity and aims was under review, in various translations, for each nation to subscribe if acceptable. “We are all in the same boat,” said the President, “just as we are all in this room.” According to the Mexican ambassador, Castillo Nájera, “The entire interview, from the time of entering the Red Room to the time of departure, lasted thirty-eight minutes.” Churchill cabled Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee extravagantly, “Today for five hours President and I received representatives of all the other Allied or friendly Powers and British Dominions, and made heartening statements to them.” It would lead, within the week, to the declaration initiating the United Nations.

ALTHOUGH DWIGHT EISENHOWER was only assistant chief of the war plans division of army headquarters, Marshall, confident in his new man on the job, was pitching matters large and small to him. To an old West Point friend, Brigadier General LeRoy Lutes, Ike wrote of the “mad house” the War Department had become during the nearly nonstop “Arcadia Conference.” Although it was already eight o’clock in the evening and a Sunday, he told Lutes, who was director of operations in the Services of Supply and who would several years later be Ike’s logistics deputy, “I have a couple of hours’ work ahead of me, and tomorrow will be no different from today. I have been here about three weeks and this noon had my first luncheon outside of the office. Usually it is a hot-dog sandwich and a glass of milk. I have had one evening meal in the whole period.”

Eisenhower bedded temporarily in Virginia at “Tall Oaks,” his brother Milton’s posh estate (Helen Eakin’s family was prosperous) in Falls Church. “Every night when I reached their house, regardless of the hour, which averaged something around midnight,” Ike recalled, “both would be waiting up for me with a snack of midnight supper and a pot of coffee. I cannot remember ever seeing their house in daylight.” Putting in sixteen-hour days, he was picked up by an army staff car heading for the Potomac bridges before the winter sun arose. Barely visible in the wan light were billboards importuning, “WAR WORKERS NEED ROOMS, APARTMENTS, HOMES. REGISTER YOUR VACANCIES NOW.” He too would need one when Mamie relocated from Texas.

The day before, Major General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell had written to his wife about the frenzied activity in the War Department. A veteran of combat in France in 1918, he had been summoned by Marshall from command of III Corps to direct the possible invasion of Vichy North Africa. “My impression of Washington,” he wrote, “is a rush of clerks in and out of doors, swing doors always swinging, people with papers rushing after other people with papers, groups in corners whispering in huddles, everybody jumping up just as you start to talk, buzzers ringing, telephones ringing, rooms crowded, with clerks all banging away at typewriters.... Everybody furiously smoking cigarettes, everybody passing you on the way to someone else. . . .” His hurried relocation would quickly lead to nothing. Shortages of shipping everywhere made North Africa a present impossibility. Marshall estimated to the British that the operation was at least “three months away”—at that an unrealistic estimate of a venture that would take place the next November.

That Saturday afternoon at 3:00 P.M. the entire military leadership on both sides, including a secretariat of six, filed into a conference room in the Federal Reserve Building. Again the North African operation came up, and Air Marshal Portal confessed that he was “horrified at the large number of planes contemplated.” He called for a “spirit of economy,” and with the apparent aim of killing the venture, Arnold recommended referring the proposal to the Joint Planning Committee. Marshall had still another tactic to bury Portal’s bare bones idea. If the means were insufficient to guarantee success, he wanted no part in it. The operation might be “the first contact between American and German troops.... A failure in this first venture would have an extremely adverse effect on the morale of the American people.”

With North Africa unsettled yet increasingly unlikely in the immediate future, the conferees turned to the Far East theater and the unity of command that still seemed unsettled, which meant taking up the draft directive Marshall had prepared for the unnamed designee. Like Churchill although not speaking for him, Admiral Dudley Pound spoke of his doubts at having a general oversee “naval matters.” Marshall, who had already countered the PM’s concerns about an all-purpose commander, said that he assumed that “a man of good judgment,” from whatever service, would be selected and that bolstered by unity of command, he would have “a distinct advantage over a man with brilliant judgment who must rely [only] on cooperation.” He read his frank directive and had copies distributed, remarking that the “Associated Powers” were opposing “an enemy who has unity of command in its highest sense.... The situation in this respect could not be made worse that it exists at present.” It was “tragic.”

On reading the draft Field Marshal Dill, who would become a close, valued friend of Marshall’s through the war, described it as “a good basis to work on, but the restrictions would make it very difficult for the Commander-in-Chief to exercise command.” Marshall conceded the restrictions, adding that “if the Supreme Commander ended up with no more authority than to tell Washington what he wanted, such a situation was better than nothing, and an improvement over the present situation.” Portal then commended the directive for its “realism” but questioned whether it would be possible “to give the commander a free hand, and to have all the political questions resolved, say, in Washington, or, as an alternative . . . , a representative in the area?”