Pearl Harbor Christmas (23 page)

Ottawa was snow-covered as Mackenzie King’s special train pulled into the city just after ten in the morning. Enthusiastic crowds, undaunted by the weather or by the fur-hatted Royal Canadian Mounted Police, swarmed through the station. Among the dignitaries up front was the American ambassador. “There was Mr. Churchill,” J. Pierrepont Moffat wrote, “standing on the platform in characteristic pose, puffing a newly lit cigar and holding up his right hand making the sign of V. As the temperature was about zero, introductions on the platform were made on the double quick and he hastened away. . . .”

“We drove to Government House [Rideau Hall] through streets banked with snow,” Dr. Wilson noted in his diary. “After a hot bath, Winston seemed his usual self.” A lunch with the Canadian War Cabinet at the Château Laurier followed, during which Churchill excused himself to hone his speech for the next day and to worry further to Dr. Wilson about the cardiac episode in the White House. “Whenever we are alone,” the exasperated Wilson noted in his diary, “he keeps asking me to take his pulse. I get out of it somehow, but once, when I found him lifting something heavy, I did expostulate.”

“Now, Charles,” Churchill said, “you are making me heart-minded. I shall soon think of nothing else. I couldn’t do my work if I kept thinking of my heart.”

The next time Wilson was asked to check the PM’s pulse, he refused. “You’re all right,” he said. “Forget your damned heart.”

WITH WASHINGTON STILL ON HIS MIND and Canadian issues to handle gingerly, Churchill telephoned Harry Hopkins at the White House at 6:45 P.M., who minuted to the President,

The Prime Minister just phoned me, . . . reading me a cable from the Foreign Office to him, in which they indicate the most strenuous objection to the ousting of the Free French from Miquelon.

They claim that de Gaulle will not issue the orders to throw his commander [Admiral Muselier] out.

The burden of the message was that the whole business would kick up an unbelievable row, for which we could give no good public explanation. In spite of the fact that de Gaulle acted in bad faith, the British don’t see how he can be forced out and think that the use of force would be very bad.

Roosevelt’s jaundiced view of the general, who had grandly assumed the mantle of France-in-exile and depended entirely on British and American material support but privately referred to his enablers as “foreigners,” would never soften, although events to come would require a frosty public correctness on both sides.

THE BRITISH PRESS was playing up Churchill abroad as a one-man show. Clementine wrote to him, “I have been thinking constantly of you & trying to picture & realize the drama in which you are playing the principal—or rather it seems—the only part—I pray that when you leave, that the fervour you have aroused may not die down but will consolidate into practical & far-reaching action.” She found the news from Malaya and Sumatra “disquieting” yet knew only what the newspapers could print. “No news of Mary since Christmas Eve when she . . . blew in for a hot bath & a bite of dinner & Sarah is completely swallowed in her W.A.A.F.” Daughter Mary was a corporal with an anti-aircraft battery stationed in Hyde Park, and Sarah was an Aircraft Woman Second Class being trained in interpretation of aerial photographs.

IN WASHINGTON Japanese diplomats, watched by Capital police, were still residing in their embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. As the likelihood of rapid exchange with American equivalents in Tokyo dimmed, the government had to lodge them somewhere remote from the capital but not in so dismal a location as to prompt retaliation by Japan. After negotiations with an appropriate hostelry, the diplomats with their families were ordered to be ready to depart on the twenty-ninth. A police motorcycle escort headed a column of four buses, three limousines, and five trucks for baggage, routed to Union Station. There the mission’s personnel were put aboard a special train to the Homestead Hotel, a resort in Hot Springs, Virginia, where they were to remain under guard. A gracious hotel in the Allegheny Mountains, complete to golf links, it had little winter business during the month of Pearl Harbor, but the management asked that the State Department guarantee to pay for any damage the Japanese might do and to move them out by April 1, the beginning of the spring season—should there be one. State promised nothing, but however unlikely it had seemed, the Homestead’s winter season was suddenly profitable.

The hotel library lacked books which a low-level diplomat, on arrival, wanted. He requested that State supply Albert Schweitzer’s
The Quest for the Historical Jesus
—an appropriate title for the Christmas season—Carl Sandburg’s
Abraham Lincoln: The War Years,
and the complete works of Shakespeare. He expected a long war and the need to improve his English. A senior diplomat requested vital supplies inadvertently left behind—five cases of Old Paar Scotch and five cases of Johnnie Walker Black Label.

German, Hungarian, and Italian diplomats received equal treatment. They were settled at the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. The management soon complained that their dogs were ruining the carpets and that their children were roller-skating in the hallways and playing in the elevators. The Italians would dislike being confined with the Germans, and the Germans considered the Italians a “barbaric” people. The State Department would have its own little war to adjudicate.

At the Navy Department a less-than-quiet internal war was also underway. Rear Admiral Kimmel (his four-star rank at Pearl Harbor had been temporary) would soon be home from Hawaii, either to be reassigned or await a worse fate. Admiral Harold R. Stark, the Chief of Naval Operations, was being criticized for prewar timidity but expected to keep his job. He had been a friend of the President since FDR had been assistant secretary of the navy in the earlier world war. “Don’t worry about our finding duty for you,” Stark reassured Kimmel on the 29th. “I value your services just as much as I ever did and more[,] and I say this straight from the heart as well as the head.” Yet Stark’s tenure as CNO was in jeopardy, and he would soon be replaced by crusty Admiral Ernest J. King, then Atlantic Fleet commander. Stark would be posted to London, and Kimmel nowhere.
⁷

AT 2:30 P.M. in the office in the Capitol of Vice President Henry A. Wallace, a dozen American officials involved in war production matters met with Lord Beaverbrook, the Minister of Supply. His former brief had limited him to aircraft production. Max Beaverbrook was not overwhelmed by the names or the numbers. Small, balding, and potbellied, he was outsized in other ways. Wallace recalled his “dynamism. . . . He was a power house with regard to what could be done and what had to be done.... Some people did not like the Beaver but he stands out in my mind more than anyone else at this particular moment.” More than anyone else in Britain, he had cajoled labor and industrialists into meeting production goals they thought were outrageous fantasy, and he found the raw materials and got them delivered in the face of catastrophic sinkings by German subs and massive bombings of factories by the
Luftwaffe
. Taking minutes was Donald Nelson, then Chairman of the War Production Board and former executive vice president of Sears, Roebuck:

Lord Beaverbrook emphasized the fact that we must set our production sights much higher than we have for the year 1942, in order that we might cope with a resourceful and determined enemy. He pointed out that we had yet no experience in the losses of materiel incidental to a war of the kind we are now fighting. He also felt we had very little conception of the productive facilities of the Axis powers. He said that . . . Stalin told him that Germany had thrown 30,000 tanks into the fight with Russia, and that starting from scratch as we were we had to build up a reserve in addition to supplying our troops with the necessary tanks to fight. He made the statement that if an invasion . . . were attempted we had no conception of the number of tanks we would have to cope with [on the Continent of Europe]. He emphasized over and over again the fact that we should set our sights higher in planning for production of the necessary war material. For instance, he thinks we should plan for the production of 45,000 tanks in 1942 against Mr. Knudsen’s estimate of 30,000.

I want to take up the question of what is preventing us from producing 25,000 medium and 15,000 light tanks per month. [He meant
year
.] I want to check merchant shipping, the conversion factor from dead weight, gross weight and cargo carrying capacity. I want to check the bottlenecks on the 3 inch versus the 57 millimeter gun, the number of man-hours, machinery involved,
etc.

Beaverbrook’s tank example was applied to everything war-expendable in the national armory, from airplanes to aircraft carriers. A resource-poor nation of forty million that had to import almost all its raw materials at great hazard and was desperately short in manpower, Britain was out-producing the United States in many categories—like aircraft. America needed far more substantial production goals. A pragmatist rather than a dreamer, “the Beaver” would influence the explosive increases in American industrial output that turned FDR’s “arsenal of democracy” image from metaphor to reality. By the end of the war the United States would produce more than 300,000 planes, and Henry J. Kaiser’s shipyards alone would launch nearly a thousand Liberty ships, almost a freighter a day.

Confiding to his diary later, on New Year’s Day, Secretary Stimson, who was not at the meeting with Beaverbrook, blamed late and laggard war production and delivery not on the industrialists but on divided priorities. As Secretary of War, the chief civilian spokesman for the military, he had to fight among rival appointees to have his voice heard by the President. Also at the President’s ear were Hopkins and Harriman, agency chiefs with overlapping powers, and lobbyists for Britain and Russia. He had to weigh “loyalty to my own Army” against “loyalty to those other nations’ armies” in the matter of where war output went. It was “one of the most constant, heavy strains that I have upon me.”

At the same time as Beaverbrook was astonishing his listeners by challenging their mobilization targets, the British and American chiefs of staff were meeting at 2:30 in the Federal Reserve Building, planning production strategy that would soon require all of Beaverbrook’s goals to be met, and more. Reporting the Beaver’s concerns, Donald Nelson emphasized how “resourceful and determined” the enemy was—that we had “very little conception of the productive facilities of the Axis powers.” The United States, he emphasized, had to set its sights much higher—“for the production of 45,000 tanks in 1942 against Mr. Knudsen’s estimate of 30,000.” Nelson also wondered why there were such production “bottlenecks” on other weapons, “the number of man-hours, machinery involved, etc.” The answers were easy, but not the solutions. Industry insisted on guaranteed profits; unions insisted on requiring unwilling employees to become unionized. Dictatorial states did not have to reckon with either.