Pearl Harbor Christmas (26 page)

Whatever its success, it would prove not enough.

“We all ate noodles for New Year’s Eve in the [command] cabin,” Ugaki wrote, referring to the traditional delicacy for celebration. “Such customary delicacies for the new year as rice cake, sake, pine, bamboo, and Japanese apricot were well prepared.... I think it is too much to have such delicacies when we are in a great war. I can’t help having sympathy for those men in the battlefield who have no time to celebrate the joyful new year.” Still, rank had its privileges.

In Tokyo at a navy New Year’s reception, Admiral Wenneker put aside friction with Japanese officialdom and, with “Party member Heck”—otherwise unidentified—handed the Vice Minister a donation of 15,000 yen raised by the embassy and the Nazi party for the naval wounded. From Berlin he received a cable authorizing German ships to cease using the “Ganges” code and to begin, with the new year, the “Himalaya” code and for the code words “Caucasus” and “Ypern” in the “Himalaya” codebook to be expunged by all vessels. Also, the special code “made up from the four strips of ‘Ysop’ is to be valid on a permanent basis”—which only meant until the next resetting.

ALL ORGANIZED FORCES in Luzon that could reach Bataan were slipping through under covering fire protecting the Calumpit Bridges over the fast-flowing Pampanga River northeast of the peninsula, where the river widened into a delta and poured into Manila Bay. Aircraft supporting the Japanese 14th Army did not attack the spans, perhaps because they wanted them intact for their own use. The North Luzon Force under Wainwright was covering the withdrawals into Bataan of the South Luzon Force under Major General Albert M. Jones. His few tanks struggled up the narrow roads, and once the lead and rear tanks were disabled, the rest were useless.

Peary
had dropped anchor off Ambon early in the afternoon, escorted through mine fields by a Dutch pilot who had come aboard. While
Peary
moored beside an oil dock for refueling, greeted by the Dutch, Patrol Wing Ten (the now-familiar PBY escorts), and Australian air crews and a contingent of ground troops, Bermingham granted evening liberty, warning that
Peary
would get underway early in the morning. At Ambon, seamen learned that
Heron,
an aircraft tender also evacuated from Cavite and ordered to assist the destroyer, “had passed unseen in the night.... On finding
Peary
had left [Ternate], she returned but had been caught by 15 bombers and torpedo planes. She had shot down one and damaged two others with her 3” AA guns, and suffered a hit on her mainmast which killed 12 men and wounded 18. . . . The pilot of the downed aircraft had refused to be rescued, and drowned.” (
Heron
would limp into Ambon early the next morning.)

Liberty on tiny Ambon offered little but dry land that did not pitch and sway. Water onshore was not fit for drinking, and there was no place to go but for spare “military club facilities.” Six hundred miles of ocean remained between Ambon and Australia. New Year’s Eve went unrecorded.

IT WAS STILL EARLY on the 31st in Quebec. On the morning of his return journey from Canada, New Year’s Eve, which like Christmas Eve referred to the date since dawn, Churchill gave a press conference at Government House in Ottawa. “Do you think Singapore can hold on?” he was asked. “I sure do,” he said with a buoyancy that belied his real estimate of the oncoming catastrophe.
⁹

“Is Singapore the key to the whole situation from the Far East to Australia?”

“The key to the whole situation,” Churchill advised, skirting the question, “is the resolute manner in which the British and American democracies are going to throw themselves into the conflict.”

Asked about the situation in Yugoslavia, under the Axis heel since April but unpacified, he replied, “They are fighting with the greatest vigor and on quite a large scale, and we don’t hear very much about what is going on there. Guerrilla warfare and the most frightful atrocities by the Germans and Italians, and every kind of torture.” Behind the lines, he explained, “The people manage to keep the flag of freedom flying.”

Responding to a question about peace feelers from the Axis, he gibed, “We have had none at all, but then I really think they must be hard pressed for materials of all kinds, and would not want to waste the paper and ink.”

“How long will it take to achieve victory?”

“If we manage it well,” the PM quipped, “it will take only half as long as if we manage it badly.”

The special train was well into the United States and midnight was approaching when a page went through the cars announcing that the “PM” wanted all members of the press corps to join him in the dining car. As they assembled, Churchill came in and called for drinks all around. When everyone had a whiskey or the equivalent, the Prime Minister raised his glass of Johnnie Walker, Turner Catledge of the
New York Times
recalled, and offered a toast to the Americans. “Then we Americans drank to the British, then everyone drank to Churchill. He responded by leading the singing of ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ When he had finished the first verse, he launched into a jazzed up version, grabbed a hand on either side, and led in a ring-around-the-rosy jig.”

“AGAIN AN ARDUOUS DAY!” General Halder wrote, using language like “no defensive success.” New assaults in the center were “suspended” and “heavy attacks” were “repulsed.” On the frozen Lake Ladoga front in the north, near isolated Leningrad, “disagreeable attacks” continued to keep the Germans at least ten miles away. Thousands in Leningrad still died daily of starvation. In the south the front was “generally quiet”—perhaps a break in the action as the old year waned. On New Year’s Eve at
Wolfsschanze,
Hitler marked the occasion with his new phonograph, a Christmas present from his staff, blurring out the gloomy news with his favorite music—recordings of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss. Stopping the music intermittently to telephone orders to hold fast, which he barked to commanders in the East, he could hear headquarters personnel waxing merrier and merrier on whatever alcohol was available. At the frozen front von Kluge (“at the end of his wits,” according to Halder) listened by phone to a three-hour tirade from Hitler on holding the line: What was needed was “a triumph of the will.” In the end he grudgingly permitted tactical withdrawals, “step by step,” to protect communications.

At midnight the Führer summoned his two secretaries, Christa Schroeder and Gerda Daranowski, for tea, and over his cup he fell asleep as his senior staff waited in a hallway to offer insincere greetings for the new year. Realizing the realities, Christa slipped back to her room to weep, then went off to the officers’ mess, where sea-chanties were being sung with drunken buoyancy.

“FRENCHMEN!” Marshal Pétain crowed on Vichy radio as the new year approached, and as if the world were flat, “War has now spread to all corners of the earth. The Continent is in flames, but France remains outside the conflict.” He hoped that in 1942 Germany and France would achieve a rapprochement that would preserve French honor, and he condemned the unceasing internal disorder, which he blamed on individual selfishness, class hatred, and the unfortunate existence of occupied and unoccupied zones. “The new order”—a term obviously borrowed from Hitler—“which is about to assume its place cannot be founded on anything but a severe internal order, one which demands from all the same discipline founded on the primacy of labor, the hierarchy of values, a sense of responsibility, respect for justice, and mutual confidence.”

Then came his plea for the future. “Frenchmen! If the government which has inherited the legacy of defeat cannot always obtain your support, its acts, nevertheless, will continue French history. Its text will be written into the textbooks of your children. Strive that those pages remain written in honor and that those who come after you will have no reason to blush, either for the nation or for its leaders.”

NEW YEAR’S EVE DINNER at the White House was much less liquid than Churchill’s presence would have made it. Some perennial Roosevelt friends were present as well as Marthe and Olav of Norway. It was far from festive at the house in Somerville, Massachusetts, where Marguerite LeHand, FDR’s secretary and confidant since 1923, when she was twenty-five, but now feeble from a stroke, lived with her sister. From 1925 through 1928 Roosevelt had spent 116 postpolio weeks in rehabilitation away from home, trying to regain some use of his limbs. Eleanor was with him for four of those difficult weeks, Missy LeHand for 110. She had a bedroom at Hyde Park and also lived with the Roosevelts at the executive mansion in Albany and at the White House. The President had visited her when she was first hospitalized, but each time she became agitated and close to hysteria. He stopped returning.