Pearl Harbor Christmas (27 page)

The next day, Ann Rochon wrote to FDR, Missy

started crying New Year’s Eve about 11:30 and we couldn’t stop her. And then she had a heart spell and kept calling “F.D., come. Please come. Oh F.D.” It really was the saddest thing I ever hope to see, we were all crying, she was very depressed all through the Holidays and that was the climax. She was expecting you to call Christmas Day and when we sat down to dinner her eyes filled with tears and she said “A toast to the President’s health” and there again in the middle of dinner—another toast to you. She loves your gift and kept saying sweet, lovely, beautiful, I love it. She watches for the postman every trip.... She worries about you all the time.

Very likely Missy did not know that FDR, despite his distancing, personally paid every expense of her care and had amended his will, authorizing half the income from his estate (the other half designated for Eleanor) “for the account of my friend Marguerite LeHand” to cover “medical care and treatment during her lifetime.” After she died in mid-1944 he would order a navy transport named for her, sending a message on its launching “in the hope that a craft which bears so honored a name will make a safe journey and will always find a peaceful harbor.”

NEW YEAR’S EVE NATIONWIDE was not more muted than in previous years. Although celebratory noisemakers largely made in Japan were used with some embarrassment by partygoers who read labels, few did, and shortages had not yet occurred in food and drink. The only predictable shortage would be in rubber tires, about which the announcement was made by the Office of Price Administration that only 356,974 would be available for civilian use, two-thirds of the tires for buses and trucks. Sales of new cars and trucks were frozen until January 15, when a rationing system would be in place, and civilian vehicle production halted for the duration of the war.

Such auguries of further belt tightening meant little as the clock ticked the old year away. Under heavy skies that threatened rain, and signs pointing the path to air raid shelters that read, IN CASE OF ALARM, LEAVE TIMES SQUARE. WALK. DO NOT RUN, the neon glare of Broadway belied wartime, as did the gaiety of party horns and bells. “Tremendous waves of sound washed against the midtown towers when the traditional lighted ball slid down the
New York Times
flagpole at midnight and the lighted legend ‘1942’ broke bright against the murky sky.” A half-million revelers filled Times Square, and another half-million who could not squeeze through crowded into streets nearby. Standing under loudspeakers in Father Duffy Square and surrounded by soldiers and policemen, Lucy Monroe, identified with the National Anthem as Kate Smith was with “God Bless America,” sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” broadcast across the country, where the time zones were still marking the outgoing year.

“If there was uneasiness over the possibility of Axis bombs falling into Times Square,” the
Times
reported, “you could not read it in the celebrants’ faces.” Despite Pearl Harbor and the reality of world war, it had not yet reached very far into the American psyche. Its reality occurred in such places as Salinas, California, where two young Japanese revelers, Teiji Fatamese and Iwau Taka, American in everything but ethnicity, were shot by other Americans who happened to be Filipinos.

On the coast itself, at San Francisco, hundreds of wounded soldiers and sailors evacuated from Oahu once the ocean passage appeared safe reached the Golden Gate. Surfaced Japanese subs had aimlessly shelled Kauai, Hawaii, and Maui, doing little damage but announcing their presence to inhibit sea activity. “Fix us up quick,” one G.I. reportedly called out from his stretcher. “We want to get back.”

January 1, 1942

New Year’s Day

N
EW YEAR’S DAY in Japan was X + 24. More aerial photos of the Pearl Harbor attacks were prominently published in newspapers from Sapporo to Kagoshima. “The people,” according to Admiral Ugaki, “seemed to be delighted with them as the best of presents.” Berlin radio broadcast a report from Tokyo that Emperor Hirohito spent the day “very quietly. In order to demonstrate his close union with his armed forces he had beef, pineapple and other tropical fruits for his dinner, the usual fare of Japanese soldiers fighting in Southeastern Asia.” In reality, the Emperor’s ordinary troops in Malaya, Hong Kong, the Indies, and the Philippines had little but rice.

At Kure the New Year’s ceremony on the
Nagato,
like that on most warships, involved a “salute to the emperor’s portrait, drinking the toast, and picture-taking.” Ugaki hoped that the “epochal expansion of the nation”—the “first stage of the war” that had to be followed by consolidation of the gains—would be over by the end of March. He wondered what would come next. “Shall we be dragged into war with the Soviet Union, owing to a rash and thoughtless act of the army? Or will the United States and the United Kingdom recover their strength sufficiently to fight a great decisive battle in the Pacific?” The idea of a decisive naval engagement in the sea approaches to Japan had dominated Japanese and American strategic thinking since the early 1920s. It reflected the age of heavy armaments aboard battleship fortresses, predating the floating airfields that would turn oceanic war in 1942 and after into carrier-based encounters, during which crews on the decks of warships would never see the enemy, their firepower almost entirely to ward off attacks from the air.

The admiral’s news from Malaya was that the southward advance toward Singapore was continuing and the air base at Kuantan, on the east coast, occupied. It was useless to the British anyway. The only planes they had were obsolete Brewster Buffaloes, now mostly debris. He also learned that submarine I-3 had sighted an enemy carrier with two cruisers one hundred miles from Oahu. It was the
Enterprise,
which had made its second return to port since the attack on Pearl Harbor. The
Enterprise
would be crucial to the great all-out battle Ugaki had predicted, for battleships would be of far less consequence than flat-tops. “Is it merely a patrol in the near sea?” he wondered. “Or will there be an air-raid to avenge our raid on Midway?” He felt that “the Task Force now making preparations at Kure [for the Indies] should be readied for immediate action as a precaution.” In early June the fleet would indeed see more action—climactic action—near Midway.

A press headline in the United States reported, “MacArthur Unites His Line for Crucial Stand,” suggesting that he would fight to hold Manila. The imminent “major battle” was suggested by “advices sent by General Douglas MacArthur” to Washington, but his troops had already evacuated Manila, and the capital was undefended. Asked by newsmen, Secretary Stimson said that he had “not ordered General MacArthur to leave Manila” and described his conduct of defensive operations as “masterful.” Then he returned to reality. “I am perfectly confident,” he said, “that we will defeat them in the end, but we cannot do it by looking through rose-colored spectacles.”

The last possible crossings over the Calumpit bridges into Bataan were made just before dawn. The 12,000 Americans included one nearly complete regiment, the 31st Infantry. The Filipinos numbered about 66,000, seven small American-officered divisions, most of them more a gendarmerie learning on the job. Overseeing the withdrawal and among the last to slip in were Major General Jonathan Wainwright and his deputies, Major General Edward King, his artillery chief, and Major General Albert Jones. The bridges, now under fire, were blown up at 6:15 A.M. by a platoon of Philippine Scout engineers. The Japanese were five hundred yards away. Their artillery and aircraft pounded the forward Bataan line, which would hold for only a week. When several bombs failed to explode, curious soldiers crept out to disassemble them. Some turned out to have concrete linings intended to break up as the dynamite exploded, to scatter as shrapnel. Others contained balls of lead foil, razor blades, and parts of old automobiles and sewing machines. Why such primitive devices were being used by the well-equipped Japanese defied explanation.

General Homma’s advance elements were already in Manila. Under the Open City declaration, Jorge B. Vargas, President Quezon’s former executive secretary and mayor of Manila only since the previous day, on Quezon’s parting instructions on December 24 had ordered the police disarmed and began pre-entry negotiations with the enemy. Vargas would become the chairman of a puppet Philippine Executive Commission. Because Homma wanted to occupy a reasonably intact city, he did not encourage his forces to rush in and rape, plunder, and torch. He knew what barbarism out-of-control forces had been employed in China. Many of his troops had been seasoned there.

From his San Fernando headquarters, retained for the reduction of Bataan, Homma ordered one regiment, the 28th Infantry, to administer the occupation. With them came the Kempei-Tai, the dread secret police. Taking over the once-exclusive Jai-Alai Club, the Kempei-Tai began preparing billboard proclamations declaring that they came “not as enemies but as liberators” and setting forth the regulations under which Filipinos were to live. Troops began rounding up Allied nationals for internment in the buildings of Santo Tomas University and setting up a government facade for Vargas in the building vacated by the American High Commissioner. The Japanese came, according to a Philippine history, with bales of already-printed, and required, occupation money, “backed by nothing and pegged to nothing” but put into circulation for the “value printed on its face.”

PEARY was steaming toward Port Darwin, with two of the RAAF Lockheed Hudsons that had attacked the destroyer earlier now flying escort from Ambon, flashing, “Goodo, Yank. God’s speed!”
Peary
flashed back in radio silence, “Happy landing. Splice the main brace for us tonight.” A cheer went up when the crew learned by radio that
Gold Star,
with its San Miguel beer and Scotch whiskey, had made it to Port Darwin. Squalls of warm tropical rain and poor visibility slowed the destroyer from twenty-two knots to five. It would anchor the next day beside five other American ships to operate out of Darwin, most of them fated for trouble by air and sea. On January 6 John Bermingham of the
Peary
would be promoted to Lieutenant Commander, a rank he held for only six more weeks, for on February 19, 1942, Australia experienced its own Pearl Harbor. One hundred and eighty-eight Japanese planes, from the very attack force that had raided Oahu and then returned home to Kure, blanketed Darwin. Dive bombers targeted
Peary
. The fourth of five bombs which hit the ship set off the forward ammunition magazines; another penetrated the after engine room. Two of
Peary’
s machine guns were still firing as the ship went down, stern first, taking with her eighty-one men, including five of its six officers. The survivor was W. J. Catlett, hospitalized in Darwin with malaria.

Late in 1944 the widow of
Peary’
s captain presided at the launching of the destroyer escort
John M. Bermingham
.

IN VICHY, in a New Year’s radio address to his rump of France, Maréchal Pétain pleaded with Germany to relax its armistice terms—an “attenuation of status.” Restoration of “dignity,” he argued, would lead to a “rapprochement” between the nations, and disillusioned “deserters” among public servants might return to their duties. Hitler was too preoccupied to show any interest. From his East Prussian headquarters he issued a proclamation to the German people that was unusual in that it used a proper noun he employed about as often as he referred to Christmas. “Let us ask the Lord,” he appealed, “to allow the new year 1942 to bring a decision for the salvation of our
Volk
.” In a supplementary Order of the Day to the military he repeated the entreaty: