Pearl Harbor Christmas (5 page)

The inauspicious beginning of the day may have made the President unusually sharp with his first official visitor. At 10:50 he expected the new Soviet ambassador, Maxim Litvinov, who was accompanied by former US envoy to Russia, William Bullitt. The stocky, sixtyish Litvinov, Lenin’s first ambassador to Britain after the revolution and dismissed by Stalin as foreign minister because of his Jewish origins during the cynical rapprochement with Hitler, had been rehabilitated. (The veteran Bolshevik V. M. Molotov proved more acceptable to Berlin.) When Averell Harriman, with Lord Beaverbrook, had been on a supply mission to Moscow, Harriman had been “shocked” by Litvinov’s appearance. (He had been summoned hastily to interpret for Stalin.) “His clothes and shoes were shoddy and, I remember, his waistcoat and trousers did not meet to cover the expanse of his shirt front.” On arrival in New York, Litvinov, now back in precarious favor, had purchased more suitable clothing for his new role. When he presented himself to Roosevelt in three-piece Madison Avenue garb, FDR, extending his hand, asked, “You get that suit in Moscow?”

Realizing the envoy’s background and hoping that he would be more than a toady for the Kremlin, Roosevelt reached out for some idealism, hoping that Litvinov would want to be remembered for something positive. To Litvinov’s discomfort, the President remarked, rather rudely, “Some day you will die and you will probably know beforehand that you are to die and you will remember your parents and all that they meant to you, and what then?” Litvinov confessed to Bullitt as they left that it was a poor beginning. He didn’t like the President’s hectoring yet had to put up with it. His job was to extract as much Lend-Lease war materiel for Russia as was possible and to minimize long-simmering anti-Soviet feeling in America. Thanks to Hitler and Hirohito, Litvinov’s country had become an ally.

Roosevelt had other ceremonial duties after Litvinov withdrew. The President received the Chinese ambassador, Hu Shih, a noted philosopher but largely a figurehead for the family of Chiang Kaishek and his wife; and Netherlands envoy Alexander Loudon. Then, after lunch with Harry Hopkins, who, however frail and chronically ailing, had long been FDR’s primary link to Britain and managed Lend-Lease; then Roosevelt telephoned the Canadian Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, to confirm that “a certain person” was “on his way.” Aware it was happening, King had invited Churchill to make a quick trip to Ottawa to address the Canadian parliament and planned to come to Washington to escort him. “There will have to be a Supreme Council,” Roosevelt told King, “and I am determined that it shall have its headquarters in Washington.”

With a large French-speaking population in Quebec and realizing its sensitivities, King would soon have fraying relations with the Vichy rump of defeated France to plague him. For Roosevelt, the issue was German influence on the unoccupied quarter of France. With its vast colonial empire almost intact, collaborationist Vichy was under pressure to submit to whatever the Nazi regime wanted, under threat of cutting off food supplies or even of a full takeover. America’s major French prize, the big liner
Normandie,
docked in Manhattan after 139 Atlantic crossings since 1935, had been requisitioned by the United States after the surrender of France in 1940. It was almost like seizing a piece of French territory.

Worried about German occupation, the State Department ordered American ambassador Admiral William D. Leahy, an old FDR friend from the Great War years and since, to send eight staffers and all confidential files in Vichy to the embassy in Switzerland. Press and radio censorship, Leahy cabled Roosevelt on the 22nd, left “Japanese treachery” at Pearl Harbor “completely unknown here” and had no influence on popular French feeling. The seizure of the
Normandie
and its being refitted as a troopship, now rechristened the
Lafayette,
³
“had produced no violent reaction whatever,” Leahy reported from talks with the Vichy resident generals in Tunisia and Morocco. The liner’s reuse had long been expected.

Leahy reported, more than Vichy knew, “that Germany is suffering a major defeat in Russia and is rapidly approaching a similar but more complete military reverse in [colonial] Cyrenaica”—Libya. The Germans would have to rescue the situation there for the inept Italians, which might also mean
Wehrmacht
intervention in French North Africa. The subject was certain to turn up in Anglo-American discussions.

HALF A DAY AHEAD IN TIME, the British in Malaya had blown all the bridges across the broad, muddy Perak, abandoning several thousand dismayed Indian troops on the north bank. “The British Army,” Colonel Masanobu Tsuji wrote wryly, “excels in retreat.” The Japanese began constructing pontoon bridges and brought up collapsible motor launches. While his new ally was prospering in semitropical Southeast Asia, to Hitler’s frustration and outrage, reverses were afflicting the Germans deep into frigid Russia. Backtracking in snow and ice from untenable forward positions was not permitted by his edict but was nevertheless a fact of survival. His chief of staff, General Franz Halder, noted in his diary, “an exceedingly difficult situation has developed here, and it is beyond anyone’s power to say how it will be restored. And yet it is impossible to prevail upon the Führer to order any long-range withdrawal.”

PRESIDENTIAL PRESS SECRETARY Steve Early announced Churchill’s arrival at 6:45 P.M. It was past seven in Washington when cameramen camped in the White House were able to pop flashbulbs and photograph Churchill and Roosevelt on the south portico. The President had a cane in his right hand, with his left arm gripping the arm of his naval aide, Captain John R. Beardall. Churchill wore a navy cap and heavy double-breasted sea overcoat. Before reporters could rush to telephones, Early handed them a brief statement for the morning papers: “The British Prime Minister has arrived in the United States to discuss with the President all questions related to the concerted war effort. Mr. Churchill is accompanied by Lord Beaverbrook and a technical staff. Mr. Churchill is a guest of the President.” Newspapermen could add background color and speculation. Although his sea attire was a clue, how the PM got to Washington was unstated.

Franklin D. Roosevelt greets Prime Minister Winston Churchill on his arrival to the United States, December 22, 1941.
Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library

The news emerged quickly. By 10:30 P.M. onecent Jefferson-head postcards imprinted by the Fidelity Stamp Company in Washington with

WINSTON CHURCHILL
British Prime Minister
ARRIVES
at the
WHITE HOUSE
December 22, 1941

were being sold and postmarked at the Benjamin Franklin postal station.

Before the “important visitor” had appeared, Steve Early reminded reporters of the Censorship Act. A later White House update added, “There is, of course, one primary objective in the conversations to be held in the next few days between the President and the British Prime Minister and the respective staffs of the two countries. That purpose is the defeat of Hitlerism throughout the world.” The statement noted that other allied nations would be consulted, and further announcements would be forthcoming, but the focus of Churchill’s planning scenarios radioed ahead had already been implicitly accepted. Despite the overwhelming American antipathy toward what seemed an unstoppable Japan, the term
Hitlerism
made it clear that victory over Germany had to come first.

Even before Churchill sat down to a late dinner at the White House, a report in
The Times
of London had appeared, obviously emanating from Downing Street, that the PM’s mission had been “his own idea” and that, as coordination among partners was crucial, he was “not the only British statesman who is at present out of the country.” It was a strong hint rising through the secrecy that Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was already long absent from London and very likely on a circuitous journey to meet with Stalin in Moscow. Eden had left for Scotland the day after Pearl Harbor to join a task force sailing to Murmansk over the hazardous subarctic supply route arcing over Norway and Finland. The icy waters were infested with U-boats. Eden had cautioned Churchill, who had proposed going to Washington, “that I could not see how we could both be away at once. He said we could. The emphasis of the war had shifted; what now mattered was the intentions of our two great allies. We must each go to one of them.”

The PM was still aboard the
Duke of York
approaching the East Coast when, on December 21, he received a radio encrypt from Eden in Moscow that, as the price of cooperation, Stalin, optimistic now that Germany could be turned back, had demanded secret Allied acceptance of prewar Soviet encroachments in Europe. The Red Army had seized the Baltic states in 1940, taken territory from Finland, and former Czarist territory from Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. Although all of it was now occupied by the
Wehrmacht,
the Soviets expected to outlast Hitler. “Stalin, I believe,” Eden added, “sincerely wants military agreements, but he will not sign until we recognize his frontiers, and we must expect badgering on this issue.” Churchill radioed his Deputy Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, that the demands violated the Atlantic Charter, “to which Stalin has subscribed,” and in any case no arrangement could be made “without prior agreement with the United States.”

Stalin’s contempt for pieces of diplomatic paper and confidence about the Red Army’s future control of the ground in question would keep the absorbed territories in the grip of Stalin’s successors until the implosion of the Soviet Union decades later. Churchill advised Attlee not to be “downhearted” if Eden should leave Moscow “without any flourish of trumpets.” And to Eden he conceded in a radiogram, “Naturally you will not be rough with Stalin,” but there could be no “secret and special pacts” without the United States. Even to present Stalin’s demands to Roosevelt (who, as would his successors, never recognize the theft of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) would be “to court a blank refusal” and “lasting trouble on both sides.”

Churchill had already radioed Stalin “sincere wishes for your birthday”—he would be sixty-two on December 21. In return, Stalin offered the PM and the British army “my sincere congratulations in connection with your recent victories in Libya.” At a birthday banquet in the Kremlin Eden reported as Churchill was reaching United States waters, “We drank [to] your health and some others. Stalin spoke very warmly of you.” On returning, Eden would tell Brooke that state dinners in Moscow began at ten and lasted until five. “[General] Timoshenko arrived drunk and by continuous drinking restored himself to sobriety by 5 A.M. On the other hand, [Marshal] Voroshilov after at least arriving sober, had to be carried out before the evening was over.” Before the Marshal slumped down, Stalin—who prudently watered his vodka—asked Eden, “Do your Generals also hold their drink so badly?”

Diplomatically, Eden answered, like Stalin through an interpreter standing by, “They may have a better capacity for drink, but they have not the same ability for winning battles!”