Pearl Harbor Christmas (9 page)

“How long, sir, would it take if we managed it badly?”

“That has not been revealed to me at this moment. We don’t have to manage it badly.”

However clever the quips, the war was being managed badly, especially by Churchill himself, but the evidence would emerge slowly if at all before peace finally came. In Malaya, as earlier in the Mediterranean (especially in Greece), he was squandering resources to stave off inevitable humiliation.

Other questions ranged from the Eastern front (he saw the Germans as “joggling backwards” and praised Russian “resiliency”) to plans afoot in Washington (“we have to concentrate on the grim emergencies”) and to anticipations of new German initiatives. He foresaw a possible enemy “attack in the Mediterranean” and referred to “talk about their getting ready for an invasion of England next year.” He thought something might come of it, but he could not predict where. “I will be glad to be informed. Gentlemen, if you have got any information, it will be thankfully received.” What he received was laughter, and although a reporter thought that it seemed a closing remark and called out the ritual, “Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister,” several other questions delayed the end. The last was, “What about a Christmas message for the American people?”

“I am told I have to do that on Christmas Eve,” Churchill said, “but I won’t give it away beforehand.”

“The smiling President,”
Newsweek
would report, “looked like an old trouper who, on turning impresario, had produced a smash hit. And some thought they detected in his face admiration for a man who had at least equaled him in the part in which he himself was a star.”

As soon as pressmen rushed to typewriters, telephones, and microphones, Churchill slipped out to call Clementine in England. “He might have been speaking from the next room,” she wrote to their daughter Mary the next day. “But it was not very satisfactory as it was a public line and we were both warned by the Censors breaking in that we were being listened to!” News of the press conference was furnished to Adolf Hitler by his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Hitler at dinner with his staff some days later described it “truly Jewish” theater produced by “imposters” who had deceived their nations. Goebbels was particularly pleased that war in the Pacific had created “a complete shift in the world picture.... The United States will scarcely now be in a position to transport worthwhile [war] materiel to England let alone the Soviet Union.”

Hitler had not been so confident. As early as December 12, meeting with Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, he asked, “Is there any possibility that the U.S.A. and Britain will abandon East Asia for a time in order to crush Germany and Italy first?” Reassuringly, Raeder replied, “It is improbable that the enemy will give up East Asia even temporarily. By doing so Britain would endanger India very seriously, and the U.S. cannot withdraw her fleet from the Pacific as long as the Japanese fleet has the upper hand.” Just in case, he added, he was ordering additional submarines to proceed “as quickly as possible” to the American east coast, where the lights had not yet dimmed. There was a different lighting problem in the east—in New York City, where sixteen thousand traffic signals placed under central air-raid control disrupted traffic in Manhattan and Brooklyn during an alert. Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine forbade air-raid wardens to indulge in further tampering. The lights remained on.

ALTHOUGH THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS was uninvolved in ongoing war planning, Archibald MacLeish, its director, a poet and occasional speechwriter for the President, had worried about the safety of the founding documents of the nation in his charge. After Pearl Harbor he inquired to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau “whether space might be found at [the Bullion Depository in] Fort Knox for these materials, in the unlikely event that it becomes necessary to remove them from Washington.” Morgenthau checked and allocated sixty cubic feet. Choices were made and procedures arranged and, sixteen days after war had broken out, MacLeish, with David C. Mearns, chief of the Manuscript Division, watched the preparations begin. “The documents were . . . wrapped,” Mearns recalled, “in a container stiffened at top and bottom with all-rag, neutral millboard and secured by Scotch tape, and inserted in a specially-designed bronze container, which had been scrupulously cleaned of . . . possible harmful elements, and heated for six hours to a temperature of about 90ºF to drive off any moisture. Empty space was then filled with sheets of all-rag, neutral millboard and the top of the container was screwed tight over a cork gasket and locked with padlocks on each side. It was late in the evening when work was suspended.” In the sub-basement carpenter shop the container was placed in rock wool in a metal-bound box to await shipment after Christmas.

MUCH NEWS, like that episode, was withheld so that morale would not be affected by what looked like panic but was only prudence. An official censor had been appointed to monitor the release of news related to the war. He was Byron Price, fifty, the highly regarded executive news editor of the Associated Press, who was to control the media outside the government’s own press bureaus and have no authority to “originate” news. Yet the army and navy could, and did. The navy sank subs that never existed, and MacArthur invented counterattacks that never happened.

Roosevelt and Churchill took a pass that evening, sharing drinks and dinner with Hopkins and a few household guests while the British and American staffs went to a dinner party for thirty-seven at the Carlton Hotel, hosted by Army Secretary Stimson and Navy Secretary Knox. Churchill delayed coming down, possibly because of telephone calls but perhaps also to forgo the President’s mixed drinks in favor of brandy supplied by Alonzo Fields. With guests about at dinner, business was shelved for reminiscence, Roosevelt recalling his support of the Boers while he was at Harvard, while Churchill, in South Africa promoting the Empire, was taken prisoner and, on escaping, earning acclaim at home. After Roosevelt added that schooling did not bring back many pleasant memories, Churchill put down his cigar and agreed. “When I hear a man say that his childhood was the happiest time of his life, I think, my friend, you have had a pretty poor life.”

At the Carlton Hotel Stimson opened with a toast to George VI, which was responded to by Admiral Sir Dudley Pound’s toast to the President. At the close, Stimson, an artillery colonel in the earlier war, noted in his diary, “I recalled my recollections of 1917 when America had just declared war and a British mission for a similar purpose had crossed the ocean and came to us.” Now, he said, “twenty-four years afterwards the same situation was presenting itself, the same hope and ideal lay before us, and this time we must not fail, but must win the war and the peace.”

After dinner they gathered in an adjoining room, Stimson recalled, “and chatted over our problems. There was a very hearty spirit of cooperation and good will evidenced on both sides and not a single note, so far as I could see, intervened to mar the earnest spirit of harmony and endeavor which pervaded everybody.” Churchill cabled to his Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee, the Labour Party leader, “We live here as a big family in the greatest intimacy and informality, and I have formed the very highest regard for the President. His breadth of view, resolution and his loyalty to the common cause are beyond all praise.”

Roosevelt may have retired early after his long dinner with the PM and Hopkins, but it is likely that Hopkins and Churchill, with rooms across the hallway from each other, talked shop into the morning, stimulated not only by events but by the spirits, however different, both could not do without. Hopkins, often disabled by internal troubles requiring drastic surgery, persisted heroically through them and the war as the President’s legs, but as he lay dying soon after, would write from his hospital bed to Robert Sherwood, who assisted in writing Roosevelt’s speeches, that his doctors “are struggling over a very bad case of cirrhosis of the liver—not due, I regret to say, from taking too much alcohol. . . . I dislike hating the effect of a long life of congenial and useful drinking and neither deserve the reputation nor enjoy its pleasures.”

Across the continent in Seattle, someone after dark sounded a fire alarm and a wannabe Paul Revere on horseback galloped about the city shouting, “Blackout! Air raid! The Jap bombers are coming!” Ostensibly to enforce the false alarm, mobs plunged about the downtown area smashing neon signs and lighted shop windows, looting the displays. Scenes like it occurred elsewhere, but mostly in the west. There, panic was easiest to stir, military aircraft punctuated the skies, and Christmas merchandise loomed invitingly behind glass. None of the “strange planes” were strange.

December 24, 1941

Christmas Eve

O
N THE
Nagato
at ten—it was X + 16, X being the opening day of the war—the chief of the naval general staff, Admiral Osami Nagano, boarded to offer a battle report about Pearl Harbor, based on interviews with the returned crews, now anchored at Kure. Although still morning, the presentation was followed, Admiral Ugaki wrote, “by a drinking party.” Then the brass left for the
Agaki,
flagship of the Pearl Harbor strike force, where Admiral Yamamoto spoke to commanders and officers of
Kido Butai
. “Pictures were taken and toasts followed.”

In Surabaja, once the crews of the
Pope
and
Ford
were paid at one-and-a-half Dutch guilders to the dollar, they were granted Christmas Eve liberty. Many put on their whites and took tenders ashore. According to the
Ford
’s diary, Mac McKean, Dan Nowlin, R. M. Soyars and Henry Mate

caught a Dutch Navy bus into town and had no trouble in finding a nice combination restaurant and bar. Someone there knew a little English and was helpful in the choice of food. Heinekens beer was recognized immediately and ordered. Then McKean spotted a glass enclosed counter with lots of rich, creamy cakes and cookies of various sizes and shapes. They ate like food was going out of style and everyone enjoyed their enthusiasm. There was no order in their eating and drinking. Beer mixed with the rich cakes and the entré[e], then more beer before and after dessert, and more beer. There were girls, too—who were easy to talk to, even if each did not understand the other, at first. After a couple of hours of vocabulary swapping and sign language, none had any difficulty understanding the other.

Jon Cross, William Mack, and C. A. Darrah of
Ford
were also in the first boat ashore. “They caught a cab to the Dutch Naval Officer’s Club, a prestigious large clubhouse on the outskirts of town. It was one fancy place, with silver place settings, flowers, immaculate adornments,
etc.
They stayed at the bar and sampled several curry appetizers, but noticing that most of the tables were reserved, they left for the Hotel Oranje. There they had a marvelous Xmas dinner,
⁴
followed by several fancy drinks. Truely a relaxing time after weeks at sea, with its deprivation, privation, and just gut-tightening watch standing and alerts.”

The account was understated. All the ships that had made it to Java had left behind dead and wounded at Cavite, and many of the bomb-damaged ships and their crews would not survive beyond Darwin, Australia. Balikpapan would fall to the Japanese on January 24, barely a month later, and exotic Surabaja would fall on March 4, with much of its trapped Dutch and mixed-race population destined at best for bleak prison camps and near-starvation.