Pearl Harbor Christmas Read online

  Table of Contents

  ALSO BY STANLEY WEINTRAUB

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prelude

  En Route

  December 22, 1941

  December 23, 1941

  December 24, 1941 - Christmas Eve

  December 25, 1941 - Christmas Day

  December 26, 1941

  December 27, 1941

  December 28, 1941

  December 29, 1941

  December 30, 1941

  December 31, 1941 - New Year’s Eve

  January 1, 1942 - New Year’s Day

  Sources

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Copyright Page

  ALSO BY STANLEY WEINTRAUB

  A Stillness Heard Round the World:

  The End of the Great War, November 1918

  Victoria: An Intimate Biography

  Long Day’s Journey into War: December 7, 1941

  Disraeli: A Biography

  The Last Great Victory: The End of World War II, July-August 1945

  Uncrowned King: The Life of Prince Albert

  MacArthur’s War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero

  Edward the Caresser: The Playboy Prince Who Became Edward VII

  Silent Night: The Remarkable Christmas Truce of 1914

  Charlotte and Lionel: A Rothschild Love Story

  General Washington’s Christmas Farewell:

  A Mount Vernon Homecoming, 1783

  Iron Tears: America’s Battle for Freedom,

  Britain’s Quagmire, 1775-1783

  Eleven Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944

  15 Stars: Eisenhower, MacArthur, Marshall

  General Sherman’s Christmas: Savannah, 1864

  FOR RODELLE

  Prelude

  IN TOKYO ON THE MORNING of December 21, 1941, the Asahi Shimbun published on its front page the first photo received of the attack on Pearl Harbor. It had been flown in by a dive bomber from the strike force returning to the Home Islands. Approaching Hawaii on its last leg from Washington was an investigating commission appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and chaired by Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts. It would be the first of many hearings on the worst military catastrophe in American history. As its plane approached Oahu, smoke, although no longer in billowing black clouds, rose from the wreckages in the harbor area. At aircraft height the upturned hulls of the capsized Oklahoma and Utah resembled beached whales.

  Justice Roberts would convene his inquiry the next day, as across the nation the President expected Prime Minister Winston Churchill for dinner at the White House. Pearl Harbor had made them open wartime allies. One small logistic problem intervened, however. Late that morning the Prime Minister was still at sea. The battleship Duke of York was plowing through winter winds and heavy swells as it approached Chesapeake Bay. By radio, assuming a calmer Atlantic, Churchill had accepted Roosevelt’s invitation. On docking in the upper Chesapeake, it would be only a 120-mile drive to Washington. Yet, increasingly anxious at the warship’s slow progress, the PM was, as his personal physician, Sir Charles Wilson,1 recalled, “like a child in his impatience to meet the President. He spoke as if every minute counted. It was absurd to waste time. He must fly.”

  Front page of the December 21, 1941, morning edition of Asahi Shimbun with the first picture of the Pearl Harbor attack, showing bombed Hickam Field by Japanese planes. Courtesy Asahi Shimbun

  U.S. battleships under air attack at Pearl Harbor, as photographed by a Japanese pilot. U.S. Navy

  Radioing his ambassador, the Earl of Halifax, the PM requested help. “Impossible to reach Mouth Potomac before 6:30 P.M. which would be too late.... I should like to come by airplane to [a] Washington airfield reaching you in time for dinner.” Halifax telephoned the White House, which ordered a squat twin-engine Lockheed Lodestar to Hampton Roads, where the battleship would dock. Churchill, his close adviser Lord Beaverbrook (proprietor of the Evening Standard and Minister of Supply), and several aides boarded the aircraft for the forty-five minute flight up the Potomac. The others awaited a special train to Washington sent by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, which would bring them to the capital by midnight.

  Early winter darkness had fallen. Emerging from years of blackouts—ships also traveled without running lights to evade German submarines—the party aboard the transport plane was amazed to see the spectacle below. Few Americans anywhere had yet to follow recent blackout instructions. It was Christmas.

  The Anacostia Flats Naval Air Station was across the Potomac from the new National Airport. Awaiting at the tarmac was a long, black limousine that the Treasury Department had confiscated from Al Capone. The Chicago gangster was now in prison. Roosevelt had been sitting in the car, waiting. “Please on no account come out to meet me,” Churchill had radioed. As the aircraft taxied to a stop and Churchill emerged, gripping a walking stick to which what the English called an electric torch was attached, for use in navigating blackouts, the President was lifted out and was standing, leaning against the limo, propped by his locked leg braces and a cane. “I grasped his strong hand with comfort and pleasure,” Churchill recalled.

  WHEN RADIO REPORTS that Hawaii had been attacked reached England, Churchill was at his official residence, Chequers, at dinner with Lend-Lease administrator W. Averell Harriman and Ambassador John G. Winant. “I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan,” the PM wrote in his memoirs, “but at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all!” Curiously, Adolf Hitler was equally delighted about his prospects once Pearl Harbor had given him Japan as a partner. “We can’t lose the war at all,” he thought. “We now have an ally which has never been conquered in 3,000 years.”

  After the news of Pearl Harbor, Churchill claimed to have “slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.” Actually, he stayed up until three talking with Winant about what to do next, and he determined to go to Washington. Seven months earlier, on May 3, feeling increasingly isolated and with German submarines strangling British lifelines worldwide, he had desperately cabled Roosevelt pleading for immediate American entry into the war—a plea he had made even earlier, in June 1940, as France surrendered to Hitler. In neither case could the President intervene overtly. Americans were unready, and Congress would have resisted. Roosevelt had to inch his way toward rescue, as he did symbolically when Britain’s new envoy arrived in January 1941.

  GREETING CHURCHILL PERSONALLY remained an unusual honor for a head of government, especially when proffered by a long-incapacitated president, who had done so only once before—and then, too, to emphasize his solidarity with Britain. Ambassador Halifax, once of the influential appeasement fraternity in England, had crossed the Atlantic on the battleship George V and was greeted in Chesapeake Bay, six miles from Annapolis, by the presidential yacht Potomac, with Roosevelt aboard. Viscount Halifax then traveled into Washington with FDR. It was a precedent-shattering gesture, and Halifax was ever afterward “Edward” to Roosevelt.

  What the public did not know was that the pair, however effective their relationship would be, was a brotherhood of the disabled. Roosevelt had lost the use of his legs to polio in 1921, and the tall, lean Edward Wood, then heir to his father’s title, had been born with a withered left arm without a hand.

  “Now that we are as you say ‘in the same boat’ wouldn’t it be wise for us,” Churchill had cabled on December 9, “to have another conference?” They had met at sea, on Placentia Bay off Newfoundland in early August, initiating what would become after Pearl Harbor a formal military alliance. “We could review,” Churchill now suggested, “the whole war plan in the light of reality and new facts, as well as production and distribution. I feel that all these matters . . . can best be settled on the highest executive level.” He could leave “in a day or two” by warship and bring with him “necessary staffs.” In a draft of his war memoirs the PM wrote, then expunged, “I thought of staying in the British Embassy, as I did not know how stiff our discussions might be.”

  Startled, Roosevelt would have opted for more time to see how war mobilization was going and the situation in the Pacific was “more clarified.” He planned to respond that way in a draft he never sent. In a second response, on December 10, also unsent, he wrote that a meeting would be “more useful a few weeks hence than immediately. However I will wholeheartedly and gladly accept your opinion on timing.” The President’s advisers realized that the British would come with carefully drafted proposals and a substantial wish list of war materiel before the White House could scramble to create its own strategies and review its production goals. Also there was concern over the hazards to the top levels of British government. The North Atlantic was a shooting gallery for German subs, and the Luftwaffe flew reconnaissance from French and Norwegian bases.

  The third presidential reply, actually sent later that day, began, “Delighted to have you here at White House.... My one reservation is great person[al] risk to you—believe this should be given most careful consideration for the Empire needs you at the helm and we need you there too.” Having postponed sailing while keeping a convoy at the ready, Churchill notified those who were to travel with him and packed his bags.

  His formal invitation to stay at the White House came via Lord Halifax while Churchill was at sea. Although he had invited himself, a strong hint to do so had come from the President in a telegram announcing Congress’s formal de
claration of war on Japan on December 8. “Today,” Roosevelt had written in the naval metaphors both leaders shared, “all of us are in the same boat with you and the people of the Empire and it is a ship which will not and cannot be sunk.” The “same boat” image was echoed in Churchill’s cable to Washington.

  Ambassador Winant in London telegraphed Harry Hopkins at the White House via Secretary of State Cordell Hull (the proper protocol): “Our friend asked me if the house was large enough to permit him to have with him a secretary and his valet.” The PM (soon “the Prime” to the President’s staff) had accepted while at sea, enlarging his personal entourage at the White House to his confidant “Max” Beaverbrook, John Martin (Churchill’s principal secretary), two security men, and the PM’s valet. The rest of the party, including Averell Harriman, were to be housed nearby at the Mayflower Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue rather than at the more distant British Embassy.

  “At first,” Roy Jenkins, a later Cabinet minister, has written, “Churchill had intended to stay only about a week, but as his visit lengthened, he became near to a real-life version of The Man Who Came to Dinner.” In the hit comedy of 1939–40 by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, the radio personality Sheridan White-side, mellifluous and charming at the microphone, having apparently broken his leg on departing the home of a socially prominent Washington couple, is rushed back indoors to heal in a wheelchair, becoming an insufferable long-term guest.

  The worldwide disasters of the weekend of Pearl Harbor made it urgent for the Prime Minister as well as the President to pool global strategies. “As soon as I awoke” the morning after, Churchill claimed, “I decided to go over at once to see Roosevelt.” He feared that the immediate impact of Pearl Harbor would be a retreat into an “America-comes-first” attitude in Washington, withholding aid to Britain and Russia while concentrating resources to strike back at Japan. In solidarity with Japan, Adolf Hitler would make that “Europe last” likelihood moot by declaring war on the United States, but isolationists who had inveighed against involvement in European wars were still influential in Congress, and the attacks on the United States had come in the Pacific. Roosevelt’s cordial invitation to the White House put a new slant on everything.

  Before the PM embarked on December 12, he engaged in strategy sessions with his advisers, who recommended continuing the careful language they had employed with America before the new dimension to the war. Sir Alan Brooke, the new chief of the imperial general staff, recalled that Churchill turned to one in the cautious circle “with a wicked leer in his eye” and said, “Oh! That is the way we talked to her while we were wooing her; now that she is in the harem we talk to her quite differently!”

  That open cynicism would be dispensed with in Washington. The Japanese were winning everywhere on the Pacific Rim. Across the Atlantic, embattled Britain, supplied largely by sea, was losing as many freighters to U-boats as were being built to replace the sinkings. Malaya was being overrun, and its 220-square mile island appendage, Singapore, was unlikely to hold out. Hong Kong had been invaded and had no hope of survival; Wake Island had been attacked and Guam quickly occupied; and in the Philippines the Japanese were already on Luzon and bombing Manila. Australia seemed threatened, and Hawaiians worried that, with the navy and air forces on Oahu decimated, the Japanese might return.

  After much politics-as-usual debate about the appropriate age for draft registration, Congress on December 19 had timidly settled on twenty for induction and eighteen for registration. On both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, the services had hurriedly set anti-aircraft guns on the roofs of buildings and alongside docks. Some weapons were obsolete, others wooden fakes, there to instill spurious confidence. Sentries, often bearing 1918 -vintage rifles, were posted at railway stations and armaments factories. Although the only interloper likely over the American skies at Christmas was likely to be Santa Claus with his sleigh and reindeer, a twenty-four-hour sky watch in the Northeast was ordered for the holidays by Brigadier General John C. MacDonnell, air-raid warning chief for 43,000 volunteer civilian observers. “Experience in war,” he declared, “has taught that advantage is taken of relaxation in vigilance to strike when and where the blow is least expected.” Lights remained on almost everywhere.

  Anxiety on the Pacific coast about Japanese air raids, however absurd, had already panicked San Francisco, thanks to the paranoia of Fourth Army commander Lieutenant General John DeWitt at Fort Ord. Every Japanese fisherman and vegetable farmer along the coast was suspected of covertly warning nonexistent enemy aircraft, and the hysteria resulted in the relocation of the New Year’s Day Rose Bowl extravaganza from California to somnolent Durham, North Carolina, where Duke University would play Oregon State.

  On war maps in the press, limited to much less than the actual facts, a dismal Christmas loomed, but it did not appear that way in shop windows across America. Enhanced by holiday lights, the street lamps and store fronts glittered, and a plethora of merchandise long vanished from high streets in Britain awaited shoppers now benefiting from jobs created by proliferating war contracts and a burgeoning army and navy. Christmas trees were plentiful, seldom priced at more than a dollar or two, and in the traditional holiday spectacle at Radio City Music Hall in New York, the star-spangled Rockettes, in mechanical unison, high-stepped away any war gloom. In newspapers across the nation the Japanese were thwarted in the Terry and the Pirates comic strip, and in film Gary Cooper as Sergeant York was defeating the Germans single-handedly in the earlier world war.

  The hit book for Christmas giving, at a hefty $2.50, was Edna Ferber’s Reconstruction-era romance Saratoga Trunk. For the same price, war turned up distantly yet bombastically in a two-disc set of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, performed by Artur Rodzinski and the Cleveland Orchestra. In New York gift crates of oranges and grapefruit from Florida were $2.79 at Bloomingdale’s. A new Ford or Chevrolet, both soon to be unobtainable, cost $900. Hattie Carnegie’s designer dresses began at $15. The upscale Rogers Peet menswear store offered suits and topcoats from a steep $38. (At recruiting stations nationwide, the army was offering smart khaki garb at no cost whatever to enlistees.) Henri Bendel featured silk stockings at $1.25 a pair; stockings in the current wonder weave, nylon, sold for $1.65. By the following Christmas nylons would be almost unobtainable. The fabric would be the stuff of parachutes.

  Among the long-prepared Christmas toy glut, shops across America advertised a remote-control bombing plane at $1.98, which ran along a suspended wire to attack a battleship. The Japanese high seas Kido Butai had not needed suspended wires at Pearl Harbor, nor in the Philippines, Malaya, or Hong Kong. The Royal Navy’s principal warships on the Pacific Rim were at the bottom of the Gulf of Siam, and the depleted Pacific Fleet, with seven battleships sunk or disabled at their anchorages, had only two destroyers available to patrol the long coastline between Vancouver and San Diego. As Churchill would put it, “Over all this vast expanse of waters Japan was supreme, and we everywhere [were] weak and naked.”

  On the other side of the continent, thoroughly open to attacks if there were to be any, the Prime Minister, having embarked from the River Clyde in Scotland on December 14, was already in the mid-Atlantic on the new battleship Duke of York amid violent, frigid gales. Aware from his office of her husband’s falling behind schedule, Clementine Churchill cabled him from London on December 19: “You have been gone a week & all the news of you is of heavy seas delaying your progress—plans to change into planes at Bermuda, so as to arrive in time, & then those plans cancelled.... May God keep you and inspire you to make good plans with the President. It is a horrible World at present. Europe overrun by the Nazi hogs, & the Far East by yellow Japanese lice. I am spending Christmas here . . . & going to Chequers on Saturday the 27th.”

  In Washington the American brass worried even before Churchill departed about having the PM at Roosevelt’s elbow, where, despite Britain’s weak hand getting even weaker, he could employ his glib persuasiveness and imperial visions.