Pearl Harbor Christmas Read online

  En Route

  CHURCHILL AND HIS STAFF had taken the overnight train from London to Greenock on the Clyde. They reached the Duke of York on the morning of December 13, three days after its sister ship, Prince of Wales, and heavy cruiser Repulse, had been sunk by Japanese torpedo bombers off Malaya. Vice Admiral Sir Tom Phillips had rushed both warships north toward the enemy invasion fleet without any air cover. The shock and humiliation were great, and the strategic loss was irreversible. Still, the Prime Minister could claim confidence that American involvement—and American industrial potential—would inevitably reverse the Axis tide.

  By radio aboard—and twenty-seven code clerks working round the clock—the PM kept in touch with events. The Germans were deep into Russia but slowed almost to stalemate by stiff resistance and heavy snow. Blaming faltering commanders for the crisis, Berlin radio reported, Adolf Hitler had assumed supreme command of the Wehrmacht. The Japanese were already exceeding their own expectations in Malaya and the Philippines and intent on driving the Dutch from the oil fields of Borneo. Hong Kong’s invaders, ordered to take mainland Kowloon and the island in ten days, were experiencing unexpected resistance, but there were no escape routes. While the sandbagged and surrounded Repulse Bay Hotel on the beautiful eastern shore, packed with frightened guests and refugees and defended by grimy, nearly sleepless, soldiers, was being shelled, an English lady who had paid a steep £10 a day for her stay complained loudly, “What are all those Chinese people doing here?”

  From the start the Duke of York and its passengers and crew endured a rough crossing. Swept by gales and high seas, the splashed decks were off limits for the first three days. Over the protestations of Dr. Wilson, Churchill dosed himself below with Mothersills Seasick Remedy (“Stops travel nausea on your vacation trips,” the label advertised), and he began offering seasick stories to his queasy companions. At the dining table, when the PM chatted gaily about the special-purpose buckets he had once seen on the bridge of a destroyer, Sir John Dill made a queasy exit. There was no stopping the former First Lord of the Admiralty, who told about the desperate passenger on an ocean liner who was rushing to the nearest rail when a steward warned, “But sir, you can’t be sick here!”

  “Oh, can’t I?” said the passenger as he kept going.

  Reaching the Azores without incident, the Churchill party could transmit business there safely by radio. A hundred miles farther out, plowing ahead of buffeted light escort vessels, which were forced to turn back, the battleship maintained outgoing radio silence, but events did not make that easy for the Prime Minister. “Our very large deciphering staff,” he recalled, “could of course receive by wireless [radio] a great deal of business. To a limited extent we could reply. When fresh escorts joined us from the Azores they could take in by daylight Morse signals from us in code, and then, dropping off a hundred miles or so, could transmit them without revealing our position. Still, there was a sense of radio claustrophobia. . . .”

  IN WASHINGTON radiograms brought in increasingly bad news. In the central Pacific a handful of marines and marine pilots had held off the Japanese at isolated Wake Island after repelling a landing on the eleventh, but after another attempt, their overwhelmed remnants were buckling. The nation had been electrified by a brash radiogram from Wake, “Send us more Japs!”—but it was at best an imaginative misreading of a much more gloomy message. Although the isolated garrison was doomed, it had accomplished a feat never repeated during the war—fending off an amphibious force with coastal guns.

  In the doomed Philippines on the twenty-second, General Douglas MacArthur, having boasted before Pearl Harbor that he was ready to meet any Japanese thrust, sat in his headquarters in an historic old fortress in Manila near his hotel penthouse flat as alarming reports came in about troop withdrawals. Forty-three thousand Japanese began swarming ashore at Lingayen Gulf in central Luzon, although MacArthur prepared defiant communiqués claiming otherwise.

  Like the British in Malaya withdrawing southward on the four hundred-mile-long Kra Peninsula toward theoretically invulnerable Singapore, protected by the natural moat of the Strait of Johore, MacArthur’s ground forces were unprepared, under-equipped, and quickly shorn of air and naval support. American subs off the Philippines had attacked enemy transports, but their poorly designed torpedo fuses did not work. Much of the air force on Luzon had been destroyed on the ground, although MacArthur had received ample warning about likely attacks. But for sporadic air raids met with futile anti-aircraft weapons geared in altitude settings for an earlier war, Manila was quiet. Its population, with nowhere to go, was passive and anxious. Preparing to leave for the tadpole-shaped “rock” of Corregidor in Manila Bay, considered as impregnable as Singapore, the general drew up a proclamation, its release still withheld, declaring Manila an open city. By the laws of war ignored by the Japanese elsewhere, the declaration meant that by Christmas the city would be undefended and thus exempt—on paper—from bombardment.

  MacArthur then sent for Lieutenant Colonel Sid Huff, a retired naval officer who had become a personal assistant commissioned on the general’s behalf. “Sid,” said MacArthur, “I’ve forgotten to buy Jean a Christmas present.” Whatever would be purchased would be less than useless on Corregidor, but Huff was to think of something for Mrs. MacArthur. Philippine money would also be useless, and the general had plenty of it to lavish on Manila shops. Loyally, Huff went off to places he knew Jean patronized and would know her size (twelve), returning with boxes of dresses and lingerie bound with Christmas ribbons. MacArthur crossed the street from venerable, walled Intramuros in Calle Victoria, took the elevator to his Manila Hotel penthouse flat on the sixth floor—with seven bedrooms and a state dining room and a ten thousand–volume military history library built for him in 1935. He advised Jean to open the gifts right away. Christmas Eve might be too late.

  War tension was lost on little Arthur IV, who would celebrate his fourth birthday in a tunnel on Corregidor in February. He had a gaily decorated Christmas tree in the family penthouse, and his presents were in a closet, never to be stacked under the tree on Christmas Eve after his bedtime. That evening his parents announced it was the day before Christmas, which it wasn’t, and extricated his presents for unwrapping. One was a tricycle, which he pedaled happily round the spacious flat and its balconies while his mother opened her own gifts with pretended joy. She examined each, holding the contents one at a time to admire. “Sir Boss, they are beautiful,” she said as she began rewrapping them for departure. “Thank you so much.” Mark Twain’s fictional Connecticut Yankee who dominated King Arthur’s court was addressed as “Sir Boss,” and Jean had adopted it.

  KEEPING BUSY AT SEA, Churchill dictated position papers on “The Atlantic Front” and “The Pacific Front” to offer the President, suggesting the dispatch of American troops to Northern Ireland and bomber squadrons to Scotland in order to relieve British forces for action. Overestimating the American pace of preparedness, he envisaged beginning the liberation of Europe little more than a year later—the subject of a third paper, “The Campaign of 1943.” In the postwar publication of his papers, silently edited, he omitted the paper on the Pacific front, giving that title to a fourth, originally “Notes on the Pacific.” He may have felt embarrassed about the hopes he had held for Singapore, expected to hold the Japanese back for six months until rescue. What he did print, however, was equally complacent, expecting that by May 1942, only five months distant, the Allies could mass a formidable battle fleet in the Pacific, bolstered by aircraft carriers yet to be built and “improvised carriers” converted from existing merchantmen and warships. The Royal Navy had begun employing “escort carriers” for convoy duty, and Roosevelt would initiate a program to refit freighters under construction as small carriers, then order escort carriers designed as such. (Of 151 American carriers constructed during the war, 122 would be escort size. Only 5 would be lost to enemy action.)

  Ever the optimist, Churchill saw the military resources of Japan, dependent on what could be exploited from occupied territories that he expected the allies to retrieve, as a “wasting factor” leading to inevitable defeat. His two service chiefs, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound and Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, concurred. Abetted, apparently, by Portal, the PM promoted deploying air power that did not yet exist from locations that also did not exist for massive air assaults on Japan itself to retard further “overseas adventures” and bring the war directly to the Japanese islands. “The burning of Japanese cities by incendiary bombs,” he wrote in a paragraph he did not reprint postwar, “will bring home in a most effective manner to the people of Japan the dangers of the course to which they have committed themselves.” That would indeed happen, three years later, but not because American planners and aircraft engineers had read the PM’s papers.

  Field Marshal Sir John Dill, who had been replaced at the War Office by Brooke, was expected to remain in Washington as liaison. Although Churchill had sniffed about him as “DillyDally,” he had the backbone to disagree with the Prime Minister and took some risky decisions for which the PM would take postwar credit. Pushing Dill out of the way so that Churchill could run the war through personal surrogates proved inadvertently to be one of the Prime Minister’s best appointments. Remembered for his observation, “It takes a lot of moral courage not to be afraid of being thought afraid,” Dill became an intimate of American chief of staff General George Marshall, and he was so highly regarded throughout the war that on his death late in 1944 he was buried, with Congressional approval, at Arlington.

  After FDR had sent Churchill a memorandum suggesting a “Joint Staff Conference” with their American counterparts “as to how we are going to fight the war together,” the PM convened his own military advisers aboard on December 18, al
ong with the Minister of Supply, Lord Beaverbrook. Canadian-born William Maxwell Aitken, a controversial Hearst-like newspaper baron who owned the Daily and Sunday Express and the Evening Standard and promoted appeasement during the tawdry Thirties, had become a relentless foe of Hitlerism once war erupted. Having only produced newsprint, he had become the tireless and inventive war production czar in Churchill’s ministry.

  Further staff meetings were called as the Duke of York struggled in turbulent waters. In his cabin on the bridge, Churchill sipped brandy, took naps, and read two books he had brought along—a novel about Napoleon and Josephine, and a World War I sea story by C. S. Forester, author of the Hornblower series the PM loved. He watched a movie every evening, with his favorite Blood and Sand, a bullfighting epic starring Rita Hayworth and Clark Gable—who, at forty-one, would soon be a gunner in action on a B-17. Churchill also enjoyed The Sea Hawk, with Errol Flynn and Claude Rains, in which Queen Elizabeth (Flora Robson), desiring to spare the purses of her subjects, hesitates to fund ships to defend England against the Spanish Armada. “You see,” Churchill told Harriman as the film wound down, “The British have always been the biggest damn fools in the world. They are too easygoing and niggardly to prepare. Then at the last minute they hurry around and scrape together and fight like hell. Good luck has pulled them through. If the good Lord once forgets them, they will be finished.”

  Reminding himself of one of the many troubles he had to face—the British did not have a single capital ship left in either the Pacific or the Indian Ocean—one evening in the middle of a film he leaned over toward Harriman and, defending Admiral Phillips, who had gone down with his ship, remarked, “It is a sad business, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. They could have harassed the enemy, always playing the second role to your big fleet. We made great sacrifices to send them [to Singapore]. They came in time. It is a cruel thing. But I will never criticize a man who aims his arrow at the enemy. I will defend him.” And in his memoirs he would also defend himself of charges of “civilian interference” in sending them uselessly.

  The noise and vibration in Churchill’s personal quarters aft rendered it all but unusable, and he worked where he could. In a long letter to be mailed to his wife on arrival, he wrote to Clementine on Sunday, December 21, “I had been hoping till an hour ago to dine with the President tomorrow, Monday night— and this is not yet impossible—but it is still blowing hard and from my porthole I can see, every minute, tremendous seas pouring over the bow of the ship, while down below can be heard the crash of them striking the sides. We are running obliquely across the waves and sometimes the ship rolls very heavily. However, once you get used to the motion, you don’t care a damn.”

  Three days earlier he had told Clementine in a letter to be posted on shore as diplomatic mail, “We left our destroyer escort behind as they could not keep up with us in the rough seas.” If the weather improved, they expected to pick up an American destroyer escort north of Bermuda that would guide the Duke of York into the Chesapeake Bay then north toward Annapolis.

  There would be no American destroyers. None could cope with the heavy weather, which had so retarded the battleship itself that Lord Beaverbrook quipped that they might as well have traveled by submarine. Yet despite the risks and the turbulence, Churchill was relieved, he wrote, that he did not attempt to fly. He had been offered encouragement that a flight over the Atlantic to Nova Scotia would take only twelve or fourteen hours, but in winter “sometimes you are kept waiting 6, 8 or 10 days for favorable weather, so that the tortoise may still beat the hare.” As Americans were not yet on ration coupons for clothing, he intended to cable Clementine on arrival “to know the length of your stockings.” He was, after all, arriving at “Christmastide.”

  THAT THE PM WOULD actually be staying at the White House was unanticipated in the first hectic days after Pearl Harbor. Lord Halifax had been to the White House to press for accepting Churchill in Washington even before Adolf Hitler had announced that the Third Reich was at war with the United States. Addressing the toothless Reichstag, convened only to listen to him, Hitler screamed at “that man who, while our soldiers are fighting in snow and ice . . . likes to make his chats from the fireside, the man who is the main culprit in this war.” Churchill had been replaced in Berlin by a new target.

  A visit by Churchill so soon after Pearl Harbor, Halifax had cabled Downing Street, might be “rather too strong medicine” for some American public opinion, which the President “still feels he has to educate up to the complete conviction of the oneness of the struggle against both Germany and Japan.... They are terribly shaken here, as you can well suppose, and fully realise that they have been caught napping.”

  The welcome offer to Churchill included dinner on the evening he reached dry land. It would be a somewhat different White House than George VI and Queen Elizabeth had visited in the sunny summer of 1939, just before the European war had broken out. Preparatory blackout curtains hung at each window; exterior lighting was dimmed and directed away from the walls. Sentry boxes were set up at driveway entrances and along the perimeter fences. Police patrolled where onlookers once strolled. Yet a stately Christmas tree was being erected on the White House lawn.

  SECRETARY OF WAR HENRY STIMSON was instructed to prepare an American agenda for the visit, to be ready by the weekend before the British party arrived. He called together Chief of Staff George C. Marshall; Army Air Forces chief, Lieutenant General Henry H. (“Hap”) Arnold; Chief of War Plans Leonard T. Gerow, a brigadier general; and his new deputy, Dwight D. Eisenhower, another one-star general assigned largely to Pacific operations, as he had served in the prewar Philippines and earlier in Washington under Douglas MacArthur. By December 20, a Saturday, a “Suggested Analysis of the Basic Topics and their Attendant Problems” was submitted to the White House. It largely reaffirmed Churchill’s views that Germany was the prime enemy and that “a violent renewal of submarine activity” in the North Atlantic had to be anticipated. Stimson, however, realized that with Pearl Harbor the precipitant of American involvement, the public would want evidence of some action against the Japanese, who were sweeping through Southeast Asia and were already in the Philippines.

  A joint Anglo-American board in Washington since March 1941, with little but an advisory function, met on Sunday the 21st to evaluate what might be done with so little time and resources already diminished by attacks, invasions, materiel losses, and defeats across the globe. It could only recommend “hold[ing] where necessary while building up strength.” Yet even holding was nearly impossible. That Sunday afternoon at a conference at the White House, with the Secretaries of War and Navy (Henry Stimson and Frank Knox) and their top brass, the President went over the memoranda item by item, reviewing how their recommendations fit the burgeoning bad news. The “big fleet” Churchill had referred to was no longer big. Dockside Pearl Harbor was a ruin, although repair facilities and fuel storage tanks had not been impacted, and two aircraft carriers normally moored there had been at sea and were happily unscathed. Despite nine hours’ warning after Pearl Harbor, General MacArthur had more than half his air force destroyed on the ground. Tons of his unprotected supplies had burned on the docks at Cavite, near Manila. He had made little or no provision to protect food, fuel, and munitions stocks for withdrawals, and the ongoing invasion of Luzon at Lingayen Gulf, first reported falsely as thwarted, was a reality. The pitiful Asian fleet based in Manila Bay was scattered or sunk. Guam was gone. The American presence in the Pacific barely existed.

  Isolated Hong Kong had been penetrated from its Kowloon Peninsula and New Territories appendages on the mainland. Its fall was expected by Christmas. The outcome was never in doubt. At Sandy Ridge in Lo Wu in the New Territories, Lieutenant Colonel Robert A. MacPherson lay among twenty casualties. Sadism was far from uncommon among Japanese soldiery, especially when they tasted victory. The wounded were savagely beaten with rifle butts, roped together in threes, and bayoneted. Sergeant Major Matthew C. Hamlon, with three riflemen of the Royal Rifles of Canada were captured at Eucliff. Stripped of their weapons, their hands were bound behind their backs. Prodded forward with bayonets to the edge of a cliff, they were made to sit down, seeing below the bodies of previous dead, some beheaded. Colonel Roji Tanaka ordered a firing squad forward and all were shot, but Hamlon rolled down the cliff and survived to testify at the war crimes trial of the colonel years later.