The New York Times Book of World War II, 1939-1945

by The New York Times

  Now submarines are again hunting in packs. They are directed to the quarry by Kurriers and Condors, which can sight the prey without being seen, then transmit the speed of the sighted convoy to U-boat commanders. The hour before dawn is still most favored by the Germans for the attack.

  The announcement by Secretary Knox that the American navy would convoy lease-lend material was said to have taken some weight off the British fleet, however.

  Destroyers, not in scores but in hundreds, appear to some observers to be the ultimate answer to the U-boat. Well does the British Navy remember Admiral Lord Beatty’s statement on the eve of his death: “We must have 300 destroyers.”

  This island is one of the centers of the counter-offensive to the German U-boat campaign. British and American destroyers, equipped with the most modern detection devices and powerfully armed, are shepherding convoys.

  The most heroic part of the story comes from the merchant sailors who emerge alive from attacks at sea. Among them it is common to meet seamen who have been torpedoed twice and even three times. Without exception they are eager to “get another ship.”

  Thousands of their fellows are dead. Others are in hospital, permanently crippled. Gangrene is the deadly enemy of the man in lifeboats.

  Theirs are terrible stories: of men who went insane and leaped into the sea from lifeboats; of tongues that swell for lack of water; of nights when waves break over the frail lifeboats and half of the crew bails while the other half rows; of horrible minutes when the smoke of a far-off convoy dies on the horizon; of hours in biting cold water that numbs the body and senses before it drags men to the bottom.

  Chapter 9

  “JAPANESE ATTACK UNITES AMERICA”

  November–December 1941

  No one reading the daily headlines in The Times through November should have been surprised by the sudden Japanese assault on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at anchor in the Hawaiian base at Pearl Harbor on December 7. Yet the attack, when it came, achieved complete surprise. The news from Russia showed Moscow girding for its ordeal as German armies edged ever closer through the tightening grip of a Russian winter, but the focus of all the news was on Japan. The Times’s correspondent in Tokyo, Otto Tolischus, sent what information he could get through the censor, but the news was all bad. On November 5 the Japanese asked the United States to reverse its policy or “face conflict.” On November 17 the Japanese premier, Hideki Tojo, in a speech to the Japanese Diet, gave the United States a virtual ultimatum to cancel the economic blockade and abandon interference in Asia. Privately the Japanese cabinet decided to wait until November 30 and if America had not backed down, to go to war to create a southern empire in Southeast Asia and the Pacific from which Japan could get oil and other raw materials that she could no longer obtain on world markets. On December 1 The Times announced that American aims were “Rejected by Japan as Fantastic.” That same day Tojo had asked Emperor Hirohito at a formal Imperial Conference to authorize the decision for war a week later. To mask the decision another negotiator had been sent to Washington to keep up the pretense of discussion. The Times reported on December 6 “Japan Confident Talks Will Go On.” News from Singapore again showed that the British doubted the threat from Japan, but in Australia preparations began for the possible onset of hostilities.

  On December 7 The Times reported the Japanese view that a supreme crisis loomed, little knowing what was actually happening. It was a Sunday in New York and the Times office was quiet. Suddenly the news came through that the Japanese naval air arm had launched a major attack on Pearl Harbor, on what for Japan was December 8. There were few details, but the news was electrifying. Arthur Sulzberger, The Times’ publisher, was away from New York but traveled back as quickly as he could to be in the thick of the crisis, sleeping in the office all that night. The full news could only be published the following day, on Monday morning. The effect all over America was profound, but the news was difficult to piece together since Japanese air and naval forces attacked in a wide arc from Malaya to Guam. All hint of isolationism or pacifism melted away. Arthur Krock, chief of the Times’s Washington bureau, reported immediate national unity: “You could almost hear it click into place in Washington today.” On December 9 Roosevelt signed the declaration of war against Japan, announcing to Congress the grim consequences of “a date that will live in infamy.”

  The news over the following three weeks was to become grimmer still. On December 10 the British battleships Prince of Wales and Renown were sunk off the coast of Malaya by Japanese naval aircraft; the same day the invasion of the Philippines was reported. The British Commonwealth garrison at Hong Kong surrendered two weeks later. Japanese soldiers advanced down the Malay Peninsula in the direction of Singapore, and through the island of Luzon toward Manila. For Tolischus in Tokyo the coming of war was a personal tragedy. He was arrested by the Japanese secret police for allegedly sending secret information to America, and tortured for weeks to confess that he was a spy. Beaten regularly, his legs and feet became swollen and bloody, reaching a point where he thought death might be preferable. But he refused to give way and eventually he was summoned before a court and given a suspended prison sentence. He was exchanged along with other newsmen for Japanese personnel and arrived back in New York amid tears of relief in August 1942.

  NOVEMBER 1, 1941

  REUBEN JAMES HIT

  First American Warship Lost in War Torpedoed West of Iceland

  By CHARLES HURD

  Special to The New York Times.

  WASHINGTON, Oct. 31—The United States lost its first warship in the Battle of the Atlantic when the destroyer Reuben James was torpedoed and sunk last night west of Iceland while on convoy duty, the Navy Department announced today.

  The Navy later announced that forty-four members of the crew had been rescued. It was without word, however, as to the fate of the other members of the crew of 120 officers and men which made up her complement.

  The meager reports on the sinking were believed to be due to the fact that radio silence for all but the most urgent messages is an inviolate rule of ships serving on the Atlantic patrol. The flashing of detailed messages by wireless serves in effect as a beacon to notify other enemy vessels where to find the ships which sent them out.

  News of the sinking of the Reuben James created an immediate stir in Washington, on Capitol Hill particularly, but President Roosevelt sounded a conservative note in a press conference when he stated that the sinking did not change any aspect of the international position of the United States.

  THIRD ATTACK ON U.S. WARSHIPS

  The sinking of the Reuben James represented only the result which might have attended torpedo attacks on two other destroyers which recently have engaged German submarines. The destroyer Greek, first to figure in such an incident, escaped without being hit. The destroyer Kearny was hit by one of three torpedoes launched simultaneously and survived, but with the loss of eleven members of her crew.

  The Kearny was a new destroyer, which proved the strength of its type in surviving a torpedo hit. The Reuben James, twenty-one-year-old member of the “tin-can” fleet, met the fate that all sailors long have agreed a destroyer faced if hit by a torpedo.

  The Reuben James is believed to have gone down in the area where the other American destroyers were attacked.

  If the engagement which cost the Reuben James occurred in the place where the previous attacks were made the vessel or vessels which witnessed and reported its sinking presumably would be some hundreds of miles from land, whether Iceland or Newfoundland, and perhaps a day or more would elapse before they could fully determine who survived and reach a safe place from which to relay further news.

  It seemed probable to informed persons here acquainted with fleet operations and with the destroyer itself (in the absence of official comment) that the Reuben James probably was sunk in a general engagement rather than in single combat with a submarine.

  American destroyers, like the British ones, are equipped with var
ious devices which make it virtually impossible for a single submarine to catch a destroyer unawares and approach within torpedoing distance. It appeared probable, therefore, that a “pack” of submarines was involved in this attack. By the same token, in view of the system of naval operation, it is probable that other destroyers were on the scene in addition to the Reuben James and there is at least an even chance that the submarine which won this victory did not long survive it.

  NOVEMBER 2, 1941

  OUR ‘ARSENAL OF DEMOCRACY’ BEGINS TO FUNCTION

  Arms Output for Ourselves and Others Has Now Assumed Impressive Size

  By HANSON W. BALDWIN

  The “Battle of Production” entered a new phase last week as an additional lease-lend appropriation was made available and the President and his industrial advisers put the finishing touches to a new “victory program” designed to double the present plan with its enormous output of munitions.

  For the first time since the passage of the Lease-Lend Act the “Arsenal of Democracy” has commenced to bristle with arms. The first twenty-four of the Army’s new 90-mm. anti-aircraft guns reached the hands of troops at Camp Davis, N.C., in September; medium tanks are beginning to roll off the lines in considerable number; aircraft production stands at about 2,000 a month; ships are being launched almost daily.

  In many items we are still in what William S. Knudsen calls the “make-ready” stage. In others we are still designing and blueprinting. Some weapons are already “flops”; others have encountered major delays of one sort or another—some of them technical difficulties, others difficulties of labor, matériel or management. There are shortages and bottlenecks in nearly every line. Many items have been delayed beyond anticipation. Lipstick and compact manufacturers are still using brass when there is a shortage of it for cartridge cases. Strike after strike—many of them jurisdiction-al—still plague, delay and seriously hurt output. Yet, despite all this, the wheels of America are beginning to turn.

  START OF PRODUCTION

  The production program was started two and a half years ago as an attempt to strengthen the defenses of this country. Before and after the war began in Europe orders for munitions were placed in this country by Britain and France, and these orders immediately caused a limited expansion of the aircraft industry. With the fall of France the entire American program underwent a tremendous expansion and was redrafted to meet the needs of a two-ocean Navy, a great air strength and a large Army, plus some supplies for Britain. But there was little attempt to key the program to actual war strategy needs and there was no detailed specific information in this country as to British production or British productive capacity.

  It was not until last Summer, after Stacy May of the OPM went to England, that our production planners gleaned the full facts about British production and it was not until then that we were able to lay a sound groundwork, in terms of industrial planning, for a program which would supply our own needs, Britain’s and half the rest of the world.

  The requests of Russian, Chinese, Greek and Latin-American requirements and the necessities of scores of other nations all had to be thrown into the hopper, to come out in the form of arms. So new and additional requirements have constantly been superimposed upon preceding ones.

  The result is a $60,000,000,000 armament program, authorized or appropriated for the new “Victory Program,” of which none of the details is known except that tank production is to be doubled, which is expected to at least double this cost.

  THE NEW PROGRAM

  This new program is supposed to be conceived in terms of “what it takes to beat Hitler” and is intended to be geared to strategic plans. Yet there are still many loose ends and the bottleneck of all plans—merchant tonnage to carry the munitions produced—has not been solved.

  The present program—not the greatly increased “Victory Program”—is based upon the construction of a two-ocean Navy, the production of complete equipment for an Army of 1,725,000 men, with critical items for an Army of 3,000,000 and with factories capable of filling the battle needs of 4,000,000 troops and an annual production rate of almost 42,000 planes. The new program is expected to skyrocket this to what once would have been considered almost fantastic proportions. Under the terms of the “Victory” plans, for instance, total planes to be produced in the factories of America, from the beginning of the wartime boom until the end of the program, would be well over 100,000.

  New munitions factories for the Army alone have already cost $1,750,000,000. In addition, $460,000,000 has been spent by the Navy on the expansion of shipbuilding facilities: the steel industry has added facilities for 6,000,000 net tons to boost its capacity to 88,000,000 tons a year; the aircraft industry has increased its floor space from 9,454,550 productive square feet on Jan. 1, 1939, to almost 54,000,000 square feet today. The monthly expenditures for defense in September, 1940, was $200,000,000; this year it was $1,360,000,000; next year it may be $2,000,000,000 or much higher, for the goal of many of the statisticians and industrialists in OPM is a $40,000,000,000 armament program annually.

  The total picture presented is not an uncheerful one. Chief problems now and in the future will be those of controlling the vast machine that has been started, supplying it with sufficient raw materials without wrecking the rest of our industry, and controlling prices and wages. It is the greatest task this nation has ever undertaken.

  Under the Lease-Lend Act American lathes were used for turning out gun parts.

  NOVEMBER 4, 1941

  MOSCOW A CITADEL CLEARED FOR BATTLE

  Reports to Kuibyshev Tell of the Spirit Of Its Defenders

  Wireless to The New York Times.

  KUIBYSHEV, Russia, Nov. 2 (Delayed)—The city of Moscow, which represents an architectural bridge between Europe and Asia has now been transformed into a fortified citadel—probably the largest defended city in the history of modern warfare. It is a city stripped to the essential, its supernumery population evacuated and diplomats and other foreigners cleared out.

  Hundreds of thousands of workers, men and women—builders, forgers, weavers, railwaymen, locksmiths, subway conductors, architects, housewives, engineers—are busily completing concentric rings of fortifications about the Soviet capital that never for a moment has thought of avoiding the struggle by declaring itself an open town.

  Ravines, fields and forests around the city are now cut by deep rings of anti-tank ditches, lined with bunkers and pillboxes and interspersed with riflemen’s trenches. Day and night streams of mobilized automobiles carry new shifts of workers to the outskirts to maintain twenty-four-hour labor on the defenses.

  A competitive spirit is encouraged among volunteers from each district constantly to speed up the construction.

  Reports here today said men and women from the Timiriazev district held the title of “Stakhanovites” of the capital because of their speed in fortifying an allotted strip, and one man of that group was said to be excavating seven cubic meters of earth daily.

  The Muscovites are adopting all sorts of slogans expressing their determination to prevent a Nazi entry of their city, the “heart of Russia.”

  NOVEMBER 5, 1941

  JAPANESE ASK U.S. TO REVERSE STAND OR FACE CONFLICT

  Foreign Office Organ Demands Complete About-Face on Pain of ‘Alternatives’

  By OTTO D. TOLISCHUS

  Wireless to The New York Times.

  TOKYO, Nov. 5—The Japanese press is continuing its campaign to bring the United States to “self-reflection” about its Far Eastern policy. There is a growing crescendo, though with some confusion and contradiction in arguments.

  The Japan Times Advertiser, organ of the Foreign Office, today made up its own list of what the United States must do “or face the alternatives”—as follows:

  All military and economic aid to Chungking must cease.

  China must be left “free to deal with Japan,” and Chungking must be advised to make peace with Japan.

  Military and economic encirc
lement of Japan must end.

  Japan’s “co-prosperity sphere” must be acknowledged, and Manchukuo, China, Indo-China, Thailand, the Netherlands Indies and other States and protectorates must be allowed to establish their own political and economic relations with Japan without interference of any kind.

  Manchukuo must be recognized; “nobody will undo what has been done there.”

  The freezing of Japanese and Chinese assets must be ended unconditionally.

  Trade treaties must be restored and all restrictions on shipping and commerce ended.

  The National General Mobilization Council of the new Cabinet is scheduled to hold its first meeting Friday.

  The Cabinet decided to call an extraordinary conference of prefectural Governors on Nov. 24 (following the extraordinary Diet session) at which special instructions are to be issued to the local authorities for the maintenance of domestic peace and order. At this conference Premier Hideki Tojo is expected to impress on the local Governors that the instructions designed to prepare Japan for war must be carried out with unflinching determination, while individual Ministers are expected to issue specific instructions in their respective fields, especially in the line of distribution of food and materials and an increase in production. The conference will last only one day.

  All papers predict that in his Diet speech Premier Tojo will reiterate what the Japan Times Advertiser calls Japan’s “standpat aims”—namely, the successful conclusion of the China “incident” and the establishment of the “East Asia co-prosperity sphere”—and at the same time reveal the truth about the American-Japanese conversations. But a “standpat” attitude on the part of the United States is denounced as “outrageous.”