This pieced neatly into a Japanese report that the Governor was participating in a conference at Kowloon with Japanese military leaders. It was only in Japanese broadcasts that any direct statement was made that Hong Kong had surrendered.
END SEEN AS AT HAND
Even as Sir Mark talked with the Japanese in Kowloon, there were reports that Chinese troops pressing toward Hong Kong were meeting with successes.
To many here, however, it seemed that the end must be near. For seven days under relentless observed artillery fire not only from the mainland but on the heights of Hong Kong Island, the British garrison fought on, rejecting two demands to surrender.
The water supply gave cause for anxiety, as three reservoirs had fallen into Japanese hands. Water mains destroyed by bombardment were repaired, but the invaders destroyed them again and again. On Tuesday there remained but one day’s supply of water.
Military and civilian casualties in Hong Kong were heavy, but under the Governor’s inspiring leadership morale was admirable.
“So ends a valiant fight against overwhelming odds,” said the official statement. “The courage and determination of the Royal Navy and troops from the United Kingdom, Canada and India, as well as local levies, including many Chinese, will long be remembered.”
In eight days Hong Kong had forty-five air raids. Heavy shelling was maintained by the Japanese. They sent two peace offers, which were rejected out of hand.
“We are going to hold on,” the Governor cabled Lord Moyne, the Colonial Secretary.
Tokyo reported the capture of Hong Kong last Friday, but this claim was refuted by a British communiqué telling of heavy losses being inflicted on the invaders.
DECEMBER 27, 1941
CHURCHILL MASTER OF TELLING PHRASES
His War Addresses Have Contained a Succession of Striking Passages
By The United Press.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 26—Winston Churchill is a master phrasemaker and passages from his addresses have a majestic cadence. Highest honors for a single sentence probably go to eleven words Churchill uttered on May 13, 1940, after Great Britain had dropped the Chamberlain government and was adjusting itself to the prospect of total war. Then Mr. Churchill told his countrymen:
“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
And with the hard going in June, 1940, and the Germans in possession of beaches a few miles across the English Channel, Mr. Churchill made this promise:
“We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender.”
In that same June, when the British Army in Europe was beaten and disorganized, he said:
“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its commonwealth last for a thousand years men will still say: ‘This was their finest hour.’”
In August, 1940, after Germany had begun all-out efforts to bomb Britain into submission, Mr. Churchill said of the British airmen: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
On Sept. 11, 1940, Mr. Churchill said of Adolf Hitler:
“This wicked man, the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatred; this monstrous product of former wrongs and shame, has now re-solved to try and break our famous island race by a process of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction. What he has done is to kindle a fire in British hearts, here and all over the world, which will glow long after all traces of the conflagration he has caused in London have been removed.”
“Do not suppose,” he warned again in January, 1941, “that we are at the end of the road. Yet, though long and hard it may be, I have absolutely no doubt that we shall win a complete and decisive victory over the forces of evil, and that victory itself will only be a stimulus to further efforts to conquer ourselves and to make our country as worthy in the days of peace as it is proving itself in the hours of war.”
To Americans in February, 1941, he directed this message: “Give us the tools and we will finish the job.”
DECEMBER 28, 1941
JAPANESE ADVANCE SLOWLY ON MANILA
By The United Press.
FIELD HEADQUARTERS, United States Forces on Northern Luzon Front, Dec. 27—Japanese forces tonight advanced slowly against stubbornly resisting American and Philippine troops in a huge north-and-south pincers upon Manila. On this Northern Front the Japanese spearheads have debouched from narrow, mountainous defiles of the north onto the broad Pampanga plains. Their advance guard was reported at Urdaneta, eight miles south of Binalonan and about ninety-seven miles from Manila.
Reports from the Southern Front placed the Japanese advance at Lucena, sixty-four airline miles from Manila, but separated from the capital by several mountain ranges, lakes, swamps and difficult terrain. At this point the Japanese had driven forward about twenty-six miles from their landing stage on Lamon Bay, a twenty-mile strip of beach from Atimonan to Mauban.
Both the Japanese thrusts were regarded as dangerous. They were backed by increasing numbers of mobile Japanese troops, landed with light arms and equipment from transports standing off Lingayen Gulf in the northwest and Lamon Bay to the southeast.
However, neither in north nor south had the main battle yet been joined as General Douglas MacArthur, Commander in Chief of United States forces in the Far East, carefully deployed his inferior numbers against the invaders.
Despite the Japanese advances there was an air of confidence here at Major Gen. J. M. Wainwright’s field headquarters. General Wainwright reported in a communiqué that he was slowly moving his troops back to strong battle lines carefully selected long in advance. There was no indication where the main defense line had been erected, but several water courses bisect this long, easy valley that provides a broad highway to Manila.
The Japanese northern thrust is being made in two main columns. One column is trying to force its way toward Lingayen at the head of Lingayen Gulf, along whose shores the Japanese landings were made. This column is circling along the coast, following the coastal plain highway. The second column has struck down through Rosales and Urdaneta, ninety-seven miles due north of Manila in Pangasinan Province.
General Wainwright reported that the Japanese were “now making slow progress on the Northern Luzon Front as the withdrawal of our troops to a stronger line is proceeding in accordance with plans.” He said that “the resistance of our troops continues undiminished.”
A communiqué from General MacArthur gave no details of the fighting except to say that it was “desultory” in the North and “very heavy” in the Southeast.
“The enemy is steadily bringing reinforcements from his fleet of transports off Lingayen and Atimonan,” the communiqué reported. “Enemy air activity is heavy.”
Reports from the South said that the Japanese flag now was flying over Lucena, capital of Tayabas Province on the Southern Luzon Coast.
Capture of Lucena plants the Japanese squarely across Tayabas Isthmus, a narrow neck of land that links the central portion of Luzon with the long narrow southern extension stretching 175 miles to the southeast. Japanese control of the Tayabas Isthmus appeared to cut off any United States forces in the south combating the Japanese landing forces at Legaspi, except by sea.
The strength of the Japanese forces now ashore in the Atimonan-Mauban sector was estimated as between 10,000 and 15,000—possibly more. The northern force was placed between 80,000 and 100,000. In all, the Japanese may have between 150,000 and 200,000 troops ashore on Luzon or awaiting landing from transports.
The American-Philippines forces in the South are believed strong enough to cope with the Japanese, at least for the time being.
Japanese soldiers in the Philippines, late 1941.
Chapter 10
“MILLION WOMEN ARE NEEDED FOR WAR”
January–February 1942
The coming of war prompted many and far-reaching changes in the United States. Presidential powers were immediately strengthened. Production was organized under a War Production Board that cut back on all civilian production, but particularly the manufacture of tires and automobiles. Civil defense measures were slowly introduced; a blackout (or “dimout” as it came to be called) was enforced, though not soon enough to prevent German submarines from cruising off the Eastern Seaboard at night to torpedo merchantmen sailing against the lit-up coast in full silhouette. The Times’s own electric bulletin was a victim of the lighting restrictions and Times Square was sunk in unaccustomed gloom. From a situation of high unemployment, the war economy now needed all the labor it could get. In late January the labor director of the War Production Board, Stanley Hillman, called for a million women to join the war industry. “Women can build airplanes,” he said, and millions of American women responded to the call over the three years that followed.
The black community lobbied to be allowed to join the war effort, prompting the formation in January of the first all-black Army division, though prejudice did not disappear. The American Red Cross refused to use the blood of black Americans for transfusions until pressured to do so by the government.
Roosevelt was feeling his way for the first weeks of war. In February The Times complained in its editorial, “Washington Paints a Confused Picture,” that the people had not yet been told the whole truth about the war crisis. The truth was bad enough. On February 15, the day the Japanese captured Singapore and more than 100,000 Allied prisoners, The Times’s military correspondent, Hanson Baldwin, warned that worse was to come from the “fanatical little fighters” of Japan. The early weeks of war were, he continued, “perhaps the blackest period in our history.” On January 2 the capital of the Philippines, Manila, fell to the Japanese Army and American and Filipino forces were pushed back onto the Bataan Peninsula and eventually into the fortress of Corregidor. Japanese troops swept all before them, capturing the Dutch East Indies in a lightning campaign and smashing an Allied naval force on February 27 in the Battle of the Java Sea. On February 22 General MacArthur was advised to leave the Philippines and to go to Australia. Earlier that month the popular Times journalist Byron (Barney) Darnton was sent to Australia to report on the Pacific crisis, only to lose his life nine months later when an Allied aircraft mistakenly attacked the landing craft Darnton was in on the way to the coast of New Guinea.
There was little news that was good. Benghazi in Libya fell to Rommel’s Afrika Korps; submarine sinkings reached new heights. The one ray of hope lay on the Eastern Front where the German armies were stuck in the snow and bitter weather, though far from defeated. Ilya Ehrenburg, the famous Soviet war correspondent, wrote for The Times from the front line where General Zhukov, Stalin’s military troubleshooter, claimed that the Germans had at last tasted “real war,” having grown too “used to easy victories.” The Times reported how well-equipped Soviet soldiers were, with their high felt boots (valenki) and sheepskin jackets, while the German Army was forced to appeal to countrymen back home to send their fur coats and sweaters to clothe German soldiers. Although the Pacific took pride of place in news reports, Roosevelt was clear when he met Churchill in Washington for the Arcadia conference in December 1941 that the priority was to destroy the German threat. On January 26 the first units of an American Expeditionary Force landed in Northern Ireland, the early contingents of what was to become the largest overseas army ever raised by the United States.
JANUARY 3, 1942
WAR PACT IS SIGNED
U.S., Britain, Russia, China and 22 Others Join in Declaration
By FRANK L. KLUCKHOHN
Special to The New York Times.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 2—All twenty-six countries at war with one or more of the Axis powers have pledged themselves in a “Declaration by United Nations” not to make a separate armistice or peace and to employ full military or economic resources against the enemy each is fighting. The agreement was signed in Washington and made public today at the White House.
The declaration, which is an outcome of the recent conferences between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill of Great Britain, is not in treaty form, and therefore does not require ratification.
President Roosevelt signed for the United States; Prime Minister Churchill for the United Kingdom; Maxim M. Litvinoff, the Soviet Ambassador, for Russia, and T. V. Soong, Foreign Minister, for China. Representatives here affixed their signatures on behalf of the Dominion and India governments and for the exiled and Central American governments. The Free French did not sign and neither did any South American government, but other nations “rendering material assistance” may adhere for “victory over Hitlerism.”
ALL IN ‘A COMMON STRUGGLE’
The declaration, carefully phrased to make it unnecessary for Russia to go to war against Japan, was made public at 3 P.M., only a few hours after announcement that Japanese forces had occupied Manila.
The adherents expressed conviction that “complete victory over their enemies” is essential for defense of “life, liberty, independence and religious freedom,” not only in their own but in other lands. Each declared itself engaged in “a common struggle” against evil forces seeking world dominance.
Therefore each signatory, on behalf of his government, pledged cooperation with the other governments involved and “not to make a separate armistice or peace with the enemies.” Some Latin-American nations at war have small armies, which may explain why each government pledged employment of full military “or” economic resources “against those members of the Tripartite Pact and its adherents with which such government is at war.”
The declaration was on a common war policy, but it pledged all nations involved to accept, after “final destruction of the Nazi tyranny,” the eight bases for establishment of peace contained in the Atlantic Charter signed by President Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill at their sea conference on Aug. 14, 1941.
JANUARY 4, 1942
Editorial
CIVIL LIBERTIES IN WAR
“Total war” is a crucial test of our ordinary theories and practices of government and of the democratic and libertarian principles by which we strive to live. The fearful exigencies of war force us to re-examine many of our political premises. Among those are the premises concerning our civil liberties. One set of extremists is apt to take the position that all civil liberties have to be suspended during the period of the war. Those at the opposite extreme are apt to contend that there should be no abridgment whatever of any peacetime civil liberty.
Obviously the truth is somewhere between these extremes. But to find precisely where it lies in particular cases is not easy. Dr. Stuart A. Queen, retiring president of the American Sociological Society, in an address posed a few questions designed to show the nature of the dilemmas which the present war raises: “Shall freedom of communication,” he asks, “be maintained for all, thus aiding enemies in our midst, or shall it be restricted, thus threatening the very democracy for which we fight?” Such a question may overstate the problem, but it does serve to emphasize the truth of Dr. Queen’s conclusion that civil liberty is “one of the most difficult problems for a democratic people in time of emergency.”
In normal times we are apt to say that the various civil liberties we enjoy are “absolute” and “inalienable rights.” Yet our actual practice has never corresponded with these phrases. It would be difficult to name a civil liberty that has not in practice been subject to some qualification. Thus the right of free speech has never been absolute. It has been curbed by the laws against libel, against obscenity, against direct incitement to riot or violence. Different ages and different communities have varied widely in where they draw the line in all these cases, but it is extremely seldom that they have failed to draw a line at all. In war-time these qualifications are necessarily greater. The press is not allowed to print military secrets. Individuals are not allowed to make treasonable utterance
s, and the definition of what is likely to cause internal dissension is in practice greatly broadened.
Liberty should never be conceived in a purely negative sense, as the mere absence of restraint. Such a conception would lead only to anarchy. To determine what are desirable liberties, we must refer to some end beyond mere absence of restraint itself. This end is the national welfare, considered in the broadest sense. Obviously the national security demands more qualifications to individual liberty in wartime than in peacetime. But all this does not mean that individual liberties should be reduced to such a point that the future of liberal and democratic institutions is endangered. It does not mean that any one Government authority or small group is to have unrestricted power to dictate what liberties are to be abridged. It does not mean that individuals are to be restricted in their right freely to criticize the Government’s diplomatic policies or its conduct of the war. Long established legal safeguards designed to protect individual rights are not lightly to be put aside.
We cannot surrender at home the very liberties and democratic principles for which we are fighting. But we must recognize that in particular cases decisions concerning the qualifications to civil liberties will often be much more difficult to make now than in times of peace.
JANUARY 4 1942
DETROIT RESIGNED TO AUTO-BAN EDICT
Gradual Slashing of Production Schedules Had Prepared Area for Shift to Arming
By FRANK B. WOODFORD
DETROIT, Jan. 3—The virtual wiping out of Detroit’s chief industry through Federal Price Administrator Leon Henderson’s order banning the production of new passenger cars and trucks has been accepted here with resignation which is tinged, in some quarters, with resentment.
The New York Times Book of World War II, 1939-1945 Page 63