Internet and television, broadcast and cable, indeed long before the news of the
world poured across cyberspace in a continuum covering all hours and all days,
there was radio, a marvel itself in its time, and there was, above all, the printed word
in its myriad forms. There was the book for the long-range, deeply considered
view, whether in prospect or in retrospect. There were the periodicals for cur-
rent and shorter-term reporting and analysis. Above all there were the newspapers
for day-to-day and week-to-week reports of the multivarious transactions of the
human race. They furnished the indispensable flow of information that enabled
societies to function, to know the fundamental facts of the world in which they
operated, to appraise forms and functions of nations and governments. In addition
they purveyed entertainment, inspiration, and the opportunity to see a wider world
than the one that lay beneath their own eyes. One needs only to consider box scores
and batting averages, stock prices, and stock averages to understand how the worlds
of sport and finance are absolutely dependent upon the continuing flow of news. It
is a timeless cliché that the newspaper reports are the first draft of history.
One might query the policies or the politics of a paper, or even its morals, or
those of its owner, but the newspaper was and is clearly an indispensable element in
any community or society. Americans smiled but Will Rogers grasped the elemen-
tal truth when he observed that all he knew was what he read in the papers. It was
in this faith that Virginia O’Hanlon wrote to The New York Sun to ask if there really was a Santa Claus because her papa had told her: “If you see it in the Sun, it’s true.”
Not all Sunday newspapers attained the majestic poundage of The New York
Times Sunday Edition. But they were clearly far different from the daily papers, if not in kind then surely in the quantity of what they gave the public to read and
what the advertisers paid for. They contained both news in far greater depth, and
more varied and fundamental analysis, than the dailies could support; and they were
looked to for news not only of sport and business, but also of society, of weddings
and engagements, and of deaths, of fashion and style, of culture and religion. Many
offered Sunday magazines or supplements, book reviews, and such widely popular
fixtures as the funny papers, which then were often funny, and crossword puzzles.
Reading the Sunday papers took time and attention and was often achieved by
dividing and distributing the many sections to the tastes and interests of family
members. At the Creation the Lord had enjoined his people to labor for six days,
“but on the seventh day thou shalt rest,” leaving open the question whether read-
ing The New York Times Sunday Edition constituted a day of labor or a day of rest.
If, like so much else, newspaper delivery has been professionalized and deper-
sonalized, in 1941 the common carrier of the newspapers, daily and Sunday, was
the iconic newspaper delivery boy, that exemplar of sturdy independence, industry
and thrift, who was bound to rise on the foundation of his earnest endeavors. He
The Sunday Papers 5
recalled Ragged Dick and a host of other Horatio Alger heroes who by pluck and
luck rose from hard circumstances into the American pantheon.
In 1941, church attendance was more the norm than the exception and a careful
study of schedules of church services (which were of course published regularly in
the press, as were the reports of the sermons preached) shows that, leaving aside the
frequent schedules of masses offered by the Catholic church, the most common
hour for church services in New York and across the country was 11:00 a.m. An
interested reader of The New York Times could mine the paper for news of general or particular interest before, during or after his breakfast, in ample time to go to
his church, or perhaps to the golf course when and where the weather permitted.
In addition to its primary function of disseminating the news, the newspaper
reflected opinion—whether the opinion of the readers or, as so often, the opinion
of its owners, reflecting the maxim that the press is indeed free if you own a news-
paper. Investigative journalism has been a prominent, often sensational, function
of the press. Newspaper advertising was until recently the basic driver of demand
in a commercial, consumer society.
Radio is an ephemeral medium, conveying specific content only at the specific
time of broadcast, then disappearing into the ether. Television in 1941 was an
experiment and a dream.
If you wanted to know what the American people knew in 1941 (or any other
year), if you wanted to know what they thought, if you wanted to know when
they thought it, then you would best find the answers in the newspapers, daily,
weekly, periodically. You would find them in the yellowing newspaper files or on
microfilm. You would find in them the news of the world and the news of the
nation, the repository of the hopes, the fears, the joys and the sorrows, the shared
experience of a community, a state, or a nation.
The America of November 30, 1941, was a far different America from the Amer-
ica of today. A scant two weeks later America was becoming closer to the America of
tomorrow then it was to the America of its yesteryears. It was, of course, December 7
that divided these two Americas. If you asked what the American people knew on
the immediate road to December 7 and how they responded to that catastrophic
event and its aftermath, you would find it in the newspaper files.
To answer these questions we will turn to a regionally disparate group of metro-
politan newspapers representing a broad spectrum of outlook and opinion. You will
find here, out of a wide array of possible choices, The New York Times , The Washington Post ,
The Atlanta Constitution ,
Chicago Tribune ,
The Denver Post ,
Houston Chronicle ,
Los
Angeles Times , and The Oregonian , worthy representatives of great regions of America.
Day by day, from Sunday, November 30, 1941, until December 14, 1941, they will tell
the tale of a nation at peace, if a troubled peace, then of a nation at war that would lead to victory, to engagement with a troubled world, and to a power scarce dreamed of
in November 1941. Brief sketches of these newspapers, their history, their ownership,
their circulation, their politics, their tone and temper, are included in A Note on Sources .
This is not a story of presidents and dictators, of statesmen and politicians, of
admirals and generals, of arms and the man. It is, instead, the story of the American
people at peace and at war.
2
A WORLD AT WAR, A NATION
AT PEACE
A World at War
In nearly every quarter of the globe the world was at war on this November
30, 1941. In Europe, the 1938 Nazi takeover of Austria had been followed by
the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia at the ill-fated Munich conference later
that year. In September 1939, the Wehrmacht opened the Second World War by
attacking Poland from the west while the Red Army beset it from the east, thus
achieving a fourth partition of Poland. At the third partition, it has been said of
> the Empress Catherine the Great: “She weeps but she takes her share.” Neither
Hitler nor Stalin shed any tears for Poland. The tiny Baltic republics of Latvia,
Lithuania, and Estonia were pawns on the chess board as the fortunes of war
moved them back and forth between the German and Soviet belligerents.
In April 1940, Germany conquered its small neighbor Denmark by telephone
as German forces swept across the narrow straits to dominion over Norway. The
next month, the Wehrmacht launched its assault on Belgium and the Netherlands,
which briefly resisted before surrendering. The French Army (once “the finest
army in the world”) and the British Expeditionary Force were routed from the
soil of France in an evacuation gallant, indeed, but in any practical calculation a
total defeat.
In southwestern Europe, Spain, supported by German and Italian forces, had
just emerged from a devastating civil war that had claimed a million lives. To the
southeast, Germany was on the move again in April 1941, descending in a quick
victory upon Yugoslavia, which subsided in defeat into internecine strife between
Tito’s communists and Michaelovic’s royalist Chetniks. This campaign had liqui-
dated Mussolini’s failed attempt in an unsuccessful war on Greece to imitate Hit-
ler’s blitzkrieg. Another British evacuation from Greece was followed by another
defeat at the hands of German paratroopers in Crete.
War raged across continents. In North Africa, British forces battled Italians and
the Afrika Korps across the Libyan deserts from the suburbs of Cairo to the shores
A World at War, a Nation at Peace 7
of Tripoli. In the horn of Africa, Italian and British forces did battle in Ethiopian
fastnesses. On Africa’s Atlantic coast, an ambitious Free French assault on Dakar
foundered. Competing loyalties between Vichy administrators and the Free French
now left huge expanses of French North Africa sought after by both belligerents.
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, where Hitler sought to gain a strategic position,
British troops, aided by the Free French, forestalled a German takeover of Syria,
although the rest of the Middle East, including Palestine, remained a tinderbox.
In Iran, Russian and British troops enforced a de facto occupation of the country.
War was a bloody fact of life in Asia, fueled by Japanese dreams of empire in
the form of a vast East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. From the 1931 conquest of
Manchuria, and the renewal of hostilities in 1937, Japanese armies were steadily
expanding their grip on vast Chinese domains. Along the borders of Manchu-
ria and Mongolia, Russian and Japanese troops waged bitter and hardly noticed
battles. Now the Japanese were casting longing eyes on much of Southeast Asia,
including British Malaya, French Indo-China, and the Netherlands East Indies, all
rich in the resources Japan lacked.
FIGURE 2.1 “The present situation demands statesmanship of a high order.”
Cartoon by Rollin Kirby. By permission of the Estate of Rollin Kirby Post. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-130775.
8 Last Sunday at Peace: November 30, 1941
There was war not only on land but at sea. There the battles stretched from the
South Atlantic, where the German battleship Graf Spee was cornered, scuttled, and sunk, to the North Atlantic, where the mightiest German battleship, the Bismarck , met its fate. What Churchill called the most critical battle of all was being waged
against the German U-boat fleet, which sought to interdict the flow of the arma-
ments and supplies critical to Britain’s continued resistance, indeed its existence.
Another critical maritime front was in the Mediterranean, where the resupply of
the strategic British base in Malta was essential to the continued flow of British
troops and cargoes to support North African battles.
America’s keenest attention was focused on the air over Britain: there the Few
had taken on Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering’s Luftwaffe in the most remem-
bered and most romanticized of all arenas of combat. The Battle of Britain had
begun in July 1940. On it hung literally the fate of the world. Heavy German
losses on September 15 signaled the survival of the RAF. What was later known
as the Blitz would keep London and other great cities of Britain under a constant
hail of bombs until the following May. The modest British bombing of scattered
German targets was, for the time, all the response it could muster.
*
On this Sunday, November 30, the greatest battles were being fought in the
western reaches of the Soviet Union, where German armies and their allies were
at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad.
On June 21, 1941, Hitler had launched Operation Barbarossa, intending to
demolish his archenemy, the Soviet Union. With two million German troops,
150 divisions strong, and 3,550 tanks supported by 2,000 aircraft, this was the
mightiest armed force the world had ever seen. The Soviet armies, their leadership
recently decimated in Stalin’s purges, had performed poorly in the Winter War
with the outmanned Finns. Few thought they would last for more than a matter
of weeks, or at most months. Indeed, in the opening phases of the campaign, the
German armies took more than two million prisoners in vast battles of encircle-
ment. Unlike the French armies, which had surrendered en masse, the Russians
stood their ground, often even when the blitzkrieg had left them far to the rear.
To the surprise of many, experts and laymen alike, the Soviets were not merely
standing their ground, but on one front had gone over to the offensive. At home in
America, readers of their Sunday papers this November 30 learned that the Soviets
had gained a decisive victory in the Don basin to the south, routing five German divi-
sions and recapturing the key city of Rostov. All this was confirmed by the German
announcement of a withdrawal from some sections of Rostov. There was a sinister
addendum to the German reports. German forces had withdrawn, they said, to per-
mit reprisals against members of the civilian population who had aided the defenders.
In northern seas, Britain reported that two of its submarines had sunk at least eight
German supply and troopships trying to set up a supply line to Petsamo in Finland.
British Commonwealth troops were heavily engaged in Libya’s North African
desert, where a major tank battle was being fought southeast of Rezegh. Britain
claimed that tanks of the Afrika Corps were being contained while infantry action
was strengthening and widening the corridor to the besieged garrison at Tobruk.
A World at War, a Nation at Peace 9
There was no abatement of tension in the Pacific, The New York Times reported.
Japanese bombers were on the attack over the Burma Road, which was the sole
path of supply and reinforcement to the beleaguered armies of China’s Chi-
ang Kai-shek. Japan’s premier, General Hideki Tojo, proclaimed that British and
North American exploitation in Asia must not only be purged, but with a ven-
geance, and that Japan would suffer no interference in her Asiatic sphere.
All this reflected a long history. Traditional American Asiatic policy had been
based on the Open Door, a Chinese market open to all comer
s, and on the inde-
pendence and territorial integrity of China. These were the principles of the
Nine-Power Pact of 1922. But Japan had rudely broken from these principles in
its 1931 takeover of Manchuria and, after the outbreak of hostilities in 1937, had
moved aggressively to conquer vast swaths of China. In 1940 Japan had joined
Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in the Tripartite Pact of Alliance, uniting forces of
aggression across three continents.
A Nation at Peace: Pronouncements and Positions
America was neutral, but there was little doubt where her sentiments and interests
lay. There was support for embattled Britain and sympathy for the Chinese. All
this expressed itself in a U.S. embargo on the scrap metal and iron needed to feed
resource-poor Japan’s armaments industry. When on July 27, 1941, a defeated
France ceded control of its Indo-China empire to Japan, President Franklin D.
Roosevelt responded with a freeze on Japanese assets in the United States.
There followed continuing discussions, negotiations, pronouncements, and posi-
tions, Japan always seeking resources and a free hand in Asia, the United States
always proclaiming the principles of open markets and nonaggression. Thus, in
late November 1941, Japan proposed freedom from U.S. economic restraints and
a free hand in China and in Indo-China. All were contrary to the principles
enunciated by U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull on April 16, 1941: respect for
the territorial integrity of China, nonintervention in the affairs of other countries,
equality of economic opportunity in China and nondisturbance of the status quo
in the Pacific except by peaceful means. Japan, of course, thought otherwise. In
November it proposed that the United States open its trade to Japan and refrain
from hindering Japanese activity in China, to which the response was a demand
for the withdrawal of Japanese troops from China.
On November 20, 1941, Japan made its final offer. Japan would withdraw
from China when a peace settlement was arrived at, but when that would be it did
not say. The United States would cooperate in the sale of commodities to Japan,
restoring commercial relations, supplying Japan with “a requisite quantity of oil,”
and the United States would take no action prejudicial to peace talks between
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