December 1941

by Craig Shirley

  THE SIXTH OF DECEMBER

  “Joint U.S.-Japan Commission

  Is Proposed to End Deadlock”

  Atlanta Constitution

  “Japanese Plea of Self-Defense Coldly Received”

  Washington Post

  “Britain Takes Up Battle Posts in Far East as Crisis Grows;

  Tokyo Reply Keeps Door Open”

  Christian Science Monitor

  “Far East Makes Ready for War”

  Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

  Bob Feller, standout pitcher for the Cleveland Indians, made his major league debut in 1936 at the age of seventeen, but after a meeting with Lt. Commander Gene Tunney, now the director of the navy’s physical conditioning program, he announced that he was planning on enlisting early in the U.S. military reserves. Back home at his father’s farm in Van Meter, Iowa, “Rapid Robert” reasoned that because he expected to be classified 1-A in February of 1942 anyway, he might as well beat the crowd. Feller was intrigued by the idea of being a reservist while still pitching for the Indians on his days off from the military. He paid a visit to the Air Corps at W Field in Ohio, as he was interested in flying planes, having already taken lessons and soloed.1 Both the army and the navy had pursued Feller “concerning his plans for entertaining” their troops.2

  British actor Captain David Niven was just as patriotic. He had it written in his contract that wherever he was making a movie, he had to be allowed to leave if he was called up to join his regiment.3

  The USS Arizona was the pride of the American navy. At 31,400 tons, she was larger than many other battleships in the American fleet. She was older too, having had her keel originally laid in 1916 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Her early days were spent close to home, patrolling the waters off the Atlantic coast, her shakedown cruise a quick jaunt to the Caribbean. The Arizona’s home port was Norfolk, Virginia, until 1921, when she was transferred to Southern California, sometimes making the journey to Hawaii and back. In 1929, she went back to Virginia to be reoutfitted and modernized, which took two years. In August of 1931, she returned to the West Coast and from there was ordered to reposition to Pearl Harbor in 1940, on direct orders of the president.

  The navy had seventeen battleships all told, some launched as long ago as 1912, as the New York and the Texas were. The Arkansas had been launched in 1911. In fact, the fleet was very old, with only the North Carolina and the Washington splashed in the previous year. Virtually all the battleships had been built during or just after the Great War. The Japanese had five less battlewagons, but they tended to be newer and of heavier tonnage. The United States’ seven aircraft carriers were newer than the battleships, but the Lexington and the Saratoga were both launched in 1925. The Enterprise and Yorktown were built in 1936 and the Wasp in 1939. Japan also had seven carriers, but again, they tended to be bigger and lighter and thus faster than their American counterparts.4 The United States had more heavy cruisers than Tokyo, eighteen to twelve, but overlooked was the fact that Japan only had one ocean to worry about. The United States had two—or more—to concern itself with.

  On December 6, there were dozens of large and small ships along with four subs moored at Pearl Harbor: eight battleships, two heavy cruisers, six light cruisers, and twenty-nine destroyers, as well as a handful of PT boats, ocean-going tugs, minesweepers, minelayers, seaplane tenders, repair ships, and two general store ships along with one hospital ship, the Solace. A destroyer, the Helm, was underway at sea; another, the Ward, was patrolling the entrance to the harbor at Pearl.5

  Three carriers had also been stationed at Pearl Harbor: the Enterprise, under the command of Captain George D. Murray; the Lexington, under the command of Captain Frederick C. Sherman; and the Saratoga, with Captain Archibald H. Douglas at the helm.6

  Less than two weeks earlier, on November 28, Adm. Husband E. Kimmel sent Halsey and the Enterprise on an errand to deliver Marine Corps fighter planes to Wake Island.7 On December 5, Kimmel ordered the Lexington to transport twenty-five scout bombers to Midway Island.8 The Saratoga had also left Pearl Harbor for repairs at San Diego9

  The “carriers versus battleships” debate continued unabated and unresolved within the American navy. The Japanese had pretty much decided that the airplane was the weapon of the future, while the navy was pushing ahead with plans to build eighteen carriers—by 1945.

  The foreign correspondent for the Sun newspaper of Baltimore, Marc T. Greene, submitted a story “by mail,” from Manila, which reviewed the American military situation in the Pacific, especially with regard to the airplane. “The rapid expansion of American air strength . . . in the southern and central Pacific area is giving immense satisfaction. . . . The recent acquisition of such islands as Palmyra and Johnston, in easy touch with our Hawaiian bases constitute the most recent evidence of that.”10 Readers were reassured of American air dominance in the Pacific.

  The secretary of war, Henry Stimson, one of the cooler and more respected heads in Washington, nonetheless found himself in a fog, though not yet of war. He was on a military plane headed to Washington from New York, but the fog that had enveloped the city the day before was still too thick, so the flight was diverted to Richmond; upon landing he found he had no way to get back to the nation’s capital. Stimson, seventy-four years of age, did what any resourceful person would do; the cabinet official on whose shoulders would fall the burden of the surely coming war stuck out his thumb and hitched a ride back to Washington.11

  Another form of debate was the soapbox kind, taking place on the street corners of America, including Fifth Avenue in New York. There, proselytizers and preachers, orators and lecturers, along with just plain cranks, attempted to convince small crowds of the curious to either be pro-intervention, anti-intervention, and, depending on which side the soapbox, either denouncing FDR or praising him, denouncing Stalin or praising him, denouncing Charles Lindberg and the America First Committee or praising them. Law enforcement tolerated them as long as no violence broke out and nobody tried to sell anything without a license.12

  On December 6—as with every Saturday—many newspapers ran quotes in advance from the sermons that priests, pastors, ministers, and reverends would give the following day. Nearly all dealt harshly with Adolf Hitler, war, and realistically about the human condition and the eternal struggle of free men against tyranny. Though they followed the teaching of a martyr, they did not preach martyrdom for their flocks but instead exhorted them to fight. Said the Reverend Louis St. Clair Allen of the Brooklyn Methodist Church: “The cross has not departed out of human affairs. If an enemy persists in destroying us, our only recourse is slavish submission, death or defense of liberty. I do not choose death or submission. I believe we must give ourselves for our liberties.”13

  Little had changed as far as America was concerned by Saturday, December 6. Diplomats and political observers were still kicking the embers and reading the tea leaves of the conflicting messages sent by the Japanese over the previous few days. Yet another Nipponese source accused America of trying to “pass the buck” in the Far East, whatever that meant.14 President Roosevelt had convened his weekly meeting with the cabinet on Friday, and afterward the White House said it would have no further comment on a new 150-word official Japanese communiqué.15

  So reporters went to Cordell Hull, who said he had nothing to say and referred them back to the White House. Official Washington, for once anyway, had nothing to say on a grave matter, including in the editorial pages of most newspapers, which had no new take on the grim matter in the Pacific. The New York Times did take a hard line, urging FDR to stand by the government of the pro-American Chiang Kai-shek forces in China. But even spokesmen for the Third Reich had no comment regarding matters in the Far East. The Christian Science Monitor said the situation was “momentarily in suspense.”16 The Monitor, based in Boston, occasionally ran editorials in German, as there was a heavy Germanic population in the area.17

  Another editorial took the U.S. government to task, though, for not b
eing frank and transparent in announcing the military buildup during the emergency. In fact, back in October, FDR had prohibited any more announcements on the production of new airplanes, but publications kept announcing them anyway. The Monitor concluded, “[T]hose in the opposition camp argue that a full exposé of America’s skyrocketing production might have persuaded the Japanese to forgo further aggression in the Far East.”18

  The Japanese were sticking to their guns, though, saying the troops sent to Indochina were to protect Thai security and that they had the permission of the Vichy French government to move troops into Indochina because of Chinese troop movement in the region. They also introduced a new argument, their own version of a “Monroe Doctrine”: the affairs of the Far East were of no concern to Washington.19

  Tokyo conveniently overlooked—or expected America to overlook—the fact that Vichy France was a wholly owned subsidiary of Adolf Hitler, including all French possessions and military hardware, or that America’s Monroe Doctrine said nothing about the United States abusing or invading her neighbors.

  The British had been supplying Chinese forces along the Burma Road, and more and more analysts thought invading Thailand to then cut the strategically important venue was the real goal of the Japanese.20

  Some of the Saturday newspapers reviewed the impasse, hashing it over. “An uneasy peace hung over the Pacific today as the United States waited for Japan to makes its choice between conciliation or further attempts at conquest in the Far East.”21 Negotiations that had started seven months earlier had made no progress whatsoever, but both sides acknowledged they were learning more about the negotiations from the newspapers than from the actual meetings and documents.

  Suddenly out of Tokyo came a new proposal, courtesy of a member of the influential Privy Council. Count Kentaro Kaneko suggested a “Japanese-American Commission to iron out the Pacific deadlock.” Kaneko, eighty-eight years old, was respected and a student of American culture. He suggested officials from various walks of life be appointed to the commission. The New York Times saw hope in the proposal, writing, “[A]n impression prevailed in diplomatic circles that something approaching a status quo may have been reached temporarily that might permit the exploratory conversations to continue with less disturbance.”22

  However, Japanese nationals were being hurriedly withdrawn from Panama, British North Borneo, Malaya, India, Ceylon, and other countries, just as they had already begun withdrawing diplomats from Mexico.23 Also, the Japan Institute in New York announced abruptly it would close and the director and his immediate staff would depart for home while another “132 Japanese nationals . . . applied for passage back to Japan.” However, approximately two thousand Japanese nationals in the greater New York area had no plans to repatriate as far as anybody knew.24

  A government spokesman in Tokyo, Tomokazu Hori, held a press conference and said it was all just one “big misunderstanding on the part of the United States government regarding our policy in the Far East.” Washington “seems to allege that we are following a policy of force and conquest in establishing a military despotism.”25

  Australia had some reason to believe that about the Japanese and hastily reconvened their War Cabinet as a result because the “Pacific crisis had reached a new and graver stage.” All Christmas leaves were canceled for Aussie troops, “a million gas masks for the civilian population” were ordered, and their naval ships were being convoyed to the Pacific, though an official said all the precautions did not “‘mean that war is inevitable’ with Japan.” But there was internal debate in Australia over the government’s power to conscript men of fighting age and whether Australians should fight for England, just as there had been during the Great War. The Aussie Labor Party opposed the draft, declaring “a volunteer army is always more effective.”26 War measures were also taking place in Thailand, “the most directly menaced,” as well as the Netherland East Indies.27

  The Churchill government implemented its own emergency measures in the Far East including “recalling all fighting men to their posts” in Singapore and prepared for a “state of readiness.” The British referred to Singapore as their “Gibraltar of the Orient.” It was announced the sale of gasoline would be suspended in Shanghai, which had become a virtual ghost town, as commercial shipping had slowed to nothingness over the past several months. Those not of British ancestry were forbidden from leaving British Malaya, and rumors swirled that Manila would soon be evacuated of noncombatants. The Associated Press also reported, “Without explanation, Japan recalled two attachés of the Japanese government in Washington. (The German radio identified them as military attaches, Col. Tadamuri and Lt. Col. Ariuo Uehida.)”28

  In character, the Australian government issued a blunt statement: “We are fully alive to the Japanese threat and are not afraid of it.”29 The pro-West Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek also issued a statement, predictably leveling Tokyo, calling its response to FDR “an insult to the intelligence of the American people.”30

  Many in the West felt that the combined military forces of the “ABCD” powers, as Tokyo called them—American, British, China, Dutch—were more than a match for the Japanese should they press on with their invasion and consolidation of the Far East. In the Philippines alone there were “a dozen divisions, one American and 11 Filipino, several hundred planes, two heavy cruisers, several destroyers and 18 submarines.”31

  Douglas MacArthur was confident his forces would repel any Japanese attack on the Philippines and that he was “well-prepared . . . to meet land onslaughts from the Japanese in the event that military folly leads Japan to war with the United States. . . . The air arm of America is a long one. From the Philippines it can sweep to and over Japan with ease, and back to its insular bases.”32 But Japanese air officials brushed off MacArthur’s swagger, authoritatively pointing out that the B-17 planes under his command were of the older “B and C type with a range of 2200 miles which is insufficient to Japan, from Manila, and return.”33

  Some, however, were worried instead about the power of the Japanese fleet and counseled a more aggressive posture by the American navy. The notion was floated of moving the American fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor to the Philippines to help MacArthur stave off an invasion but “this could not be brought to the Philippines without great danger, because the cruising range of the fleet is only 2500 miles, and it would be necessary to make one jump of more than that distance without refueling. . . . This would be a risky operation for it would require the use of the whole American battle fleet and would leave the West Coast open to Japanese raiders. It probably will not be tried.”34

  A new $8 billion defense bill had passed the House 309–5 and was headed for the Senate, where its passage was all but assured.35 America Firsters or no America Firsters, no one on either side of the aisle was going to allow themselves to be accused of being unpatriotic, or miss out on federal contract goodies for their states.

  The funding bill could not have come along at a better time, as a new report out by the U.S. Senate scored the army for pitiable recreational facilities at bases across the country. With the exception of Ft. Mead, all had extremely poor sporting facilities. Camp David in North Carolina had eighteen basketballs but no basketball courts. Pine Camp in New York had plenty of baseballs and bats, but no baseball fields. Camp Blanding in Florida, with a compliment of fifty thousand men, had “no basketball courts, no football fields, no handball courts, no gymnasium—but 25 chapels.” A congressman called the situation “ridiculous.”36

  The navy did a far better job taking care of their personnel, especially their officers, than did the army. The navy’s air base in Miami looked like a “superswank country club.” It had tennis courts, bars, squash courts, a movie theatre, and swimming pools (one for officers and cadets and the other for enlistees) for the pilots to enjoy when not in training.37 The competition between the army and the navy, and the Marine Corps and the navy, was not without basis, as the other two branches thought the navy elevated th
emselves to be the royalty of the American military. But navy pilots could also be dangerous and foolish. Two pilots were released from a navy prison after an investigation in which they had clearly been hot dogging in Alabama, when they flew too low over a turnip field in Alabama and decapitated a woman with the wing of their plane, according to news reports.38

  The navy was also building dozens of temporary structures on the Mall between the Lincoln Memorial and the U.S. Capitol. Always referred to as “temporary,” the Public Buildings Administration said they could be torn down faster than they were built and the plan was to do just that after the “emergency.”39

  For the first time in FDR’s nine years in office unemployment was slowly tracking downward, after years of joblessness in the high teens and low 20s. The economy had perked up considerably as a result of the war effort, with the government plowing billons into defense contractors. Yet, as corporations began to finally show a profit after long years of languishing, Washington began talking up a new tax on corporate dividends, cutting into investors’ profits.40 Congressman Carl Vinson of Georgia was touting legislation that would cap corporate profits, with the excess turned over to Washington, even as Wall Street had been dwindling down since September.41 But the guns versus butter versus success issue seemed settled to the Brain Trusters of the New Deal. Government would dispense and control all.

  Regardless, a profound shift was occurring in the administration’s priorities that met sharp resistance from the eternally crusading First Lady and her allies among the more liberal New Dealers, such as Vice President Henry Wallace. Funding for social programs was increasingly subordinated to ramped-up preparation for what seemed like inevitable war. The more conservative advisers and cabinet members in FDR’s orbit, always ambivalent about the New Deal anyway, were starting to win the day, as the president shifted his attention from domestic concerns to the existential threat posed by geopolitical crises abroad. By 1941, the pendulum was swinging away from butter, and inexorably to guns. Ironically, the transition to rearmament also provided a Keynesian spending boost that helped ameliorate unemployment. A lasting structural change to the American economy was unfolding.