December 1941

by Craig Shirley

  Perhaps Churchill and his government’s bluntness, as opposed to the often less than forthcoming U.S. government, led a small but hardy band of civil libertarians to wonder how many public facts of the war the government should be left in control of. After all, it was December 26, and Americans still had not been told all the facts of Pearl Harbor or the other battles raging in the Pacific. The Roosevelt government often confused the facts of the war with the secrets of the war.

  The U.S. Supreme Court expressed its own opinions on censorship when it ruled seven to zero that corporations and businesses had the right to speak out against labor unions and labor problems without it being considered a violation of the Wagner Act. Organized labor considered the 1935 Wagner Act to be the Holy Grail of the labor movement, as it severely restricted what businesses could do in the face of labor organizing and activities. By overturning this key portion of the Wagner Act, the high court gave the American people a moment to pause and reflect on the power of government to censor and just how much power it should really have.

  Previously, Woodrow Wilson had made it clear that he felt the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was an impediment to progressive society and proved it shortly after the beginning of the First World War by asking Congress for broad powers to censor. His bill called for imprisonment for life, of anybody who distributed in wartime, any information deemed to interfere with U.S. war policies. The goal was to shut down political opposition to Wilson. The bill passed the Senate but died in the House. Yet another bill offered by Wilson after America’s entry into that war would have made it a crime for anyone to publish anything the chief executive deemed to be of use to the enemy. American newspapers rose up in opposition, lead by the Hearst newspaper chain and the bill was heavily amended.44

  It was the simple nature of some men to want to control the knowledge and freedom of other men, and the debate had been at the core of the American experiment since before the days of the Founding Fathers.

  Government bureaucrats were not only capable of dumb mistakes and overreaching, they were also often guilty of dumb overreacting. Deep in the heartland of Pennsylvania, the eternal flame at Gettysburg, signifying a great victory for the United States, was doused by the National Park Service, fearful that the light would be an attractant for enemy bombing of the ancient battlefield and cemetery.45

  Other inanities were mercifully reversed. The “Flying Santa” of New England, a pilot who flew gifts each year to lonely lighthouse keepers and their families, had been initially grounded by military officials. At the last minute they relented, realizing they had gone too far, and the Flying Santa was airborne again, spreading good will and cheer, up and down the coast.

  The bountiful nature of Washington was such that nearly five thousand more meals were prepared for Christmas Day than there were soldiers to eat them. The best laid plans of the District Defense Committee were to arrange for dinners to be prepared in five thousand homes where families had volunteered to take in soldiers for the day. The meals all arrived and everything had been carried out except for one thing; they were missing soldiers because at the last minute, Washington had been declared a war emergency zone and all leaves were cancelled. Servicemen and officers had to stay on base or on their ships for Christmas Day. No one had bothered to tell the organizers, who had expended thousands of hours in an attempt to provide for a home cooked meal for serviceman away from home. Finally, a call was placed to a local post and the officer who answered haughtily replied, “You people in Washington don’t seem to realize that a war emergency does exist.”46

  Actually, the civilian population was all too familiar with the issues of life and death, of sacrifice and charity, and of peace and war. In just a two day period, over 400 people including many children had died in America because of accidents. “Death stalked the highways . . . but also struck 97 times in other forms—fire, guns, lightening, planes.”47 A group of ten in St. Louis had attended midnight Mass, boarded a bus, got into an accident and the ensuing fire killed them on Christmas Day.48

  In New York, a former school teacher, Isabelle Hallin, 32, was found dead by her own hand on Christmas Day, the unlit gas pilots in her stove open. Four years earlier, she’d been falsely accused of serving alcohol to members of the Saugus, Massachusetts, drama club by the town harpy, who a wire story said was a “prominent Saugus clubwoman.”49 The Boston Daily Globe said her accuser was the wife of a local minister.50 Hallin, who was described as a “pretty blonde” lost her job, sued for libel, won the case, and left town to take a job as a copywriter in New York but the false accusations crushed her spirit and she finally took her life. She left no suicide note.51 Massachusetts had a long and cherished history of smearing and ruining people in the name of righteous mean-spirited busybodies.

  Of all the sad stories of December of 1941, the death of Howard Lusk was one of the saddest. He’d been an orphan in Michigan, not knowing anything about any member of his family. He ran away from orphanages continuously until, at age sixteen, he was discovered on the mean streets of Baltimore in the darkest and deepest days of the Great Depression. He was penniless, disheveled and hungry and was taken in by the Travelers’ Aid Society. Eventually, an unknown sister was discovered, who had also been abandoned as a child, like Howard. He’d travelled on the rails for years, North and South, East and West, in a vain attempt to find his parents.

  Eventually, Howard found a home in the army and then as a private in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, found death at the age of 25.52

  CHAPTER 27

  THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OF DECEMBER

  Japs Blast Undefended Manila

  Birmingham News

  Papers in U.S. Hit New Peak in Circulation

  Atlanta Constitution

  Ban Tires for Family Cars

  Chicago Daily Tribune

  On Christmas Day in Rhode Island, Henry “Daddy” Johnson celebrated his 107th birthday. Henry was a former slave, who had met Abraham Lincoln after the Emancipation Proclamation and was in remarkably good health, perhaps because he chose to never marry so he could “stay out of trouble.” Until the prior year, he’d lived unaided in a rough cabin in the woods of the tiny state.1 Andrew Jackson was president when Johnson was born.

  In Missouri, General John M. Claypool, 95, of the former Confederate Army of the Confederate States of America and, by 1941, the national commander of the United Confederate Veterans, was photographed signing up for civil defense work in St. Louis.2 James K. Polk was president when Claypool was born.

  Meanwhile in Georgia, William Jones, 105, led more than three dozen former slaves in prayer “that this country may be victorious, as the Atlanta Ex-Slave Association held its annual Christmas party. . . .”3 Martin Van Buren was president when Jones, a former slave himself, was born.

  In 1941, the grandsons of slaves and grandsons of Confederate generals took up arms together, united to fight a common enemy which had embraced a perverted aim of elevating a “Master Race” over the rest of humanity. Ironically, the U.S. Armed Forces were, at the time, racially segregated, mirroring the color barrier throughout the rest of American society. This great paradox would be tackled with full force, but not until after the war.

  Just then the Democratic political machine in Chicago was having its own problems with race, as the chief justice of the Windy City’s Municipal Court, Edward Scheffler, refused to recognize the appointment of a black attorney, Patrick B. Prescott Jr., as an associate justice on the same bench. The appointment of Prescott was made by the Illinois’ Republican governor, Dwight Green.4

  There was a bond growing between Churchill and Roosevelt. Philosophically, they disagreed on much, one the liberal the other the conservative, but they liked each other personally and respected each other’s political skills. They also shared the same basic worldview, particularly against the backdrop of Nazism. Certainly their love of the sea was an important bond as well. During the First World War, Roosevelt had been assistant secretary of the navy, the same tim
e that Churchill had been First Lord of the Admiralty in Britain.

  They both had suffered political reversals and rejections and had come through those trials as hardened and tougher men. They’d first met in 1918, when they were far younger, somewhat callow, and neither carried a cane. Both were the children of rank and privilege, though Americans would sometimes complain they had no royalty. The Roosevelts, the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, the Whitneys, the Cabots, and the Lodges defied that hollow protest. Classless society, indeed. A mordant ditty made the rounds, among high society and hoi polloi alike: “New England, land of the bean and the cod, where the Lodges talk only to the Cabots, and the Cabots talk only to God.”

  The next time they met wasn’t until, fittingly, on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic, the Augusta, in August 1941 to produce the Atlantic Charter. The document was not a mutual defense treaty but a framework for how democracies should conduct themselves in relation to other democracies. Churchill had sailed to Newfoundland to confer Roosevelt on the Prince of Wales, the very same battleship sunk later by the Japanese.

  While both men were known for their humor, Churchill’s was more intellectual; he could be devastating but was also self-depreciating. At his lunch with the congressional leadership the day before, Senator Josiah Bailey of North Carolina told him that ever since the Boer War, “I have always believed that you would be Prime Minister of Great Britain” to which Churchill replied, “Senator you are wrong. My future is behind me.”5

  The after-action reports continued to roll in for his landmark speech to Congress and they were 100 percent favorable. Everybody knew when the Atlanta Constitution editorialized, “It was a great speech. It was moving, inspiring and full of power” and then singled out his reference to Gettysburg for accolades that the world had indeed changed in those twenty days since December 7, that America was a changed country. Factionalism—at least for the moment—had been set aside.6

  The only countries where it had been predictably, badly reviewed were Germany and Italy. The German “view is that the catastrophic situation in Anglo-American conduct of war has led to this meeting.” The Italian press said it was one more “step by England along path of political submission to United States.”7 In one other regard were Roosevelt and Churchill similar; they were supreme egotists, obsessed with praises but also brickbats.

  Some saw it in a broader context that Congress, even with the bombing of Pearl Harbor and with America losing the war for the Pacific, still needed to hear from Churchill to gain a greater perspective on what was at stake in the war for the world. Churchill had to remind his American audience they his people also “had the same feeling in our darkest days.”8

  Said syndicated columnist David Lawrence, “He brought with him a tonic of reassurance and confidence that makes long range planning for victory seem comprehensible in spite of the setbacks and defeats of the immediate future. Nothing compares with it. . . .”9

  That Saturday, FDR had eight separate meetings, all dealing with the war, and Churchill attended six of them. Some of the meetings dealt with better communications and co-ordination among not just Great Britain, Russia, and America but also Australia, Norway, and Belgium, the latter [two] having “refugee governments.” They also met with Soviet Ambassador Maxim Litvinoff who, like all the Russians it seemed, had to be handled with kid gloves.10

  The war planners were also still trying to decipher the Third Reich’s next move. Some thought a renewed effort in North Africa, where the British had finally gained the upper hand, or an invasion of Turkey or an invasion of Spain. Hitler’s surprise moves of the past seven years had kept his enemies guessing and had not changed.

  Meanwhile, another man of the sea, Admiral Chester Nimitz, reported to Pearl Harbor to assume his new command as head of the Pacific fleet.

  The Japanese agreement with General MacArthur to treat Manila as an “open city” and thus not to be touched by either’s military, lasted exactly one day. By the twenty-seventh, the Japanese renewed their heavy bombing campaign, apparently only waiting for MacArthur to move his anti-aircraft guns out of the city so they could attack with impunity. In all the destruction falling from the sky, not one shot was fired from the ground in retaliation to the silvery and glistening twin engine bombers.11

  Attacking an unarmed city filled with innocent civilians offended sensibilities, no less so than if a country attacked another and then declared war after the attack. War, according to the Geneva Conventions, was supposed to be conducted civilly and that meant not making unnecessary war on noncombatants. “Rivaling if not surpassing the stab-in-the-back assault on Pearl Harbor, the raiders visited terror upon the helpless metropolis . . .12 They sank one and badly damaged another ocean-going liner at anchor in the Manila harbor while also damaging two American war ships. While bulletins and news reports on the battle for the Philippines were readily available, very few photos of the carnage and destruction were appearing in any of the nation’s broadsheets. Many of the stories were angry and graphic though, including the strafing of civilians in the Intramuros district of the old city.

  Even the normally unruffled and fact-based Associated Press wire service hotly reported, “Japan treacherously violated the laws of human decency anew Saturday when Japanese bombers savagely attacked Manila, killing many and setting fires, 24 hours after the Philippine capital had been declared an open, undefended city.” Much of the bombing campaign had focused on the area around a large hotel “where several hundred Americans and Britons were sheltered.”13 Dozens of planes over many hours pounded the city and the first estimates were of fifty killed and many wounded but the count of the dead multiplied as the day went on.

  A 350-year-old church, Santo Domingo, was hit by Japanese bombing planes and caught fire. Much of the old walled portions of the city built hundreds of years earlier by the Spanish were leveled. A radio report said the church had been “smashed by one direct hit.”14 Japanese ground troops were even closer to the city now, just over sixty miles away. Americans and Filipino forces were falling back, again and again, to fight and fall back yet again. The bombing campaign by the Japanese had pretty much wiped out what was left of MacArthur air corps and air fields. Oil fires were everywhere, the Manila port was a bombed-out wreak and the U.S. naval base at Cavite had been spewing black smoke for over two days. Explosions of gas and ammo dumps were frequently heard.

  Cordell Hull, Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, was asked his opinion of the Japanese regard for the international law and the civility of war. The normally understated elderly man let loose comparing the behavior of the Japanese to those of Nazi Germany, saying they were “practicing the barbaric methods of cruelty and inhumanity that Hitler had been using in Europe.” He noted the cruelty also of the Japanese when they invaded China in 1937. Senator Burton K. Wheeler, Democrat of Montana and noted isolationist before December 7, said of the Japanese, “we face only a half-civilized race and in the future they have to be treated as such.”15 Then he could not resist a shot at FDR and Lend–Lease saying how much he regretted not having the bombs to “bomb the hell out of” Japanese cities because “we have given them away!”16

  Bert Silen, an NBC broadcaster in Luzon said over the air, “The cry is for help—help from America. And if this does not come soon, all of us have resigned ourselves to the inevitable.”17 The Japanese were reportedly dropping bombs all over the island and while Tokyo said nothing about violating the rules dealing with open cities, Berlin radio ridiculously said the Japanese did not recognize it as such because MacArthur had not consulted with the civilian population before announcing his decision. The Berlin broadcast was picked up by NBC short-wave radio.

  Late in the evening of the twenty-sixth, the War Department issued a communiqué on the crisis in the Philippines. “Philippine theatre. Fighting in the Lingayen Gulf area north of Manila, is of desultory character. Combat operations in the southeast, in the general vicinity of Lamon Bay, are very heavy. The enemy is being continually reinforced
from fleets of troopships in Lingayen Gulf and off Atimonan. Enemy air activity continued heavy over all fronts. There is nothing to report from other areas.”18 Lamon Bay was on the east coast of the Philippines and Lingayen was on the west coast of the Philippines and Manila was right in between.

  The Japanese navy minister Shigetaro Shimada went before the Diet and claimed that the Japanese had nearly destroyed the British and the American navies and air forces operating in the Western Pacific. “He asserted British and American naval losses included seven battleships sunk, three heavily damaged and one less seriously damaged; two cruisers sunk and six damaged; a destroyer sunk and four damaged; nine submarines, nine gunboats, seven torpedo boats and sixteen merchant [ships] sunk and fifty captured.” He also said they had destroyed 338 American planes in the Philippines and together, including British planes lost, had destroyed 803.”19 Again, the Allies did not dispute the enormous and impressive claims and again, all this was widely printed in the Western newspapers, and there was little the U.S. government could do to censor the stories or gloss them over. The word “retreat” appeared in a number of those stories.20

  Bulletins appeared of how friends and associates of General MacArthur feared for his life. In the “world war” he was known to take risks—some which were thought to be reckless—and his capture by the Japanese would be a huge propaganda victory for Tokyo and equally disheartening for Americans. “MacArthur’s headquarters staff in Manila went to an air raid shelter each time Japanese planes approached, but the general remained in his office, smoking and studying war maps.”21 Of great concern too was the safety of his wife Jean and their son, Arthur. Of the fight for the Philippines, the American High Commissioner, Francis B. Sayre summed it up in one short sentence: “We will fight to the last man.”22