Stanley Weintraub - Pearl Harbor Christmas: A World at War, December 1941

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Table of Contents

ALSO BY STANLEY WEINTRAUB

A Stillness Heard Round the World:
The End of the Great War, November 1918
Victoria: An Intimate Biography
Long Days Journey into War: December 7, 1941
Disraeli: A Biography
The Last Great Victory: The End of World War II, July-August 1945
Uncrowned King: The Life of Prince Albert
MacArthurs War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero
Edward the Caresser: The Playboy Prince Who Became Edward VII
Silent Night: The Remarkable Christmas Truce of 1914
Charlotte and Lionel: A Rothschild Love Story
General Washingtons Christmas Farewell:
A Mount Vernon Homecoming, 1783
Iron Tears: Americas Battle for Freedom,
Britains Quagmire, 1775-1783
Eleven Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944
15 Stars: Eisenhower, MacArthur, Marshall
General Shermans Christmas: Savannah, 1864

FOR RODELLE

Prelude

IN TOKYO ON THE MORNING of December 21, 1941, the Asahi Shimbun published on its front page the first photo received of the attack on Pearl Harbor. It had been flown in by a dive bomber from the strike force returning to the Home Islands. Approaching Hawaii on its last leg from Washington was an investigating commission appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and chaired by Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts. It would be the first of many hearings on the worst military catastrophe in American history. As its plane approached Oahu, smoke, although no longer in billowing black clouds, rose from the wreckages in the harbor area. At aircraft height the upturned hulls of the capsized Oklahoma and Utah resembled beached whales.

Justice Roberts would convene his inquiry the next day, as across the nation the President expected Prime Minister Winston Churchill for dinner at the White House. Pearl Harbor had made them open wartime allies. One small logistic problem intervened, however. Late that morning the Prime Minister was still at sea. The battleship Duke of York was plowing through winter winds and heavy swells as it approached Chesapeake Bay. By radio, assuming a calmer Atlantic, Churchill had accepted Roosevelts invitation. On docking in the upper Chesapeake, it would be only a 120-mile drive to Washington. Yet, increasingly anxious at the warships slow progress, the PM was, as his personal physician, Sir Charles Wilson, recalled, like a child in his impatience to meet the President. He spoke as if every minute counted. It was absurd to waste time. He must fly.

Front page of the December 21, 1941, morning edition of Asahi Shimbun with the first picture of the Pearl Harbor attack, showing bombed Hickam Field by Japanese planes. Courtesy Asahi Shimbun

U.S. battleships under air attack at Pearl Harbor, as photographed by a Japanese pilot. U.S. Navy

Radioing his ambassador, the Earl of Halifax, the PM requested help. Impossible to reach Mouth Potomac before 6:30 P.M. which would be too late.... I should like to come by airplane to [a] Washington airfield reaching you in time for dinner. Halifax telephoned the White House, which ordered a squat twin-engine Lockheed Lodestar to Hampton Roads, where the battleship would dock. Churchill, his close adviser Lord Beaverbrook (proprietor of the Evening Standard and Minister of Supply), and several aides boarded the aircraft for the forty-five minute flight up the Potomac. The others awaited a special train to Washington sent by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, which would bring them to the capital by midnight.

Early winter darkness had fallen. Emerging from years of blackoutsships also traveled without running lights to evade German submarinesthe party aboard the transport plane was amazed to see the spectacle below. Few Americans anywhere had yet to follow recent blackout instructions. It was Christmas.

The Anacostia Flats Naval Air Station was across the Potomac from the new National Airport. Awaiting at the tarmac was a long, black limousine that the Treasury Department had confiscated from Al Capone. The Chicago gangster was now in prison. Roosevelt had been sitting in the car, waiting. Please on no account come out to meet me, Churchill had radioed. As the aircraft taxied to a stop and Churchill emerged, gripping a walking stick to which what the English called an electric torch was attached, for use in navigating blackouts, the President was lifted out and was standing, leaning against the limo, propped by his locked leg braces and a cane. I grasped his strong hand with comfort and pleasure, Churchill recalled.

WHEN RADIO REPORTS that Hawaii had been attacked reached England, Churchill was at his official residence, Chequers, at dinner with Lend-Lease administrator W. Averell Harriman and Ambassador John G. Winant. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, the PM wrote in his memoirs, but at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! Curiously, Adolf Hitler was equally delighted about his prospects once Pearl Harbor had given him Japan as a partner. We cant lose the war at all, he thought. We now have an ally which has never been conquered in 3,000 years.

After the news of Pearl Harbor, Churchill claimed to have slept the sleep of the saved and thankful. Actually, he stayed up until three talking with Winant about what to do next, and he determined to go to Washington. Seven months earlier, on May 3, feeling increasingly isolated and with German submarines strangling British lifelines worldwide, he had desperately cabled Roosevelt pleading for immediate American entry into the wara plea he had made even earlier, in June 1940, as France surrendered to Hitler. In neither case could the President intervene overtly. Americans were unready, and Congress would have resisted. Roosevelt had to inch his way toward rescue, as he did symbolically when Britains new envoy arrived in January 1941.

GREETING CHURCHILL PERSONALLY remained an unusual honor for a head of government, especially when proffered by a long-incapacitated president, who had done so only once beforeand then, too, to emphasize his solidarity with Britain. Ambassador Halifax, once of the influential appeasement fraternity in England, had crossed the Atlantic on the battleship George V and was greeted in Chesapeake Bay, six miles from Annapolis, by the presidential yacht Potomac, with Roosevelt aboard. Viscount Halifax then traveled into Washington with FDR. It was a precedent-shattering gesture, and Halifax was ever afterward Edward to Roosevelt.

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