December 1941

by Craig Shirley

  The Jews of Europe were also grounded in reality, a monstrously horrible one: “the Paris municipal government ordered new measures against Jews in the German-occupied capital and surrounding Seine department.” Jews were required to notify Gestapo officials of any change in their addresses. “For the last week, the Gestapo has been rounding up Jews and sending them to concentration camps. Travelers arriving at Vichy said several thousand had been arrested.”37

  Navy sources also revealed that German U-boats had been sighted off the Eastern Seaboard, sometimes within eyesight of land. The main Philippine island of Luzon was under increased assault by Japanese forces, which had made yet another successful beachhead on the island.38 American and Filipino soldiers and flyers were doing their best under impossible circumstances.

  Just a few weeks earlier, most Americans could probably not find Luzon on a map. Now they were learning about faraway places they had never before heard of, with odd and even funny names, but which were quickly becoming very important to them and their country. Just that day, they learned that American forces on Mindanao near the town of Davao were engaged in “some of the most serious battling of the war,” where the Japanese had opened yet a new front in the fight for the Philippines. Meanwhile, the British had taken Derna and El Mekili in North Africa.39

  From the Russian Front, “Tarussa, sixty-five miles northeast of Kaluga, and the town of Kanino, southeast of Kaluga, also were reported captured. Kaluga is an important rail junction on the line running south to Bryansk and Kiev.”40 They also learned that American fighter planes had downed four Japanese bomber planes over Chungking.41 However, twenty-four Japanese planes bombed, again, this time hitting the U.S. base at Cavite near Manila Bay.

  The situation in Hong Kong worsened for the British. Giant fires were seen in the area, and there were reports of hand-to-hand fighting in the streets. Wake Island was enduring its thirteenth day of attack. They’d been undergoing an underreported story of “long hammering by bombs and shells, of endless hours without rest or sleep, of the dogged spirit which has turned aside attack after attack in more than 300 hours of almost constant attack.”42 The island was no more than 2,600 acres, and “the highest point above sea level is 15 feet.”43 The tough marines and navy seamen on the island repelled another two attempts by the Japanese to take the little atoll.

  The leaders of the Marine Corps were getting ready to roll out their new recruiting poster for billboards across the country. It featured a “rough and ready marine, against a background of the sea and ships, holding his hand out to greet prospective enlistees.” The caption read, “Want Action? Join the United States Marine Corps.”44 The battle for Wake Island certainly served as an inspiration for the poster and for the American people. The Japanese had, at the outset of the war, claimed they had captured Wake Island, but the marines and the navy said “nuts”.

  Enlisting was one thing. That only began the process. Young enlistees only had a few days to settle their civilian affairs; break the news to alternatively angry, scared, and proud parents; tell their friends and employers, maybe a girlfriend or at least the girl next door; pass the physical and then report to a recruiting office to swear their loyalty to the Constitution of the United States and to follow the orders of the president of the United States and their superior officers. A recruiting doctor observed that Northern boys had “good feet and bad teeth,” while Southern boys had just the opposite. His theory was boys in the South liked to go barefoot while boys in the North ate “too much candy and soft foods.”45 Ironically, both bad teeth and flat fleet could earn a young man a 4-F designation, though other restrictions against serving, including hernias, hay fever, or a “nasal deformity,” had been lowered.46

  Often, towns would hold parades for the young men with good teeth and good feet, cheering and watching them march off even as they were still in “civvies,” with bands, and crowds, and fanfare, before they boarded a bus or a train and headed for six weeks of hell in boot camp. It was all rough going, learning how to kill other men, eat lousy food, and live in drafty barracks with no air conditioning and poor heating, and drill instructors yelling at them all the time. One “boot” at Fort Dix swore the breakfast sausages were stuffed with sawdust. At no time did any “boot” have any privacy. They marched together, ate together, showered together, and slept together. They went into the military as little more than boys but came out as men, forever changed. The marines had the roughest boot camps of all, complete with hazing and harassing. Of the first twenty-eight days in camp, nine were spent learning how to shoot and handle a rifle.47

  There had never been a military man in the history of the nation who did not say service in uniform did not change his life forever. Friendships also sprang up, some that lasted a lifetime—however short that might now be.

  The day had been relatively quiet on the Malayan Peninsula, but most thought the Japanese were regrouping for a massive assault on Singapore. American and British troops were earning their combat pay. American military leaders told reporters that, despite all the problems, they believed MacArthur would hold on to the Philippines with his 130,000 troops, despite the fact that supplies were running perilously low. MacArthur also had maintained the warm support of Philippine president Manuel Quezon.48 It would be difficult. The Philippines all told had over 300 separate islands and atolls that, combined, made up more shoreline than that of the entire continental United States.49

  It was not known if the island redoubt of Corregidor had yet been attacked, but the telltale smoke associated with antiaircraft gunfire was seen over the island. Also, the Philippines were overrun with Japanese sympathizers. At one location, American servicemen discovered a mirror in a tree, obviously put there as a signal to Japanese bomber pilots.50

  One of the cushiest U.S. Army assignments of the war may have been to the new garrison on the island of Bermuda. The closest the island came to war was having the British name one of their bomber planes after it, or maybe a visit from the occasional German submarine. True, it was out of harm’s way, away from the action, but if eating cold K-rations in a wintry foxhole in Europe was not your cup of tea or if sweating out the war in the engine room of a warship in the Pacific was not up your alley, then pulling easy duty on a balmy island while still getting a ribbon on your chest was a good way to go. And to top it off, there were regular Pam Am Clipper fights between the island and Miami.

  Meeting the press the day before, FDR was in a lousy mood, “his face graven and serious, his manner brusque and preoccupied. Mr. Roosevelt started talking without preamble, without a trace of a smile. As somber as his heavy black suit and the lines bracketing his mouth, the President paced off his conference quickly.” After a long day, he slipped out for a “pre-dinner swim and an evening of work.” The president’s health was markedly deteriorating, but this fact was kept hidden from an anxious nation that needed confidence in its leaders. The White House staff also was burning the midnight oil.51

  A mini-crisis developed over the weekend when Secretary of State Cordell Hull had to angrily knock down a rumor that the State Department had “asked the Navy to suspend patrolling activities west of Hawaii during his pre-war negotiations with Japanese diplomats here.” He blamed Fifth Columnists who were “spreading the foulest reports that the most mendacious mind can conceive.”52 The accusation was that Hull wanted to create a peaceful atmosphere by having the navy stand down, as it would send a signal to the Japanese that the United States did not suspect them of possible dirty pool. It would have been the ultimate white flag.

  The issue over a congressional investigation into the events at Pearl Harbor was slipping once again out of its box, having already been scotched twice by the White House. Senator Robert Taft, Republican of Ohio, spoke out and said that just because Roosevelt had created his own blue ribbon committee, it should not preclude a Capitol Hill inquiry from going forward.53

  Another mini-crisis coming out of FDR’s Business-Labor meeting was that unions were balking no
w at abiding by a no-strike pledge if they could not protect their “closed shops.” As more and more men and women were coming into the war industries, it was not clear that they had to be compelled to join unions as they had for years. The goal had been to get unions to agree to no strikes for the duration of the war, but when this became a sticky wicket, Congress threatened more legislation expanding the no-strike laws.

  The next day, Sunday the twenty-first, was the championship game for the NFL. The game, to be played in Chicago, would feature the “Monsters of the Midway,” the Bears, against the New York Giants. The Bears, the defending champions, were heavily favored, and were coached by the legendary George Halas, aka “Papa Bear.” But with everything going Chicago’s way in advance of the game, ticket sales were way off, and game officials were not expecting anything close to a sellout.

  Fans could be forgiven for having other things on their minds.

  CHAPTER 21

  THE TWENTY-FIRST OF DECEMBER

  Report Sub Attacks Off U.S.

  Chicago Sunday Tribune

  Son Is Not Dead, Navy Apologies, Gloom Vanishes

  Boston Sunday Globe

  Arab Cheers Greet British at Derna

  Washington Post

  If Saturday the twentieth had been a day of big little news, Sunday the twenty-first was a day of little big news. Under giant black headlines: “The Navy said . . . it had received unconfirmed reports that two oil tankers had been attacked by submarines . . . and that one had sent out an S.O.S.” The two ships were the 6,912-ton ship Emidio and the 6,771-ton Agriworld.1

  The Agriworld had been only a hundred miles from San Francisco, en route to Los Angeles.2 The crew of the Agriworld put on their life belts, fearful of being sunk. Despite being fired upon repeatedly by the submarine’s deck gun, rolling seas threw off the aim of the gun crew, and she survived. The attack on the Emidio, less lucky, was off of Blunts Reef, near the tiny California town of Eureka, only fifteen miles off shore. The ship had “sustained a torpedo attack.” The navy later sighted the crippled ship and radioed that it was riding “low in the water.” Both ships escaped, despite the Emidio being hit repeatedly by shells from the unidentified submarine. The crews for both ships clearly identified submarines, however no markings.3

  Navy and army planes searched for the attacking warships, but to no avail. Several days earlier, an unidentified submarine had been sighted off of Puget Sound and military planes had engaged the vessel, firing on it, but this was only revealed several days later.4 Some officials suspected the Japanese had a secret, hidden sub base in Latin America. One man claimed he’d seen Japanese fishing boats hauling cement there for years.5

  These attacks on the oil tankers, plus the new sightings of German U-boats off the East Coast, brought the war much closer than it had been before. After two weeks of unremitting war news and emergency announcements, the American people could be forgiven if they’d become a bit disconsolate. Telltale signs emerged of flagging morale. Still, “news of the submarine actions of San Francisco did not disturb the outward calm of Los Angeles. Church bells echoed all the morning and the roads were clogged with the usual Sunday traffic.”6

  It was also confirmed that an American commercial vessel, the Cynthia Olson, with a cargo of lumber, some 700 miles from the West Coast, had been fired upon and hit by a Japanese submarine on the day of December 7th.7 The Cynthia Olson had been sunk with all hands lost.

  More bad news came from the Far East when it was learned that communications with the city of Davao on the island of Mindanao had been cut off. The Japanese had made landfall the day before and now General MacArthur could not get any information out of that battle zone.8 “No word has been received from there since yesterday afternoon.” It was reported the Japanese had come ashore “in fairly substantial forces . . . [T]he Davao campaign may develop into the most important land battle yet in the Philippines archipelago.”9 The goal of the Japanese was to quickly build airfields on conquered territories and establish air supremacy as soon as possible.

  The situation was also deteriorating in Manila. Douglas MacArthur warned that looters would face the death penalty. Before the blackout came, reports got out that the Moro tribe, a tough bunch of bolo-swinging native warriors, joined the fight against the Japanese on Mindanao.10

  MacArthur then discovered, to his dismay, that twenty Japanese ships including destroyers and submarines were engaged in the battle for the Philippines: more than he’d previously known about.11 The odds were stacking up against the optimistic general.

  Underestimating the Japanese was proving costly. The Japanese were thorough and had well-developed plans. Several months before the attack on Hawaii and other military installations—including Guam—it turned out that a Japanese ship suffered a deliberate wreck at Guam just so the officers and crew could get a close good look at the island’s defenses—defenses they later overcame.12

  Hong Kong was teetering. “The Japanese say they have the city of Victoria and that lorries flying the scarlet ball of the rising sun are roaring through the streets, packed with disarmed British soldiers; the remnants of the British garrison are encircled on the peak of the island, Mount Victoria.”13 The Japanese had already captured or destroyed large quantities of oil, rice, vehicles, medicines, and much of the colony was aflame. The slim hope was for relief by Free Chinese forces. No relief for the gutsy British troops hiding and fighting a last-gasp guerilla battle was contemplated by London.

  While the loss of Hong Kong to the Japanese would be devastating, the loss of the strategically located Singapore would be cataclysmic. Singapore had deep sea anchorages, docks for repairing large ships, “workshops for machinery and guns, one of the most powerfully transmitting stations in the world, and huge underground oil and armament depots.” But Britain’s “crown jewel” was even more than that. “The vital significance of Singapore is not simply because it lies athwart trade routes supplying both the United Kingdom and the United States; it is the one spot in that part of the world able to accommodate large fleets in an emergency.”14 From Singapore, attacks could be launched against Sumatra, Borneo, and Australia. For the U.S. fleet to have a port in the Far East from which to wage war, it had to be Singapore. The facilities at Guam were unfinished and had been lost to the Japanese; the facilities at the Philippines were inadequate. If the navy lost Singapore, it would push the United States back thousands of miles.

  For all of these reasons and many others, the Allies were fighting hard to hold on to Singapore. “British units fighting along the 400-mile Malaya peninsula leading to Singapore include English infantrymen, Scottish Highlanders, Australians, Sikhs, Moslem riflemen, Gurkhas and Malayans.”15

  Not all the news was bad. Wake Island was still holding on. “Three days after the Japanese had claimed the island, two days after the President had warned the nation to expect its loss, the isolated band of heroes sent out one of the most astounding communiqués of the war. They still held Wake. They had repulsed four landing attacks. They had succeeded in sinking a Japanese cruiser and a Japanese destroyer. Whether they held the island indefinitely depended upon reinforcements and supplies but already they had taught Nippon that what looked like a pushover on paper can be hell on earth when it is defended by the United States Marines. It was in the tradition . . . of the Argonne, Chateau Thierry, and Belleau Wood, where Marine marksmanship and Marine bayonets literally exterminated the pride of the German Army,” boasted the Boston Sunday Globe.16 Now, of course, there was a new German army to defeat.

  The Saturday Evening Post ran a long story which detailed that the Third Reich was planning for a five-year war against the Allied Powers. Like the citizens of England, Japan, and America, their government was not only asking for sacrifices from the citizenry, they were demanding it. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels went on state radio to call on the German people to donate blankets to their soldiers on the Russian front.17 The Germans meanwhile were embarking on a massive shipbuilding program. Their shipyard
s were operating twenty-four hours a day.

  War was not only all hell, it was also vile. As the German troops fell back from their thrusts into Russia, they desperately needed transportation of any kind. As a rouse, they announced in Russian towns that free salt was available. Peasants came from everywhere via horse and sleigh when the word spread of the free salt. Except there was no free salt. The Germans took the horses, the sleighs, and shot any Russians who protested the theft.

  For Hitler and Nazi Germany, there were no longer civilians, women or children. Any human being, in any circumstance, was fair game. The German people themselves would eventually learn the terrible consequences of total war on their own soil, but that would come later, when the tables had turned against them. In 1941, at the apex of their power, the German conquerors cut a murderous swath through every invaded country, with no compunction and with complete impunity. They were particularly savage toward the Russians, whom they considered untermenschen, subhuman.18

  The War Department, concerned about the nation’s morale, began churning out stories of heroes and of American successes. The tale of Captain Colin P. Kelly, Jr. who had sacrificed his life to sink a Japanese war ship had been in the paper for days. It was later learned Captain Kelly had ordered six of the crew in his plane to parachute to safety, leaving him and two others to finish the mission in their shot up and battered plane. After his demise, he was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross by Douglas MacArthur.19