December 1941 (63 page)

Christmas was tough at the home of J.E. Ingraham of Eastaboga, Alabama, as he mourned the loss of his son, George. George Ingraham had been killed the morning of the seventh—just after mailing his father a Christmas card.
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Despite the war, or perhaps because of it, meetings in Washington on the future of the new medium, television, were going forward. Few in America had a television, but some government officials and executives with the National Broadcasting Co. saw its potential, primarily as a learning device and tool to alert many people on war developments. “The current discussions by N.B.C. are based on three main points: Increased use of television as a training device through programs dealing with air-raid precautions, fire control, first aid, etc; large screen television to be used in public auditoriums for civilian defense programs; and entertainment.”
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The government considered moving nonessential agencies out of Washington to accommodate all the new military personnel and war industry civilians flooding into the city. Officials were also making plans to evict—forcibly if necessary—private companies from their places of business as well. To meet the needs of the navy alone, huge temporary buildings made out of aluminum were constructed on the mall, row after row of them. They looked like giant mobile homes and were horrendously ugly. The temporary buildings were still on the Mall twenty-eight years later when President Richard Nixon ordered them dismantled, as they should have been at the end of the war.

FDR “asked” the governors of the forty-eight states to consolidate all their public employment services “under the federal government” so as to “facilitate the rapid recruiting of defense workers.” Yet a new agency, the State and Territorial Employment Services, was set up immediately. FDR said that a meeting in Washington to discuss the matter was“waste motion.”
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In essence, Roosevelt was federalizing the states' labor forces.

His new Bureau of Censorship began to flex its muscles, but the more it did so, the more some civil libertarians questioned the wisdom of such an agency. On the one hand, FDR abhorred censorship and said so. On the other, he saw the usefulness in chilling leakers and potential leakers, while putting a fright into anyone who might step over the line and communicate too much information from the government, on the radio or via a private letter. Congress was going one step further though. A bill that would “permit President Roosevelt to take control of telephone and telegraph facilities” was approved by the Interstate Commerce Committee. Potentially, it meant FDR could also control the “transmitting equipment of press services.”
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The Associated Press and United Press were the lifeblood of hundreds of newspapers around the country, and without the wires, their newspapers would be reduced to covering only farm reports and social doings.

Congress was still considering a plan to make Daylight Savings Time the law of the nation in order to ameliorate many problems associated with blackouts and air raids, while at the same time lengthening the workday.
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Also under active consideration were federal laws enforcing and taking control of the blackouts in all the states.
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The head of the federal office of Civil Defense, New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, was under fire. “Responsible sources reported that high official White House circles were displeased over the Mayor's handling of the civil defense problem.” Specifically, “under criticism were the false air raid alarms in New York last week, the air raid drill staged for newsreels in Times Square . . . and the complete failure . . . of the well-advertised test of a giant siren that proved virtually inaudible.”
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These were just three of the hundreds of expensive mistakes going on in the country.

Even at its most efficient, war is nothing if not expensive. The cost of war kept spiraling upwards. It was calculated that in December 1941, it cost the country an appalling $729 per second, but by 1942, it would be up to an astounding $1,400 per second.
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Some in academia had been slow to join the war effort. Two weeks after the declaration of war, the presidents of Wesleyan College, Colby College, and other schools pleaded with their undergraduate males to stay with their studies and get their degrees (and continue paying their tuitions) while others, including Harvard, finally got into the swing of things.

The president of Harvard said third-year law students could receive “war degrees” on a case-by-case basis with an abbreviated last year. Smith College organized an Ambulance Corps, Brown University added “14 military courses,” Yale was offering degrees in three years, and Simmons College in Massachusetts was holding evening courses in national defense.
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By the afternoon of Friday, December 19, the Japanese were claiming to have taken Hong Kong, in spite of the claims of the British military. If the Japanese claim were true, it would be devastating. Just hours earlier, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox spoke to the 1942 graduating class of Annapolis, whose graduation had been accelerated by six months because of the war. He told the 547 graduates that the army and the navy had repulsed a third attack by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, but this was false as there had been no third attack. He also asserted that with thirty minutes notice, the Japanese air invasion would have been blown out of the sky. “There is no question at all, in light of what transpired, that half an hour's warning of the approach of the Japanese planes would have made all the difference.”
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Who knew?

However, Knox also told the young men in white dress uniforms what was becoming obvious to all now: the Japanese had by far the largest naval force in the Western Pacific.

“By far.”
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CHAPTER 20
THE TWENTIETH OF DECEMBER

U.S. Reveals Foe Operating Subs off East Coast

Birmingham News

Hong Kong Defenders Staging Last Ditch Fight

Yuma Daily World

12 U. S. Agencies, 10,000 Leaving D.C.

Washington Post

Heavy Philippine Battle Rages; Japs Land Anew

The Sun

A
s news days go in a new war, Saturday the twentieth was a relatively measured one even as planes were downed, ships were sunk, soldiers were killed, and civilians were marched off to their own extermination. A measured march was working inexorably against America and the Allies.

The war news—such as it was—was getting worse for the Allies. The newspapers began using phrases like “bad news from the East” and “heavy raid reported close to London.” A headline in the
Boston Evening Globe
screamed, “Hong Kong Doomed.”
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The Saturday evening edition of Baltimore's
Sun
newspaper reported as if Hong Kong had already fallen, but in fact, the British garrison was fighting on, holding on, hanging on.

Winston Churchill once said that the only thing inevitable in war was disappointment. Power of an air force is terrific when there is nothing to oppose it. .
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To illustrate Churchill's point: for years a man had flown Christmas gifts to lonely lighthouse keepers and their families up and down the New England coast, but the navy grounded the “Flying Santa,” fearing he might be mistaken for an enemy plane and shot down.
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So much for Christmas spirit.

Still, Americans could take heart and draw on their own history for inspiration and resolve. After all, the twentieth was also the 164th anniversary of another beleaguered time in American history: when George Washington and his ragged and demoralized men straggled into Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, to make camp. Among his troops was Private Henry Cone of Lyme, Connecticut.

Congress was moving toward a break, even after a pledge by Speaker Sam Rayburn that the House would not go out of session because of the war. The plan now was to go into recess until January 5.

Since the attack at Pearl Harbor, the national legislature had moved with lightning speed over long days to declare war on three nations, appropriate billions of dollars for defense, grant the president unprecedented war powers, create a restructured Selective Service bill which was finally headed to President Roosevelt for his signature, and hold hearings on all sorts of war-related matters including corruption.

The head of the Selective Service, General Louis B. Hershey, sent Roosevelt a memo outlining his concerns that men in war
-
related industries should stay put and not be allowed to join the armed forces. “In many instances they are men of skills who should stay in war production or vital civilian activities.” He advocated that recruiting stop and that the military depend instead on a draft.
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Memos Roosevelt reviewed that day dealt with the disposition of loyal Japanese on the West Coast
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(authored again by John Franklin Carter) memos on the Dutch East Indies,
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memos on Russia,
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and Stalin's desire for “the Baltic States
.
. . but also
.
. . expansion to the west, presumably by advancing the Lithuanian borders into East Prussia” and obtaining “naval and air bases in Finland . . .”
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No wonder Roosevelt was tired and cranky.

He also received a detailed memo from the office of the legal advisor at the State Department explaining how, while the Constitution was clear on declaring war, it was silent on declaring peace. “The Constitution itself contains no specific grant of power to any branch of the Government to make peace.”It had been discussed at the Constitutional Convention in August of 1787 “to give Congress the power to declare both war and peace. The motion was unanimously rejected.” This power had been in the Articles of Confederation. Any conclusion of hostilities required a treaty, and that required the approval of the U.S. Senate. However, the fabled document gave the president broad powers. According to constitutional experts, “It is the right of the president, and not of Congress, to determine whether the terms [of peace] are advantageous, and if he refuses to make peace, the war must go on.” Even Woodrow Wilson said only the Senate could ratify peace.
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A House special investigating committee also released a report that said “thousands of Nazis, Fascists, Japs are active there” in South America. In Argentina alone, it was charged that over 2,000 Gestapo agents were operating, and there “was reason to believe that a large contingent of Storm Troopers has 1been organized and that secret drilling is now in progress.” Also, the committee report claimed that there were 90,000 Nazis in the Buenos Aires area alone.
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The German embassy in that city was little more than a printing press for propaganda.

The German embassy had taken the speeches of Charles Lindbergh, put them in a brochure, and distributed them widely throughout Argentina.
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Lindbergh, erstwhile American hero, would suffer a permanent blow to his reputation and prestige because of his previous pro-German, isolationist stance. The congressional report on these matters was comprehensive and had been assembled in a short period of time. Senator Harry Truman's steadfast work rooting out corruption was also impressive.

Whether one agreed or disagreed with all the actions of Congress, those actions were nonetheless impressive in speed and scope.

It was time for the editors of the United Press to poll their editors and rank the top ten stories of 1941. The attack at Pearl Harbor was the lead-pipe cinch for first place. Of the succeeding nine, all were war related, from Lend-Lease to the Atlantic Charter to the pitched sea battle between the
Bismarck
and the
Hood
in the Atlantic. Not even Joe Louis's epic title defenses or Joe DiMaggio's fifty-six game hitting streak or Ted Williams' phenomenal season hitting over .400 made the top ten stories.
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In Washington, a former silent screen star, Corrine Griffith, and her husband, “wealthy Washington (D.C.) laundry operator Clark Griffith” were granted full custody in the adoption of two young girls. Buried at the bottom of the small newspaper item, it was also noted that Griffith was the owner of the “Washington professional football Redskins.”
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The national debt was announced at $57 billion dollars.
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Initially, the War Department had put out a call for skilled welders and steelworkers needed to help build ships at Pearl Harbor, but it was revealed several days later that, in fact, the workers were needed to “help repair the damage” at the war-torn island. “Those needed include mechanics, laborers and helpers. Among the journeyman trades the pay will vary from $1.02 an hour to $1.30 an hour, depending on the type of work. One hundred laborers at 62 cents an hour and 100 helpers at 74 cents an hour are needed. Single men are preferred . . . all applicants will be subjected to . . . [a] Federal Bureau of Investigation fingerprint test.”
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The war industry continued to ramp up speedily as the president set higher and higher production quotas. Exhibiting his usual knack for the inspirational phrase, FDR called America's massive manufacturing might the Arsenal of Democracy. At first, business leaders as well as Congress (which had to come up with the astronomical funding) balked at some of his ambitious demands. Soon, though, the war economy was firing on all cylinders and producing weaponry and materiel at levels previously deemed utterly impossible. Germany and its Axis partners were about to get a taste of America's will. At a plant in Johnsville, Pennsylvania, new dive bombers were near to being turned out only weeks after the factory opened. Without revealing any details, the designers of the new plane promised it would fly circles around the German Stuka. The new American plane's initial name was “Buccaneer.”
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