Pearl Harbor Christmas (28 page)

Soldiers!

Now the year 1941 lies behind us! It was a year of most difficult decisions and extremely bloody battles. However it will enter history as the year of the greatest victories of all time.... In the year 1942, after all the preparations that have been made, we will engage the enemy of mankind anew and do battle . . . as long as it takes....

Europe cannot and will not tear itself to pieces forever, so that a bunch of Anglo-American and Jewish conspirators can find satisfaction, in their business machinations, in the dissatisfaction of the people.

It is my hope that the blood that is spilled in this war will be the last in Europe for generations. May the Lord help us with this in the new year.

Adolf Hitler

In London General Brooke also invoked the Almighty. After a chiefs of staff meeting in the morning and a Cabinet meeting that he attended as COS at noon for Anthony Eden’s report on Russia, Brooke turned to his diary. He had no idea yet when Churchill would return. “I pray God,” Brooke wrote, “that He may give me sufficient strength to devote the energy and drive it may require. Difficult times with the PM I see clearly ahead of me and there again I pray God to help me by giving me guidance on how to handle the difficult situations which are certain to confront me.”

Eden’s mission to Moscow had failed. Stalin wanted no restrictions on war materiel supplied, whatever the struggle to get it past the
Kriegsmarine
in the Arctic or by any other means. Lend-Lease was neither lend nor lease. His suspicions of the West would only be mollified, he had insisted, by recognition by Britain and the United States of intended Russian frontiers—land grabs—as they existed at the moment of Hitler’s invasion on June 21, 1941. He already knew there was no chance of Roosevelt’s agreement or that of the American Congress. American and British military presence in Russia, even to ferry Lend-Lease aircraft across the border, would be almost nil. The Cold War was already coexisting with the hot war against a different adversary, and it would continue long past Stalin’s personal rule.

AS THE
Regnbue
approached closer to the American shoreline, turning to steam around Florida, the crew was permitted to use the radio receiving set in the chief officer’s cabin. Liebling managed to tune into Miami, where the local announcer noted with pride that there was no frost–the temperature had not dropped below 37 degrees. Seeking war news, Liebling dialed another station and heard another announcer report, “The slant-eyed specialists in treachery continue their advance toward Singapore.” Immediately after came a commercial for “creamy Sweetheart Soap.”

ON NEW YEAR’S MORNING in Washington, a gray, rainy Thursday, a procession of automobiles left the White House for Virginia, crossing the Potomac to 118 N. Washington Street, Alexandria, the site of fashionable red-brick Christ Church. Built in the colonial style from 1767 to 1773, it had known several wars much too closely. In its churchyard were buried, in a mass grave, thirty-four Confederate prisoners of war who had died in nearby Federal camps. Several days in advance Secret Service agents had scrutinized the building inside and out, talked with the rector, and explained that only 250 certified parishioners could be permitted at the morning service. Eight young men of the parish were charged with the formal notifications, and early on the morning of January 1 they divided up the approved list and began knocking at doors and ringing bells. Householders barely to bed after a long New Year’s Eve rubbed their eyes and learned of the special services at Christ Church at eleven.

Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt greeting the daughter of the pastor of Christ Church, Alexandria, VA, on New Year’s Day, 1942.
Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library

Some had suspected as much because gossip at parties the night before had spread the word that the Secret Service had examined the church—which meant only one thing. Yet no one then knew who would be permitted to attend. To be excluded at the door risked social embarrassment.

On braces only visible as the straps fitted under his shoes, the President entered the church on the arm of Major General “Pa” Watson. Churchill was accompanied by Lord and Lady Halifax, the ambassador towering over the PM. The Roosevelts, with Churchill, were seated in George Washington’s pew at the front. Parishioners sang “God of Our Fathers” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” after which the rector, the Reverend Edward Randolph Welles, delivered a militant sermon and read Washington’s Prayer for the United States, written for the day of his inauguration, April 30, 1789. “Almighty God,” it began, “We make our earnest prayer that Thou will keep the United States in Thy protection, that Thou will incline the hearts of the citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedience to government, and entertain a brotherly affection and love for one another and for their fellow citizens. . . .” Mrs. Roosevelt slipped her husband cash for the collection plate. “When these little things are taken care of by others as a rule,” she would recall, “it is easy always to expect them to be arranged.”

Mount Vernon was several miles up the Potomac, via the Memorial Highway built in 1932 to mark the bicentennial of the first president. Leaving church, his attendance something of a record for Churchill, who had endured divine services twice in a week, the presidential party proceeded to George Washington’s home. His steel-barred tomb was unlocked for the occasion. The persistent rain had become heavy, but Roosevelt was helped out of his car and stood under a broad umbrella. Accompanied by Mrs. Roosevelt, the PM placed a wreath of red-brown chrysanthemums and blue iris, bound with red, white, and blue ribbons.

Newsmen clustered about Churchill, hoping for a remark that would go into their papers and then into the history books. “A very wet day,” said Churchill to Eleanor.

“Yes it is, isn’t it?” said the First Lady. In the red brick mansion the resident director, Charles C. Wall, opened the guest book for Roosevelt and Churchill to sign, raindrops from their clothes falling on the page as they did.

At lunch at the White House Eleanor had her young friend Joseph Lash seated next to Churchill. “I was too awe-struck to open my mouth,” Lash wrote, but the PM was his voluble usual self. Up to date on the news, he told Lash, “Hitler had sounded awfully anxious in his New Year’s message, even invoking Almighty God. But we have a presumption on the Deity.”

VALERY GROSSMAN, a correspondent for the Soviet Army newspaper
Red Star
, wrote to his wife, Lyusenka, “Well, we’ve celebrated the new year: you in Chistopol [far to the east of Moscow], I at the front. . . . The horizon is clearing for us. There is a feeling of confidence and strength in the army, and each day brings the victory closer.” He passed on snippets given to him by political commissars who wanted the remarks, however unreliable Grossman felt they might be, published to boost morale. One, allegedly from a German soldier’s letter home, found on his body, was, as translated, “Don’t worry and don’t be sad. Because the sooner I’ll be under the earth the more suffering I will spare myself.”

The “Joint Declaration of War Aims” that Secretary Hull had been drafting since December 14 was signed ceremonially at the White House later on New Year’s Day. It had not been easy to fashion and even less easy to obtain signatures. Churchill had refused to permit India to be a signatory, as he intended the jewel in the Crown to be a colony forever, but Lord Halifax, a former Viceroy of India, objected strenuously to Churchill and the War Cabinet and urged that the “mistake” be reconsidered. Hopkins advised the President that it was “up to the British to decide . . . although for the life of me I don’t understand why they don’t include [India].” When Roosevelt penned a listing of signatories on a sheet of White House stationery, India appeared among the twenty-six nations with Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, separated alphabetically by the President from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Eden and Churchill had wanted them grouped together under Britain as a claim of continuing dependency. It seemed a bleak moment to proclaim the birth of the “United Nations,” yet the nations needed the uplifting concept.

Stalin had bridled at all the Four Freedoms outlined in the Atlantic Charter of August 1941 but especially at “freedom of religion.” On December 27, when Roosevelt met with Litvinov and changed the wording to “religious freedom,” the President expected difficulties with phraseology but told the ambassador to send it to Moscow “for comment,” which surprisingly came back in two days. Stalin was ready to sign on, realizing that he could ignore any commitment. Besides, as a deputy in Moscow explained Section 124 of the Soviet Constitution, “Freedom for any religion presupposes that the religion, church or community will not be used for the overthrow of the existing authority. . . .” Further, Stalin needed Lend-Lease war materiel.

“Associated Powers” had become, in the revised document for signatures, “United Nations.” The long literary memory of the Prime Minister, who reluctantly accepted the order of signing, had recalled lines from Lord Byron’s travel narrative
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
from a canto published in 1816:

Here, where the sword united nations drew,
Our countrymen were warring on that day!

At dinner in the White House, the President turned to domestic matters, raising a surprising trial balloon. Perhaps Wendell Willkie, his losing Republican adversary in the 1940 third-term election, whom he had grown to admire, might be offered an appointment as director of industrial mobilization. As his secretaries of war and navy were distinguished Republicans, it would be another dramatic gesture beyond party labels. Always to the left of her husband, Eleanor voiced misgivings about offering Willkie too much power. Harry Hopkins suggested that because Fiorello LaGuardia had proven unable to handle civil defense on top of the New York mayoralty, it would be a good fit for Willkie. Eleanor threw up her hands in mock horror. Willkie would be offered neither post. The President would look for a nonpartisan appointee.

A new year had begun. A long war beckoned. Slow to prepare, although a sluggish Congress had its plethora of warnings, America was far from ready to fight across two oceans. At Pearl Harbor the fires were out, but vestiges of smoke still rose.