December 1941 (2 page)

The goal here is to make the reader feel as if they are experiencing the day to day events as they unfolded. Some historians don't like to go into the arduous tasks of going through thousand of newspapers preferring instead to rely on those bits and pieces of news reporting they may glean from other books. I did, and consequently the reader will find stories and information from the month of December 1941 they have never heard before. It makes for what I hope will be a fascinating book.

Of my previous writings, many said they gave the reader a “you-are-there feeling,” while another said I wrote like a sports writer, which I took as one of the best compliments I've ever received. The goal here was to impart new information while making the reading enjoyable. I wanted to do a story of America, to allow the reader to see the country through the eyes of the 130 million citizens who lived in the forty-eight states in that remarkable month of December, 1941.

The goal was to write a book so that the reader could read and feel what their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were reading and hearing and feeling and talking about at the time. About a time of war and peace and service and sacrifice and losing and winning and unity.

President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, General George C. Marshall, Admiral Chester Nimitz, General Douglas MacArthur, and many others in both the Allied and the Axis Powers are here. Prominent Americans including political leaders, actors, and athletes are here. Yet they are all merely supporting cast members in this drama.

The central and most important actor in
December 1941
is the United States of America.

Craig Shirley
Lancaster, Virginia

CHAPTER 1
THE FIRST OF DECEMBER

“U.S. and Jap Negotiations Continue”

Fitchburg Sentinel

“Britain Puts All Far East Areas on War Basis”

Tucson Daily Citizen

“Nazis See Fall of Moscow Near”

Idaho Times

“‘Wise Statesmanship' Might Save Situation, Japs Tell Reporters”

Bismarck Tribune

A
merica's 1,974 daily newspapers
¹
were crammed with war news: Russian, German, British, Japanese, Italian, Free China, Vichy France, Netherland East Indies, and Serbian. Reports were thick with hostilities in the North Atlantic and the South Pacific, in Northwest Africa and Southeast Asia, in Western Europe and on the Eastern Front.

The Third Reich and the British Empire were engaged in massive tank battles along Africa's Mediterranean coastline. Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, the puppet head of the Vichy French government, was reportedly in meetings with Adolf Hitler as a final step toward including France as part of the Axis powers' “New Order.”
²
Several months earlier, in a bold military campaign that would have pleased the founder of the “First Reich,” the Prussian king Frederick the Great, hundreds of thousands of German troops invaded Russia. Stalin cowered, and the maneuver looked like another brilliant offensive operation by Chancellor Hitler.

Maps of Asia, Africa, and Europe were frequently in the newspapers and magazines, showing American readers German thrusts and surges across Europe, along with counterattacks by Britain and the Russians. Other drawings showed new incursions by the Japanese into China and Indochina, their designs on Thailand and the Burma Road. Giant arrows slashed across continents.

In Shanghai and Hong Kong, the British were eyeing fresh movements by Japanese troops. British troops in Hong Kong were ordered to return to their barracks, and a state of emergency was declared in Singapore. The Philippines also watched the Japanese with concern.

War was raging on the high seas. German “Wolf packs” preyed upon helpless civilian vessels with shoot-on-sight orders from Adolf Hitler himself, and thousands of tons of hardened steel had already been sent to the bottom of the Atlantic. Berlin was also making plans to take Surinam, a strategically important outpost on the Atlantic side of South America. “Bundles” were dispatched to Britain, and Greek war relief funds were raised courtesy of American charity for those besieged countries.

To slow the inevitable German advance on Moscow, the Red Army burned the homes of Russian peasants by the thousands in hopes of denying Nazi forces any resources they might find in them. As a result, untold thousands of Russian citizens were left homeless in the blinding white cold.

It was all just one more day in a new world war that had already been a fully involved inferno for over two years. And yet there was much more to come.

But there was no American war news. No Americans were fighting anywhere in the world, at least not under their forty-eight-star flag. Americans didn't want any part of this rest-of-the-world mess. They'd been through that thankless hell once before, in a previous global struggle that was supposed to make the world safe for democracy. Memories were still fresh of American doughboys fighting and dying in the trenches of European battlefields, only to result in the rise of distinctly undemocratic societies a generation later.

An entire world was truly at war, but the United States was sitting this one out.

On December 1, 1941, Americans simply referred to the unfolding hostilities as “the emergency” and went about their business, walled off from the clamor by two giant oceans. Christmas was coming, and the economy was showing signs of life for the first time in years. For over a decade, the country had staggered through the dark valley of the Great Depression, and it could finally see some sunlight. Americans planned to enjoy an uneasy peace and a modicum of prosperity.

The only place American troops could be found “fighting” was South Carolina in war games supervised by one-star Gen. George S. Patton Jr. Because of severe budget restrictions, the troops used fake ammo. The brass wanted to conclude these maneuvers quickly so they and 300,000 participating troops could make it home in time for Christmas. But the faux battle was described as a “sham” with fistfights breaking out as parachutists landed, while “on to the field,” as
Time
reported in the language of the era, “charged grease-monkeys and Negro engineers” armed with “rifles and clubs.”
³
The army guaranteed they'd use real ammo for maneuvers scheduled in 1942.
⁴

The navy's materiel situation was just a bit more promising. Rolling off production lines in Maine and San Francisco were new destroyers, the
Aaron
,
Buchanan
, and
Fahrenholt
. Battleships in the works were the
Indiana
,
Alabama
,
Iowa
,
New Jersey
,
Missouri
, and the
Wisconsin
. They were bigger, armed with more powerful guns than the fifteen battleships already in the fleet. “Meanwhile, Navy men find a particular comfort in their completed plans: as far as they know, the Japanese are planning nothing like them.” The plan was for a two-ocean navy, an overall addition of 17 new battlewagons, along with “eleven more carriers, 54 cruisers, 192 destroyers, 73 submarines.”
⁵
Also under development in Boston was a relatively small and light torpedo vessel known as a PT boat. Its development was “a military secret,” but pictures and all the specifications were printed in detail in
Time
magazine complete with speed, armaments, length and construction, which was a plywood hull.
⁶

The weather across the country was cloudy that day, from Abilene to Washington, D.C., and so was America's clarity about the threat from the East.

“Americans do not even seem worried by the prospect of war with Japan,”
Life
magazine reported.
⁷
The reigning assumption was that if there was any action by the Japanese in the Pacific theatre, it would be directed against Great Britain and the empire's outposts there. As a result, the British were beefing up their naval presence in the region, having recently dispatched large warships including the
Prince of Wales
.
⁸
The British in Hong Kong ordered their garrison there to move into an “advanced state of readiness,”
⁹
and their troops in Singapore and Rangoon had also been so warned. As a precaution, the U.S. Army and Navy in the area were “ordered on the alert.”
¹⁰
News photos of “Swarthy Punjabi sepoys”
¹¹
—Singapore soldiers manning 40-milimeter guns—appeared in some American papers. Some 75 percent of the tin imported by the United States came from Singapore, so Washington had at least a passing interest.
¹²

The American navy had been quietly moving munitions out of Honolulu and the tiny island of Palmyra to the British-held Fiji Islands and the Free French island of Caledonia to assist against possible Japanese strikes there.
¹³
The Americans had strengthened their military operations on Samoa, but the Japanese government made clear they too had parochial interests in the Pacific and vowed to keep the shipping lanes between their home islands and South America open. For the average American, though, when they gave the Pacific a passing thought, it was only about palm trees and sandy beaches. The very word
pacific
meant tranquility, a peaceful nature.

Consequently, few in America paid any attention to an item buried deep in a United Press International story from the evening of December 1, dateline Manila: “Sixteen Japanese heavy cruisers and aircraft carriers were reported by Manila to have swung southward. . . . Japanese reinforcements were reported landing in Indochina where there already were an estimated 100,000 troops.”
¹⁴
Another unnoticed story, this one from INS news service, reported on the “precarious positions of the Philippines . . . under command of Lieutenant Gen. Douglas MacArthur” who was being “subjected to a horseshoe encirclement by Japan.”
¹⁵
However, according to respected military analyst Dewitt MacKenzie, recent setbacks by the Nazis in Russia and Africa had led the Japanese to pull up because, he said, “Tokyo is anxious to evade conflict with America.”
¹⁶
Indeed, representatives of the Japanese and American governments were in ongoing peace talks to gain clarity and iron out their differences.

Numerous newspaper reports and columns speculated on the intent of the Japanese government, and nearly all came to the conclusion that they had neither the will nor the industrial plant to move forward with any serious naval action in the Pacific. Furthermore, the Japanese navy was seemingly so weak the Nazis had deployed some of their ships to the Pacific to buttress their Axis ally. The Allies had lost track of a good portion of the Nazi navy—they couldn't find many of their ships.
¹⁷

When it came to the American ships, the conventional knowledge was that “[t]he Pacific fleet . . . has a decided superiority over the Japanese. . . . The Japanese would be hard put to it to replace their losses because of the lack of raw materials which they obtained from the United States and other western democracies.” Few in America worried about the Japanese navy, though there were signs they should. Chillingly, buried at the end of a piece, respected British correspondent Constantine Brown reported, “The Japanese have hinted . . . that they do have some juicy surprises if we decide to accept their challenge in the Pacific.”
¹⁸

Part of the source of the irritation between Tokyo and Washington stemmed from the Japanese invasion of Free China. The Japanese had invaded China in 1937 and proceeded to conduct genocidal activities on the Mainland. The Chinese had a strong lobby in Washington and America, as well as many sympathetic supporters.

In retaliation, the Americans slapped a boycott on products headed for Japan, including precious scrap metal. For the boycott to be lifted, the State Department set out four conditions to the Japanese. First, they had to withdraw as a member of the Axis powers. Second, they had to withdraw their forces from French Indochina and the Mainland. Third, they had to renounce aggression, and fourth, they had “observe the principle of equal trade opportunity in the Pacific.” Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, also offered the Japanese government $100 million if they would agree to switch from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy, but also sell war material to Russia in order to help Stalin fight Hitler.
¹⁹

While talks continued with Japan, most eyes in America were fixed on Europe and the North Atlantic, not Asia or the Pacific.

The night before, the Germans had downed eight British bombers on a mission over Hamburg.
²⁰
Over the previous weekend, the American merchant ship
MacBeth
was reported missing in the North Atlantic, presumed torpedoed.
²¹
U.S. ambassador to the USSR Laurence Steinhardt paid a worried visit to the White House to discuss the war in Europe with FDR;
²²
and Nazi propaganda minister Paul Joseph Goebbels gave a talk at Berlin University in which he predicted that it was too late for the United States to do anything to prevent England's eventual defeat.
²³
The plane of an American general, George H. Brett, head of the Army Air Corps, was shot at by Axis naval vessels as it crossed the Mediterranean.
²⁴
Privately, Franklin Roosevelt had been telling aides since 1939 he believed the Nazis were bent on “world dominance.”
²⁵