December 1941 (40 page)

The silent galleries in the House were not filled to capacity as they were on the eighth, but present were British ambassador Lord Halifax and Archduke Otto of Austria.
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Halifax had recently journeyed to Detroit, only to be pelted with eggs by isolationists there. He took it in stride at the time saying, “My, those people certainly were good shots.”
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While there was nearly 100 percent unanimity in the country to going to war with the hated Japanese, Americans were somewhat more ambivalent about going to war with Germany and Italy, even as the Third Reich had just sneakily torpedoed American military and commercial vessels, much the same as the Japanese had at Pearl Harbor. There were many German Americans and many others who saw Hitler as anti-communist (but pro-socialist) and that knew he had revived the German country. This made some Americans more dubious about the European War. And by and large, Americans had never had anything against Italy. What's more, the East Coast cities of America teemed with their own “Little Italy” sections. Still, despite the ambivalence, not one newspaper of record editorialized against the declarations of war. From Chicago to Minneapolis to Seattle to New Orleans, all praised FDR, all condemned the Axis, and all exhorted Americans to do their utmost to win.

With the two war resolutions in hand, the president first balanced his cigarette holder on the edge of his desk and then signed them, muttering, “Everything seems to come in threes.” He then asked Senator Tom Connally for the time, and “with lips drawn back from clenched teeth,” Roosevelt scribbled it on each piece of historic paper, along with his distinctive signature.
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About a dozen members of Congress were there in the Oval Office, and the room was deadly silent. He signed the declaration of war against Germany at 3:05 p.m. and the declaration of war against Italy at 3:06 p.m. From the time his message had been read to Congress at 12:21 p.m. until he signed the resolutions passed by both houses of Congress, America had gone to war with two more countries in less than three hours.
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Congress also voted to take the handcuffs off the President. Quickly, they voted to allow U.S. troops to go beyond the constraints of the previous law that barred them from leaving the Western Hemisphere.
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The House that morning had opened with a prayer by the chaplain, Rev. James S. Montgomery, “with an appeal for divine aid for the nation.”
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Calls for a formal investigation into the attack on Pearl Harbor were growing louder. Senator Charles Tobey, Republican of New Hampshire, having earned headlines for himself the previous day with his unremitting attacks on the military and his near-leaking of sensitive military information to the press, called yet again for an inquiry and again let the world in on confidential information. “Senator Tobey asserted that the fleet's listening devices ‘weren't working,' that the ships ‘lay at anchor and no steam up' and that more ships were sunk than had been disclosed by Roosevelt.” When asked by a colleague where he'd gotten his information, Tobey replied he'd gotten it from two other colleagues. Tobey told reporters, “I wouldn't want to tell all I've heard on the floor of the Senate.” He blasted the navy for allowing a “disaster that's almost unspeakable.”
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Democratic Senator Scott Lucas of Illinois rose to angrily challenge Tobey, warning him that it was “a serious thing to indict anyone until you know what you are talking about.” He said Tobey “does not know what he is talking about and he admits he does not. You, Mr. Senator from New Hampshire, are no naval strategist.” Lucas was just warming up, furiously and repeatedly attacking Tobey. When Tobey asked Lucas to yield—a cherished and time-honored senatorial privilege—Lucas refused to give him the floor.
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Tobey was one of the most unpopular men in Washington.

Yet Tobey was not the only senator raising hell. It was bipartisan. Senator Frederick Van Nuys, Democrat of Indiana, charged the military with “criminal negligence.” He said it was the responsibility of Congress to get to the bottom of the matter. But Van Nuys himself also trafficked in rumors, as he told reporters “he had heard reports the British military intelligence service had warned the American forces that an attack by the Japanese might be imminent.”
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Meanwhile, Frank Knox and Admiral Stark had still not appeared before any congressional committees.

In his syndicated column, “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” Drew Pearson tsk-tsked, “Alibis cannot very well explain away how both Army and Navy Intelligence had their guard down so carelessly when Japanese planes swooped down out of the early morning sky at Hawaii on Monday.” He then eviscerated navy intelligence as being dominated by “royalty,” where family connections, breeding, and good table manners were more important than skills and, well, intelligence. Navy intelligence, Pearson charged, was dominated by “wealthy young blue-bloods. Only members of the best families can qualify for Military Intelligence, and how much they know about the life around a Japanese waterfront is questionable.”
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Following Tobey's tirade, another Republican, Minority Leader Charles McNary, who had been Wendell Willkie's running mate in 1940, offered into the record a resolution of unanimous support for FDR by the GOP members.
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Later that day, the chairmen of Republican and Democratic parties, Joseph Martin and Edward Flynn, respectively, exchanged telegrams in which they pledged to set aside partisan differences for the duration of the war. They also sent a telegram to the president, indicating their peace accord and then suggested that the headquarters for both parties in Washington be turned over to non-partisan activities to support the war effort. Roosevelt accepted their pledge and suggested the facilities be converted to civil defense.
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Martin, said “Republicans will not permit politics to enter into national defense.”
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It would remain to be seen how durable this peace would be.

As politicians were making accusations and conjectures and suppositions about the attack on Pearl Harbor, other individuals were pointing out that the navy's patrol planes in the days leading up to December 7 went out each day, at exactly the same time and followed the same route, each day. The theory was the Japanese could have timed their approach and attack when the patrol planes were not in the area. One officer said, “You could set your watch by those flights.”
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Given the fact that the Japanese consulate was a stone's throw from the harbor on Oahu, and from which there was a considerable amount of spying going on, it was one of the saner theories.
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Secretary of War Henry Stimson, much esteemed by all in Washington, stepped into the fray when he asked Congress not to investigate any dereliction of duty at Pearl Harbor and instead leave it to Roosevelt to get to the bottom of it and take action if deemed necessary. “We don't even know yet all the details of the fight in Hawaii,” he sagely pointed out.
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Naval officers were still marveling at the accuracy of the Japanese attack at Pearl, but with little photographic evidence and shaky firsthand evidence, some guesstimated that the Japanese must have flown planes into the American and British ships. Another theory was the Japanese had developed some horrific new bombing technology, possibly based on a “magnetic principle” to account for their uncanny accuracy at Pearl.
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Worse, the
New York Herald-Tribune
reported that “said “an informed source” said the Japanese were making plans to launch suicide bombers at the West Coast.
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Abruptly, all three congressional committees, which had begun preliminary investigations into “what happened in Hawaii,” shut down. “The House Navy Affairs Committee abandoned an investigation,” and its chairman, Carl Vinson, Democrat of Georgia, said there were no plans to reopen the nascent inquiry. Meanwhile, Senator Harry Truman, Democrat of Missouri, announced his Senate Defense Investigating Committee would cease any further inquiry in the surprise attack as would the Senate Naval Affairs Committee.
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The wagons of the bureaucracy were being circled, and editorials across the nation applauded the decision to forestall any investigation.

Stimson would only concede that there had been a “heavy loss of planes” in Hawaii and then said oddly that the loss “is being made good at the present time.”
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The United States and Great Britain had adopted radically different methods in alerting the civilian population as to military reversals. Whereas Washington was under a near-standing order to stay mum on specifics of losses, Winston Churchill believed instead in hitting the British subjects right between the eyes, withholding nothing, reasoning this would rally the civilian population to greater resistance, as opposed to obfuscating. “No one can underrate the gravity of losses inflicted on the United States nor underrate the length of time it will take to marshall the great forces necessary in the Far East for victory,” said the prime minister.
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With the sinking of the
Repulse
and the
Prince of Wales
, Churchill immediately went to Parliament to tell the members in person and in detail.
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With the loss of the two ships came the deaths of nearly 600 men and officers
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including a personal favorite of the prime minister, Admiral Sir T. S. V. Phillips.
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Churchill was also forthcoming about reversals in North Africa. “The Libyan offensive did not take the course its authors expected, although it will reach the end at which they aimed,” he said. Of course, England had several more years of experience in these matters than did the U.S., and it was harder to explain away German airplanes overhead bombing London than it was an attack 6,000 miles away in the middle of an ocean. Still, Churchill was stricken over the twin losses, according to correspondence with Roosevelt.
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A survivor of the sinking of the
Repulse
was Cecil Brown of CBS, who'd been embedded on the ship.
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Another embedded journalist, O.D. Gallagher of the International News Service, was on the
Prince of Wales
and found himself bobbing in a life preserver in shark-infested waters. Of the attack and his long hours waiting to be picked up, Gallagher wrote, “The physical hell created by the Japanese attack was matched by a psychological hell.”
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The British so embraced the hard truths that even the Christmas card put out by the Admiralty reflected on the loss of the two ships.
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In Washington, officials deliberated on the need for air-raid shelters and “pontoon bridges across the Potomac River and other emergency plans. . . .”
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Treasury officials discussed the possibility of higher taxes with members of Congress.
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And a plan to fingerprint and issue government identity cards was thrashed out in Congress “as a measure of protection against saboteurs and as a means of speedy identification of hostile agents.”
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Moreover, in the nation's capital, the Office of Production Management announced that it was ordering Detroit to cut construction of automobiles scheduled for January of 1942 by 50 percent.
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The
Washington Post
reported that the U.S. was making plans to issue an outright ban on the sale of new tires and would confiscate all imports in order to conserve rubber for the war effort. The government also announced that it might freeze tin stocks to prevent speculation.
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The decree came from the Director of Priorities, which was a part of the Office of Production Management.
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Only the orders for automobile from defense contractors would be processed. The government came down hard on tire manufacturers, warning them to surrender their inventories. They were told to “cough up” or else. Americans would have to learn how to patch and re-patch flat tires; used tires were exempt from the edict.

Washington bureaucrats also “ordered a 75 percent reduction in the manufacture of coin-operated gambling machines and juke boxes because the metal is needed for the war industries.”
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A rumor going around D.C., promulgated by Eleanor Roosevelt, was that the president had met with a Japanese diplomat on December 7, but in fact there had been no such meeting. “Imagine the nerve of that man sitting with my husband in the White House when Japanese bombs were falling on our boys! And when I came in he got up and actually bowed and was full of smiles,” she told audiences.
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The First Lady had apparently been misinformed. Doris Kearns Goodwin, in her Pulitzer prize-winning,
No Ordinary Time
, explained that “the only explanation is that Eleanor mistook the Chinese ambassador, who had stopped by to see the president shortly after noon, for the Japanese ambassador.”
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It also leaked out that there had been a contentious debate a year earlier over the oil embargo of Japan, with Harold Ickes, Robert Morganthau, and Frank Knox on one side, arguing for the embargo; and Cordell Hull on the other side, against it. FDR eventually sided with the pro-embargo faction in his cabinet, but only after Japan had stockpiled enough of the precious liquid to conduct extended war operations.
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The day before the war declaration by Germany and Italy, FDR had convened his “inner war cabinet” for an hour-and-a-half meeting at the White House beginning at noon. “Those present at the meeting . . . included . . . Hull and Stimson . . . the acting Secretary of the Navy, James V. Forrestal, Admiral Harold B. Stark . . . General George C. Marshall . . . and Sumner Welles, Under-Secretary of State.” During this meeting, the final touches were being added to FDR's “battle room” in the West Wing of the White House.
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