December 1941 (49 page)

It was announced, however, that Dutch submarines had sighted and sunk four Japanese troop transports on the east coast of Borneo. Torpedoes were fired, and 4,000 Japanese troops were sent to the bottom of the Pacific.
⁸⁵
In an “exclusive” story for the
Boston Evening Globe
, the “Jap Naval Attache at Vichy” denied that pilots for his country were using the planes as “human torpedoes” calling it a “myth.” The paper also claimed that neither Washington nor London was pressuring Moscow to get into the fight against the Japanese.
⁸⁶
The same day, however, the
Washington Post
ran a story saying “Tokyo admits using ‘human torpedoes.'”
⁸⁷
It was the war's first confirmation of kamikaze pilots.

Reporters caught up with the widow of Captain Colin P. Kelly Jr., the twenty-six-year-old West Point grad and pilot who was credited with the sinking of the
Haruna
. Mrs. Marion Kelly was calm, saying “I know he's happy,” of her now-deceased husband. Photographed on her lap was one-and-a-half-year-old Colin P. Kelly III, nicknamed “Corky.” His mother bravely, if also forlornly, continued, “And Corky will be proud too.” The mother and son had little choice as the most important man in their lives was dead. There was little left in the emptiness except pride and pain, a Gold Star in a window to replace the Blue Star that had previously been displayed, and, under the improved pension legislation for war widows, $42.50 a month for the rest of Mrs. Kelly's life or until that time as she remarried, from a grateful government.
⁸⁸
But the curly headed, handsome young pilot with the wide-set eyes would never walk through the door of his home again, never again throw his arms around his wife, never again have a son bound up into a warm embrace.

Unfortunately, the Kelly's would be one of the first of many who would bravely tell reporters how “proud” they were of the men in their family who had fallen in the new war.
⁸⁹
The first Gold Star of World War II had already been awarded to the mother of Private Joseph G. Moser by Mrs. Mathilda Burling, president of the Gold Star Mothers of America.
⁹⁰

A tradition of the first war had been revived. Blue stars in the front windows of American homes denoted a family member in the service. Silver stars were for a family member who'd been wounded. And then there were the Gold Stars. So many more sad stories were yet to come of dead soldiers and sailors.

In war, it always seems that the women and the children are the ones who suffer the most.

CHAPTER 14
THE FOURTEENTH OF DECEMBER

Civil Service Law Bars Aliens from Federal Payroll

Boston Sunday Globe

San Francisco's Women Get Ready to Fight

San Francisco Chronicle

U.S. Flyers Battle Japs in Manila Raid

The Sunday Star

Japanese Report Fate of Hong Kong Sealed

Los Angeles Times

S
even days after the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 836 days after the surprise German attack on Poland, and three days after Nazi Germany and fascist Italy declared war on the United States, an observer needed a scorecard to tell who, around the globe, was at war with whom. The Associated Press went so far as to use a sports metaphor in calling it a “lineup.”
¹

At war with Germany, Italy and Japan:
the United States, Great Britain, Canada, China, Free France, the Netherlands, Netherland Indies, New Zealand, Poland, union of South Africa, Costa Rica, Cuba, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Haiti, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Panama.

At war with Germany, Italy, and their European allies only:
Soviet Russia, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, Greece, Luxembourg, Norway, Yugoslavia.

At war with the United States, Britain, and Russia:
Germany, Italy, Slovakia, Rumania.

At war only with Russia and Britain:
Finland, Hungary.

At war only with the United States and Britain:
Japan, Manchukuo, Bulgaria.

Broken relations with Germany, Italy, and Japan:
Mexico.

Broken relations with Japan only:
Colombia.

Broken relations with the United States:
Hungary.

Expressing ”solidarity” with the United States:
Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela.
²

Not mentioned were Ireland and Vichy France, which was little more than a hand-puppet for Berlin, although there were some in the West still under the illusion that the Marshal Petain government could or would stand up to the Axis Powers. Joseph Stalin still had not decided to declare war on Japan, still looked out for his country's own interests, and still demanded Lend-Lease help from America. He was angry that, despite his country's enormous sacrifices in staving off Hitler's Operation Barbarossa, he seemed to be getting little help in return from America and the Brits. A delusional paranoiac by nature, Stalin began to suspect that the Allies intended to let his country bleed at the hands of the Nazis. After all, in Stalin's mind, his partners of convenience—America and Britain—were capitalists and, as such, could not be trusted. Indeed, one of his greatest fears was that FDR and Churchill would eventually make common cause with Hitler, and all three would then pursue him. Stalin trusted no one, as reflected by his incessant, murderous purges of millions of innocent people. Meanwhile, the Irish, blinded by an age-old hatred of the English, could not see that the Third Reich was their enemy too. The island of Eire remained neutral.
³

Argentina, though expressing solidarity with the United States, was thought among the knowledgeable in Washington circles to have strong Nazi leanings.
⁴
To be sure, South America was riddled with Nazi spies and sympathizers, making that region a prime surveillance target for both the FBI and FDR's brand-new foreign spy agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA.

What with countries at war and with all of the borders and bureaucrats and bribes needed to get from locale to location, noncombatants and civilians queued up in ports of call and airports, in terminals and in train stations. They waited interminable hour upon interminable day upon interminable week, without transit visas, trying to get out, get in, get going, get back, get home. “Lisbon has been crowded for many months with persons who have gone there in the hopes of getting transportation to America via the Pan American clippers or ships of the American Export Line.”
⁵
Somewhere, Bogie and Bacall were stuck too, and time went by.

Just hours after the German army said it was hunkering down for the long Russian winter and awaiting spring to renew its offensive operations, came fresh stories declaring the Russian army now had the Nazis on the run, at least outside of Moscow. But, as much of the reporting came secondhand from Stalin's propaganda machine, it was unknown what was true and to what extent it was an exaggeration. “The German high command said early this week that with the settling in of winter, Nazi troops had entrenched themselves and that Moscow and Leningrad could not be taken before spring.”
⁶
The
New York Times
accurately digested the Russian propaganda and said, “It seems unlikely that the Germans have suffered real disaster the red Army avers.” Hitler claimed the German army would regain the offensive after the winter snow melted.
⁷

The Nazis were continuing their purges in other occupied areas, such as in Vichy, where resistance members were shot for possessing guns or holding a different political view or simply being of another race—basically, anyone who wasn't a Nazi. “In the unoccupied zone, roundups of Jews, Communists and ‘terrorists' generally continue day by day.”
⁸

It was later revealed that over a hundred non-Aryans were lined up and shot by the Nazis. The occupying Nazi General, Otto von Steuelpnagel, signed an order levying fines of one billion French Francs “exclusively” against Jews in Vichy. The order never elaborated what the fine was for, although bulletins pasted all over Paris made clear, the Nazis were not done with the matter—they were on the hunt for more “anarchists.” Also, by von Steuelpnagel's order, “A large number of criminal Judeo-Bolshevik elements will be deported to hard labor in the eastern territories. Other deportations of still greater numbers will follow.”
⁹

The Nazis also began registering Americans in Germany, but oddly, only those over the age of fifty and under the age of fifteen.
¹⁰

Yet another American pilot emerged as an early hero of the war. This one was John G. Magee Jr., a pilot/poet in the best tradition of Antoine de Saint-Exupery. He was the son of a rector of St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington. Impatient to get into the fight, young Magee had joined the Royal Canadian Air Force months earlier, and while the details of his death were not revealed, he too had “slipped the surly bonds of Earth . . . and, touched the face of God.”
¹¹

Curiously, as one city after another had stumbled and bumbled its way through air-raid drills and blackout drills, the nation's capital had yet to complete a first, true dress rehearsal. As of the thirteenth, one was not planned for several weeks, even though the head of the local civil defense warned that without complete cooperation, “failure . . . may mean the blasting out of life or property.”
¹²

The city had good reason to protect property, and not just the public property of the government either. Many private insurance companies had stopped writing policies or cancelled policies on “war risk” homes and businesses located in Washington. “The majority of the reputable companies closed their books with the first rain of bombs on Hawaii.”
¹³
Consequently, the federal government took $100 million and created a “nation-wide war insurance system to pay the private owners of homes, farms or factories in the Continental United States for damage or destruction resulting from enemy aircraft.”
¹⁴
The new government bureau, the War Insurance Corporation, also covered crops and fruit orchards.

The federal city for years had been a sleepy, fevered, malarial swamp, appallingly humid and hot in the summer. It was situated on the Potomac River, which had become a slow-moving cesspool. Sewage was dumped in from homes upstream: from Georgetown, whose sewage drained right into the river; from the Army base at Ft. McNair; and from the Anacostia River, which fed into the larger Potomac. Until a WPA project built the Tidal Basin to control the river, it often overflowed its banks, sometimes even as far as the White House, and everything reeked. Between the New Deal, Lend-Lease, and now a new war, the town had changed radically.

David Brinkley memorably wrote in
Washington Goes to War
, “A languid Southern town with a pace so slow that much of it simply closed down for the summer grew almost overnight into a crowded, harried, almost frantic metropolis struggling desperately to assume the mantle of global power, moving halting and haphazardly and only partially successfully to changing itself into the capital of the free world.”
¹⁵
Because of the advent of air conditioning, it was at least tolerable in the summer months now. But on this Sunday, December 14, it was doused by heavy sleet that knocked down the phone lines.

British diplomats had so hated being posted to Washington that they were paid extra, the same as if they were assigned to a war zone.
¹⁶
Now, Washington was ground zero for a world war zone. The town was radically altered, forevermore.

The town took soldiers and sailors, not only of America, but of America's allies, to its bosom. British and Australian enlistees were truly amazed at how hospitable Washington was. “Decent, that's what these people are. Why, there are more conveniences for service men here than I've ever found anywhere.”
¹⁷

There were canteens where men in uniform could listen to music, write letters, put their feet up. There were dances at churches and civic centers, there were of course bars on every corner, but there were also lectures and concerts, historic tours and church services. At the Botanic Gardens, there was a poinsettia display, and a variety show at the Washington Hebrew Congregation.
¹⁸
The cities of America, and especially Washington, had transformed into one big “R and R” station for men in uniform. The town bristled with a military presence, and the navy's PBY's routinely took off and landed on the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers.

The war had radically changed life in the military and aboard ship as well, especially in a combat zone. Censorship was widely employed in letters to and from sailors. It was not at all unusual for gobs and swabs to open their “V-Mail,” only to find it already read by navy censors. Sensitive information such as the names of cities and ships, as well as details about other sailors, were neatly cut out of the letter with scissors. The same treatment went double for outbound letters. In a letter home, a sailor wrote, “We hear on the radio that the U.S.S. was sunk. We couldn't send out any message because it would give our position away to the Japs.”
¹⁹
Wives and girlfriends were advised not to put multiple lipstick kisses on the outside of letters as it could be interpreted to be code.
²⁰