December 1941 (57 page)

By 1942, Louis, Baer, and Robinson were all in uniform.

Clark Griffith, the owner of the Washington Senators, announced that he wasn't going to make an announcement about some important news regarding his baseball team because of the war. “In another week or so, we'll be veterans in the war and people will want to look at the sports pages as a change.” Fans hoped whatever change was coming would be on the mound, as only the pitiable Philadelphia Athletics and the even more pathetic St. Louis Browns had worse pitching.
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The annual East-West Shrine college game held in San Francisco had been moved to New Orleans because of the apparent risk under which the West Coast was still operating.
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As a result, other high school, college, and professional sports events were also cancelled or moved. With the baseball season over, the son of San Francisco, Joe DiMaggio, the “Yankee Clipper,” was voted Outstanding Male Athlete of 1941, besting Ted Williams, the “Splendid Splinter.” The winner the previous year had been Tom Harmon, “Old Number 99,” the famous end of the Michigan football team.
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But the big unanswered question was whether or not Major League Baseball should be cancelled during the national emergency. The owners had already met in Chicago with no decision reached, preferring instead to see what Washington said. “End of major league baseball for the duration is being feared . . . as a result of what already has happened to the sports programs on the Pacific Coast,” the
Boston Globe
observed.
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In 1917, the game had been confronted with the same problem, but the government told owners to keep playing as it was too important to the nation's morale. Even so, a month was sliced off the schedules during that war. If the 1942 baseball season went forward, the minor leagues figured to take a hit, what with so many of their players young, single, and 1-A healthy. There were vague reports about future meetings between baseball leaders and governmental leaders.

The news from the world of sports that Americans did not get through newspaper or magazines, they could get from radio. Radio was simply the most dominant cultural force in America, even more than the movies, magazines, or the broadsheets. The role of radio as a form of news and entertainment in the American home could not be overstated. Radios were in the living room, the bedroom, and the kitchen. Radios were in cars and restaurants. They were simply everywhere, and everybody listened, especially now.

Radio had been the main form of entertainment for Americans since the early days of the Great Depression and even before. Many was the lonely pensioner who got by each night listening to Bob Hope or the “Texaco Hour” or “Our Miss Brooks” or the orchestra dance music, broadcast from a hotel in any given city in America. Only one's imagination limited what a radio show could do; the creative men and women could make the kids sitting around the living room believe Superman was really flying or ghouls were really at their door, or Little Orphan Annie was really meeting with the president.

Yet the entertainment side of the radio shied away from the war until
Fibber McGee and Molly
took up the subject. Fibber wanted to buy a globe, and Molly warned him to buy it with Japan still on it, before the Allies bombed it into smithereens. Bob Hope then jumped into the fray, telling audiences, “We may have to black out our lights, but we will never black out our sense of humor.” Another was a bad routine between Jack Benny and Dennis Day. That did it. By mid-December 1941, radio, like everybody else in America, had gone to war.
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Congress passed a law that would provide for six months' salary and give lifetime pensions to the families of the soldiers and sailors killed at Pearl Harbor. The salary was straightforward, but the pension was a more complicated system, based on widows, their age, and how many and how old the servicemen's orphans were.
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It ranged from a low of $30 per month to a high of $83 per month. It was a part of the Soldiers and Sailors Relief Act, but some additional laws also kept men in uniform from being harassed by collection agencies and lawsuits, and under circumstances prevented a war widow from being evicted if behind in her rent.
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Mr. and Mrs. Max Mueller of Omaha were notified that two of their sons, Henry, nineteen, and Erwin, seventeen, had both been killed at Pearl Harbor. The last the parents knew, both boys were assigned to the
Arizona
.
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More details were slowly being released from Hawaii, including the recovery of a “suicide submarine,” one of three suspected subs thought to have participated in the attack at Pearl Harbor. A “midget submarine,” it carried a two-man crew and ran on batteries. Its range was so limited that it could not make it back to a safe port. The three subs and crews who were believed to have engaged in the attack on Pearl Harbor knew they were on a one-way mission from which they, in all likelihood, would not return alive. A photo of the recovered sub that had washed ashore appeared in the papers.
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Submarines had been an important part of the story of the North Atlantic for some time. German “wolf pack” U-boats had been sinking everything in sight; however, subs had not yet become important in the fight for the Pacific, except when the story was bad. That day, a confidential memo from the Secretary of the Navy to FDR advised the president that the American naval sub presence in Manila was now tenuous. “How much longer the submarines can base at Manila is problematical.”
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Also, the American Asiatic fleet was down to “one patrol bomber squadron . . . 2 cruisers, 8 destroyers, 3 gunboats, several minesweepers . . . surface vessel lack fighter aircraft defense, and cannot operate in areas where dominated by enemy aircraft strength.”
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This story line would eventually change. For the first time since the beginning of the war, American naval forces reported sea action by American submarines in the western Pacific, adding that they had performed well enough but had little to no support from American planes or surface ships. The overall news from the region continued to be nearly all bad for America.

“Japan's assault on the Philippines slacked off . . . but defense forces regard the respite as only temporary. Most observers said the letup probably meant that the Japanese were moving additional forces and supplies into position off the island coasts, resting pilots, overhauling planes and marshaling gasoline, bombs and ammunition for new and powerful attacks.” The situation was anything but “well in hand.”
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The British were “having difficulty in Borneo, Malaya, and Hong Kong, and the American possessions of Johnston and Maui Islands in the Hawaiian area were shelled by Japanese naval craft.” Also, “Wake Island and Midway were reportedly raided again . . . [S]evere fighting continued in northern Malaya, where Japanese troops continued to push southward toward Singapore, now using one man tanks. At Hong Kong, Japanese naval vessels were reported . . . to have joined the attack on the British Colony. The Japanese claimed they had sunk one gun boat and six torpedo boats and damaged a destroyer and three other vessels in Hong Kong waters.”
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Lord Beaverbook, the British ambassador to the United States, said of Hong Kong, “We must be prepared for its fall” and proclaimed that it had no military value.
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Apparently, the attack on Maui had only been some Japanese torpedoes that hit the loading docks of a pineapple company; but still, Maui was part of the Hawaiian chain and only a hundred miles southeast of Honolulu. Also, a military airfield and “fleet anchorage” were located at Lahaina Roads there.
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It was the first attack on the Hawaiian Islands since the seventh, and that alone made it terrifying. Johnston Island was described by navy officials as being hit much harder than Maui, and more importantly, that was the first time it had been bombed. Johnston Island was “discovered” by the British ship
Cornwallis
in 1807.
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Some speculated that the Japanese were hitting many different locations in hopes of sending the navy off on a wild-goose chase.

The British were doing their utmost to hold onto Singapore, but this hold seemed more tenuous by the day. A knowledgeable source said, “British lack of naval superiority has changed the entire situation in Northern Malaya.”
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If Singapore was taken, it would be catastrophic to the cause of the Allies. If Singapore went, the rest of the Western Pacific could fall like dominos into Japanese possession.

There was a growing suspicion that the Roosevelt Administration, being heavily influenced by Winston Churchill, was more interested in first investing resources in the Atlantic and Europe and that the Pacific would have to wait. Two days later in an unsigned White House memo dated December 19, titled “First Priority of Military Strategy, the answer came in the next line: The Defense of the Atlantic Area between the United States and the United Kingdom.”Both Africa and “the Pacific area” were noted as “secondary areas.”
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The condition of the Pacific was described as “bleak.”
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Meanwhile the governments of Turkey and Ireland restated their decision to stay neutral. Ireland also refused to allow the Allies to use its ports. Vichy France also claimed to be neutral, although with hundreds of thousands of German troops in the country and Marshal Petain at Hitler's beck and call, it was a joke. Conversely, Free French forces in Morocco, Algeria, and other locations were bravely working against the Germans, who were tightening their grip on the region. An underground movement in France was growing. Audaciously, they had detonated a bomb in Paris, killing six Gestapo agents and one German general. New reprisals came in the form of rounding up as many as 4,000 suspects including, of course, Jews. “This group included some of most influential and wealthiest Jews in Paris.”
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Halfway around the world, another courageous group was fighting the odds. A small assembly of twelve Indians led by one British lieutenant furiously fought off a much larger force of Japanese in Kota Bhara, in Malaya, before finally succumbing.
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The civilian evacuation of Malaya had already begun. “There definitely is danger—a real threat to Singapore by land,” a British dispatch read.
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Meanwhile, it was rumored that Hitler had come close to suffering a nervous breakdown, frustrated with the lack of progress on the Eastern Front. His doctors told him to go to Berchtesgaden, his spectacularly scenic mountain retreat in Bavaria, for rest.
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There, the would-be ruler of the world would gaze at the soaring peaks and become lost in reveries of his own megalomania. Meanwhile, in the field, his soldiers were behaving with characteristic thuggery. Three precious Russian shrines, the home of Tolstoy, the cottage of Anton Chekov, and a museum dedicated to Tchaikovsky, were sacked by Nazi troops.
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In a confidential memo to Roosevelt from the British Embassy, the document said the Germans generals had decided to “try to stabilize their Russian front.” The document also pointed out that the Russian air force had gained air superiority over the Germans, in part because they knew more about handling equipment in the freezing cold than did the Germans.
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There was no rest for the Poles under the heel of Nazi governor Hans Frank, an eager and enthusiastic supporter of Hitler's genocidal policies. While grinding Poland into the ground under his iniquitous administration, “hundreds of children between the ages of 14 and 16 have been executed for their political activities, including membership, in the Boy Scouts. A Polish official said in one town, 100 Scouts were executed in the central square and a nine-year-old boy was shot because he destroyed a Nazi propaganda poster.”
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Secretary Knox had not been entirely forthcoming in his report on the damage at Pearl Harbor, but he had said all along he wasn't going to reveal everything, in the name of security. The
New York Times
said his report was “undoubtedly an understatement of the damage done ”
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The Japanese of course were claiming much more damage at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines than Washington was, but this time, the Japanese estimates were closer to the truth than the American revelations.
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The casualty report was as accurate as could be expected in those days after the attack, but Knox said at the time the government would not release all that they knew, and now, once again, some members of Congress were agitating for a full inquiry. Knox also did not release the names of any of the deceased, but he did meet with key congressional representatives in secret. His report was long on heroics but short on specifics, such as the story of the four ensigns who, when their captain went down, supposedly guided their destroyer out of the harbor in an attempt to track down the enemy.
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Capitol Hill was sharply divided, with some members eviscerating Knox. One said that America needed a new Secretary of the Navy. Supporters of the White House had hinted for several days that Roosevelt would soon order an investigation. Others members of congress said if they went forward, they would not ask Knox to testify about his own findings. But another, Senator David Walsh, Democrat of Massachusetts, said they might have to “investigate the investigation.”
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Walsh had been a bitter opponent of Lend-Lease and was a fervent isolationist—until December 7. The call for a congressional inquiry had been safely bottled up for over a week, but it was beginning to escalate again. Knox had also claimed that the navy was at sea looking for the Japanese; that was true in only the barest sense.
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