December 1941 (59 page)

F
lag sales were up, but morale was down as it became known of the lonely and modest burials taking place daily near Pearl Harbor.

The demand for American flags was nothing like it had been on the eve of America's entrance into the First World War when sales skyrocketed 100 percent. In the days after Pearl Harbor, flag sales were up, by industry estimates, some 15 to 25 percent, which was impressive, yet also a bit less than expected.
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Because of the demand for cotton, muslin, wool, and silk for the military, flags were being made out of rayon, but even these synthetic flags were scarce. The bottom line: there was a pent up demand, just not much supply. Among those dealers who had stocked up before December 7, they had sold out in a matter of hours.

In Hawaii, the young men who had fallen for that flag were buried. Each afternoon, on the island of Oahu, a group of marines trooped out to a grave site and fired a salute to yet another fallen American soldier or sailor. “A tight lipped group of six-foot marines in olive-drab uniforms raise their rifles and fire three volleys over the fresh earth as nightfall approaches fast. A bugle sounds taps.”
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These forlorn memorials had begun on December 8 and had been going on for days. “They have been laid to rest on green hills overlooking the sea—there to remain until a peaceful time when the bodies might be returned to their native soil.”
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There were no family members, no politicians, no crowds. Only the brief discharge of guns, the trumpet, and the murmured prayers by men of the cloth punctuated the silence.

Nuuanu Cemetery was initially used for the first of the Pearl Harbor dead. The cemetery overlooked the sea. Then, when all the spaces had been taken, graves were dug on Red Hill, which overlooked Pearl Harbor. “Day after day, just before sunset, with simple dignity befitting the gallantry with which they died for their country, America's finest have been buried at Honolulu.”
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Each burial observance was accompanied by Navy Chaplain Captain William Maguire and a black-robed priest. The priest blessed the ground with “holy water,” and Maguire recited a committal prayer. On the decks of many of the navy vessels, Sunday church services were routine, some beginning at 8 a.m. None took place on December 7. Now prayers were offered every day. “Don't say we buried with sorrow,” Captain Maguire said. “Say we buried with conviction. Our men died manfully and we will wipe out the treachery come what may. The spirit of these men lives on. I can feel it.”
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Each grave was adorned with a floral bouquet, Hawaiian-style, all picked from nearby homes. “Each grave is marked and each body carefully identified for shipment back to the mainland after the war is fought and won—back to home towns.” Maguire said he was proud of the sacrifices of these sacred dead. He said, “And while all this heroism was going on, those Japs were still machine-gunning. . . .”
⁶

He told of men with arms ripped off, begging to get back into the fight. Men burned, nearly naked, screaming, “I want to get back to my ship. I want to get back to my gun.” Other wounded men said, “For God's sake, I am alright.”
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They weren't.

Americans, Maguire said, “would glow if they could see how our boys died. If every American had seen how quietly, yes, quietly men suffered, how gallantly they died, how courageously they thought about the next man, they would glow. They would swear our front line will never give.”
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In the towns and villages of America, because there were not bodies to bury, many internment ceremonies went forward anyway, as at Georgetown University with “flag draped catafalque symbolizing the bier of Ensign George Anderson Wolfe who died at Pearl Harbor”
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Also among the fallen was Billie McCary, seventeen, of Shades Mountain, Alabama. He was on the
Arizona
as a member of the band, for which he played the tuba and the coronet. Just weeks earlier, the band from the
Arizona
had competed with sixteen others in Hawaii, and Billie and his band, came away with the gold cup.
¹⁰

The first “white” resident of Birmingham—as noted by the
Birmingham News
—to die at Pearl Harbor was James Mark Lewis, twenty-one, seaman second class. Again the inevitable telegram: “The Navy Department regrets to inform you . . .” Concluding, it said, “The Department extends to you its sincerest sympathy in your great loss. To prevent possible aid to our enemies, please do not divulge the name of his ship. . . . Rear Admiral C.W. Nimitz, chief of Bureau of Navigation.” James's dream was to be a navy chaplain, combining his love of boats as a child and his devotion to the Birmingham Tabernacle Gospel. His mother, age sixty, told the paper that, if she could, she would put on a uniform and go fight. The boy's father, “aged . . . sitting in the sun on his back steps his face cupped in his hands said only, ‘they stabbed him in the back . . . he didn't have a chance.'” Seaman Lewis's remains had not yet been recovered.
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Julius Ellsberry was the first “Negro” resident of Birmingham to be killed at Pearl Harbor, again as noted by the Birmingham paper. “First to be notified here that a son had given his life for his country was a Negro family in Inglenook.” Ellsberry, twenty, was a “mess attendant aboard a warship.”
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The paper featured an editorial headlined, “Julius Ellsberry. All Birmingham, white and colored, honors his name.” The family got the identical telegram that the McCary family and the Lewis families had received.
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The U.S. military may have been segregated, but death was color-blind.

In dying for their country, the boys, Julius, Billie, and James, were not separate but were equal. The price of war kept going up. It was a price equally shared by all social and economic classes. Everyone had a stake in the war; America was experiencing a social cohesion that had not been witnessed before.

In a marvelous public relations stunt, Roosevelt wrote a letter to another president: he wrote a letter to whoever would be president in 1956, recommending that the eighteen-month-old son of downed pilot/hero Captain Colin P. Kelly Jr. for appointment to West Point, fifteen years hence. “In the conviction that the service and example of Captain Colin P. Kelly, Jr. will be long remembered, I ask for this consideration in behalf of Colin P. Kelly, III.”
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Nominations to U.S. military service academies such as West Point (for the army) were competitive. While some applicants may be eligible for a presidential nomination by virtue of a parent's service, all U.S. citizens were eligible to compete for a nomination from his congressional representative and senators. A nomination from FDR himself certainly constituted an amazing “trump card.” Indeed, the president of the United States in 1956 offered “Corky” a.k.a. Colin P. Kelly III an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, but in true hero fashion, the young Kelly refused, wanting to compete with everybody else for a place; and he did so, graduating from “The Point” in 1963. The president of the United States in 1956 was Dwight David Eisenhower, who in 1941 was an obscure, chain-smoking aide in the office of Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall and who only months before had been promoted to the rank of general. Before that, he was a clerk for General Douglas MacArthur. Roosevelt loved being president, MacArthur wanted to be president, and Eisenhower hadn't even given it a thought.

The shake-up in the Pacific command finally came, oddly, before FDR's Board of Inquiry had even met to investigate what had actually happened at Pearl Harbor and whether or not anyone really was to blame. Indeed, the board was given the task of finding facts in search of a theory. “They will seek to fix the responsibility for the fact that the armed services were ‘not on the alert' on Dec 7.”
¹⁵

Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, fifty-six, was named to replace Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, fifty-nine, who was unceremoniously removed as commander-in-chief of the United States Fleet and as commander of the Pacific Fleet. The position as chief of the navy was a fairly meaningless title, but the position of head of the Pacific fleet was where the rubber met the road. Nimitz would become commander of the Pacific fleet but not “Commander-in-Chief” of the navy itself. Also removed and replaced were General Walter C. Short, sixty-one, commander of the army garrison in Hawaii, and Major General Frederick L. Martin, fifty-nine, commander of the Army Air Corps there.

Stepping in for Short was Lieutenant General D.C. Emmons, fifty-two, and replacing Martin was Brigadier General C.L. Tucker. “The shifts were the direct result of the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, in which the Hawaiian defense forces were caught off guard.”
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Douglas MacArthur, who could have also been removed because he'd had some warning of an imminent attack, unlike Kimmel and Short, escaped unscathed because he was still fighting a battle in the Philippines, because he got better “press” back home than did the others, and because he was a personal favorite of Roosevelt's, despite their political differences. They were kindred spirits in that they were royalty in America. MacArthur was the scion of a famous military family. His father had won the Congressional Medal of Honor for action in the Civil War, and Roosevelt, of course, was the scion of a famous political family. They had worked together before, and there was a friendship, though based on society and not ideology.

In 1932, the Bonus Marchers of the Great War, had descended on Washington in the depths of the Great Depression to ask the government to pay early a bonus promised to the doughboys who had answered their country's call. The bonuses had been issued in 1924 but would not come due until 1945; however, many of these heroes who went over there were out of work, starving, and wanted the government to pay ahead of time, even if it meant forgoing the interest. FDR refused and directed MacArthur to rid Washington of the marchers. MacArthur used harsh actions to clean the city of the thousands of Bonus Marchers and their families. In 1936, when Roosevelt had still not solved the Depression, the Democratically-controlled Congress, over the president's objections, paid the Bonus Marchers.
¹⁷

Kimmel and Short were not American royalty, were frankly scapegoats—sacrificial lambs who had done everything by the book, had not been given all the facts by Washington, and now were being punished for it.
¹⁸
They had been as astonished by the attack as anyone else in the world, but had they been given the decoded Japanese communications between Tokyo and their embassy in Washington that the War Department and the White House were intercepting, Kimmel and Short may have had a chance to change or at least alter the course of history. Even the night before the seventh, when shown the next to last segment of the thirteen-part Japanese communiqué that presented the Japanese ultimatum, FDR read it and said, “This means war.”
¹⁹

That was never communicated to any of the field commanders in the military, especially in the Pacific, who had more than a passing interest in the intent of Prime Minister Tojo and his government.

Adding to this, the War Department and the navy had been tracking a large convoy of Japanese ships including six aircraft carriers just days earlier, but when the armada turned eastward, U.S. military strategists lost track of it. This too was never communicated to Kimmel or Short. All they ever got were oblique and confusing messages from Washington, reinterpreting the secret coded information going back and forth between Washington and Tokyo. The administration had believed that war was imminent between Japan and the United States, but they wanted Tokyo to commit the “first overt act of war” so a moral case for participation in the war could be made to the American people and the world community.
²⁰

The Roosevelt administration had successfully squashed any congressional investigation and had gained control of the matter by naming its own board of inquiry. Even so, it was obvious the blame was either going to Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, Henry Stimson, George C. Marshall, Harold Stark, Frank Knox, and the rest of the military and political leadership in Washington, or it was going to two competent, if politically naïve, men who were 6,000 miles away, without access to the press to tell their side of the story or defend themselves. The outcome of this was easy to see. The lead in
The Baltimore Sun
reported, “Without waiting for any more information on the contributing causes of the Pearl Harbor disaster,” the men were humiliatingly dumped.
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Washington had seen the old “hang 'em out to dry” gambit a thousand times before. Someone had to take the blame, and the master politicians in Washington made sure it was going to be Kimmel and Short, and not themselves. The history of the country was marked with not only heroes but also scapegoats. “Sources” in Washington let it out that Short and Kimmel had not been “on the alert.”
²²
An unflattering photo of Kimmel was made available to the newspapers. This was all orchestrated: the War Department and the Secretary of the Navy made the announcement simultaneously. Secretary of War Stimson bluntly said his thinking was in line with Secretary of the Navy Knox regarding the “unpreparedness of the situation of December 7th . . . and to expedite the reorganization of the air defenses in the (Hawaiian) islands.”
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Their demotion was the headline of every newspaper in America, and nearly all used the word “ousted.”
²⁴
It was humiliating, especially since Kimmel's new assignment was to stay in Hawaii on “temporary duty.” The final humiliation was that he would have to stay to watch Nimitz replace him.