December 1941 (77 page)

It would take more than posters and bonds to see the U.S. through the days ahead. Churchill was right in preparing the American and the British people for more bad news because it was coming hour by hour and day after day. After all, the Allies were up against “wicked men,” but in the end, they “would be called to terrible account.”
³²
Some of that bad news included word from Wake Island that the Japanese captured almost four hundred marines and another thousand civilians, mostly construction workers on the island.
³³

News from Europe was grave as well. The Russian counteroffensive against the German invasion appeared to have slowed and the Germans were digging in, resisting harder. Even the Soviet propaganda tabloid
Izvestia
reported that “the Germans had heavily fortified this place and exerted every effort to stop our offensive. Stubborn street engagements ensued. . . .”
³⁴
The
New York Tribune
reported that “German resistance is increasing all along the front.”
³⁵
And the German war industry was turned up even higher, as more and more of their women went to work in the factories. The Germans also had another brutal advantage: slave labor from the occupied territories.

The Germans claimed they had sunk twenty-seven British ships in the month of December alone. The Japanese claimed they'd destroyed forty British planes in the air and another eight on the ground in a new assault on Rangoon, Burma.
³⁶
The Japanese were occupying Thailand and had, since the first hours of the war, with nary a squeak from the Allies, who were too busy holding on by their fingernails to other territories in the Western Pacific.

New reports were coming from Hong Kong that suggested civilian riots had broken out there in the last days as the Japanese had cut off the water supply. The outpost had been bombed forty-five times in eight days by planes not including the constant shelling from the sea.
³⁷

There was good news from Midway. For the first time in days, Allies received communications from its embattled forces there, and amazingly it appeared as if the marines had successfully held the island. “We are still here,” flashed one message.
³⁸
“The Navy said today its force of Marines on Midway Island is still holding out. The Midway garrison was in communication with headquarters here yesterday but the Navy would not discuss the messages nor how the Marines were faring on the mid-Pacific isle.”
³⁹

The really bad news was rolling in from Manila. The Japanese forces were advancing on the city from two directions, laying waste to everything in their path, military and civilian. They “intensified a two-way assault on Manila, with an artillery fight northwest of the capital and a tank battle to the southeast, where Japanese pressure has been increased an Army communiqué declared late today. Casualties were reported heavy in the tank battle.”
⁴⁰
The Japanese trickle of tanks put ashore had rapidly become a caravan. Tokyo made public claims that they had destroyed the entire American fleet operating in the waters around the islands of the Philippines.

The threat to the civilian population of 600,000 had forced the decision on Douglas MacArthur to declare Manila an “open city,” meaning it would be neutral and that all warring parties would agree to not conduct any battles there. He did so, he declared, “to spare the metropolitan area from the possible ravages of attack. . . .”
⁴¹
Japanese planes flew over the city, but stopped dropping bombs and American anti-aircraft guns stopped firing on those planes when over the city. Under the rules of engagement, all belligerents were supposed to steer clear of such designated areas. Douglas MacArthur had already departed his headquarters in Manila to take personal command of the army in the field.

The Roosevelt administration was faced with the very real possibility of losing the Philippines to the Japanese. “Washington reports conceded that eventual loss of the Philippines archipelago was distinctly possible as Japanese hordes poured onto Luzon, and Manila was threatened from several sides simultaneously.”
⁴²

All through history, military battles were planned by old men, but executed by young men. This war was no different. The American army and navy were comprised of downy-faced boys, not much removed from being tucked into feather beds by their mothers; but if possible, the Japanese troops were even younger, some as young as fifteen years of age, sweating it out and struggling and fighting in the jungles of the Philippines, whose people were also putting what were essentially little more than boys into the life-and-death struggle of the fight.

In the background of the national debate of late December 1941 were the beginnings of a small pushback against the “First War Powers Act of 1941,” as it had become known, and all the power granted President Roosevelt over most forms of private or privately owned communications in America as of December 18, 1941.

The Espionage Act of 1917 had never been repealed. The more radically restrictive Sedition Act of 1918 had been repealed by 1921. Essentially, one had the freedom of expression in America, but only up to a point. Among the verboten verbiage were “false statements to interfere with the success of the United States,” which was so open to interpretation as to cause a chilling effect on the ability of anybody and everybody to express their own opinion. Only the overt act of treason was a constitutional offense. That standard was a bit more fixed; an individual had to act to topple the government by “levying war” against the U.S. or “give aid and comfort to the enemy,” as specified in Article Three, Section Three.
⁴³

Perhaps Churchill and his government's bluntness, as opposed to the often less than forthcoming U.S. government, led a small but hardy band of civil libertarians to wonder how many public facts of the war the government should be left in control of. After all, it was December 26, and Americans still had not been told all the facts of Pearl Harbor or the other battles raging in the Pacific. The Roosevelt government often confused the facts of the war with the secrets of the war.

The U.S. Supreme Court expressed its own opinions on censorship when it ruled seven to zero that corporations and businesses had the right to speak out against labor unions and labor problems without it being considered a violation of the Wagner Act. Organized labor considered the 1935 Wagner Act to be the Holy Grail of the labor movement, as it severely restricted what businesses could do in the face of labor organizing and activities. By overturning this key portion of the Wagner Act, the high court gave the American people a moment to pause and reflect on the power of government to censor and just how much power it should really have.

Previously, Woodrow Wilson had made it clear that he felt the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was an impediment to progressive society and proved it shortly after the beginning of the First World War by asking Congress for broad powers to censor. His bill called for imprisonment for life, of anybody who distributed in wartime, any information deemed to interfere with U.S. war policies. The goal was to shut down political opposition to Wilson. The bill passed the Senate but died in the House. Yet another bill offered by Wilson after America's entry into that war would have made it a crime for anyone to publish anything the chief executive deemed to be of use to the enemy. American newspapers rose up in opposition, lead by the Hearst newspaper chain and the bill was heavily amended.
⁴⁴

It was the simple nature of some men to want to control the knowledge and freedom of other men, and the debate had been at the core of the American experiment since before the days of the Founding Fathers.

Government bureaucrats were not only capable of dumb mistakes and overreaching, they were also often guilty of dumb overreacting. Deep in the heartland of Pennsylvania, the eternal flame at Gettysburg, signifying a great victory for the United States, was doused by the National Park Service, fearful that the light would be an attractant for enemy bombing of the ancient battlefield and cemetery.
⁴⁵

Other inanities were mercifully reversed. The “Flying Santa” of New England, a pilot who flew gifts each year to lonely lighthouse keepers and their families, had been initially grounded by military officials. At the last minute they relented, realizing they had gone too far, and the Flying Santa was airborne again, spreading good will and cheer, up and down the coast.

The bountiful nature of Washington was such that nearly five thousand more meals were prepared for Christmas Day than there were soldiers to eat them. The best laid plans of the District Defense Committee were to arrange for dinners to be prepared in five thousand homes where families had volunteered to take in soldiers for the day. The meals all arrived and everything had been carried out except for one thing; they were missing soldiers because at the last minute, Washington had been declared a war emergency zone and all leaves were cancelled. Servicemen and officers had to stay on base or on their ships for Christmas Day. No one had bothered to tell the organizers, who had expended thousands of hours in an attempt to provide for a home cooked meal for serviceman away from home. Finally, a call was placed to a local post and the officer who answered haughtily replied, “You people in Washington don't seem to realize that a war emergency does exist.”
⁴⁶

Actually, the civilian population was all too familiar with the issues of life and death, of sacrifice and charity, and of peace and war. In just a two day period, over 400 people including many children had died in America because of accidents. “Death stalked the highways . . . but also struck 97 times in other forms—fire, guns, lightening, planes.”
⁴⁷
A group of ten in St. Louis had attended midnight Mass, boarded a bus, got into an accident and the ensuing fire killed them on Christmas Day.
⁴⁸

In New York, a former school teacher, Isabelle Hallin, 32, was found dead by her own hand on Christmas Day, the unlit gas pilots in her stove open. Four years earlier, she'd been falsely accused of serving alcohol to members of the Saugus, Massachusetts, drama club by the town harpy, who a wire story said was a “prominent Saugus clubwoman.”
⁴⁹
The
Boston Daily Globe
said her accuser was the wife of a local minister.
⁵⁰
Hallin, who was described as a “pretty blonde” lost her job, sued for libel, won the case, and left town to take a job as a copywriter in New York but the false accusations crushed her spirit and she finally took her life. She left no suicide note.
⁵¹
Massachusetts had a long and cherished history of smearing and ruining people in the name of righteous mean-spirited busybodies.

Of all the sad stories of December of 1941, the death of Howard Lusk was one of the saddest. He'd been an orphan in Michigan, not knowing anything about any member of his family. He ran away from orphanages continuously until, at age sixteen, he was discovered on the mean streets of Baltimore in the darkest and deepest days of the Great Depression. He was penniless, disheveled and hungry and was taken in by the Travelers' Aid Society. Eventually, an unknown sister was discovered, who had also been abandoned as a child, like Howard. He'd travelled on the rails for years, North and South, East and West, in a vain attempt to find his parents.

Eventually, Howard found a home in the army and then as a private in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, found death at the age of 25.
⁵²

CHAPTER 27
THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OF DECEMBER

Japs Blast Undefended Manila

Birmingham News

Papers in U.S. Hit New Peak in Circulation

Atlanta Constitution

Ban Tires for Family Cars

Chicago Daily Tribune

O
n Christmas Day in Rhode Island, Henry “Daddy” Johnson celebrated his 107th birthday. Henry was a former slave, who had met Abraham Lincoln after the Emancipation Proclamation and was in remarkably good health, perhaps because he chose to never marry so he could “stay out of trouble.” Until the prior year, he'd lived unaided in a rough cabin in the woods of the tiny state.
¹
Andrew Jackson was president when Johnson was born.

In Missouri, General John M. Claypool, 95, of the former Confederate Army of the Confederate States of America and, by 1941, the national commander of the United Confederate Veterans, was photographed signing up for civil defense work in St. Louis.
²
James K. Polk was president when Claypool was born.

Meanwhile in Georgia, William Jones, 105, led more than three dozen former slaves in prayer “that this country may be victorious, as the Atlanta Ex-Slave Association held its annual Christmas party. . . .”
³
Martin Van Buren was president when Jones, a former slave himself, was born.

In 1941, the grandsons of slaves and grandsons of Confederate generals took up arms together, united to fight a common enemy which had embraced a perverted aim of elevating a “Master Race” over the rest of humanity. Ironically, the U.S. Armed Forces were, at the time, racially segregated, mirroring the color barrier throughout the rest of American society. This great paradox would be tackled with full force, but not until after the war.

Just then the Democratic political machine in Chicago was having its own problems with race, as the chief justice of the Windy City's Municipal Court, Edward Scheffler, refused to recognize the appointment of a black attorney, Patrick B. Prescott Jr., as an associate justice on the same bench. The appointment of Prescott was made by the Illinois' Republican governor, Dwight Green.
⁴