December 1941 (80 page)

When Morgan refused to fire Mrs. Davie, La Guardia got tough and one of his lackeys referred publicly to Mrs. Davie as Morgan's “girlfriend.”
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Morgan threw up his hands and resigned.

Candor was the Western watchword in the waning days of December. Australian Prime Minister John Curtin gave a speech before his parliament in Canberra in which he warned of more and more reversals for the Allied Powers. The leaders of the Allied Powers had little choice but to tell people this as the news each day seemed to become gloomier and gloomier. The best they could do against Japan, Curtin said, was to “slow the enemy down.”
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Curtin also understood what he and the Allies were up against. “We face an enemy nurtured in the tradition that to die for the nation is the highest virtue.”
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Not everyone was convinced that the Allies felt that defeating the Japanese carried the same weight as defeating Nazi Germany, including many, not surprisingly, in the Pacific. Indeed, in the war conferences in Washington, on at least one occasion, Allied representatives suggested that the war in the Pacific could wait. “Diplomatic circles reported . . . that one of the premises basic to the conference was that Hitler's Germany was the chief and, at present, perhaps the most vulnerable enemy and that Japan, if she could be checked at Singapore and its approaches including the Philippines, could be taken care of later.”
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The premise was dangerous and foolish because even a cursory look at the broadsheets of the days made clear that the battles for Singapore and the Philippines were not going at all well for the Allies. There might not be much, later.

Another harsh critic of the “Europe First” policy, Sir Keith Murdoch, publisher of the
Melbourne Herald
, took Churchill to task, denouncing him for being “Atlantic-minded” and said in no uncertain terms that if Singapore fell, then the Churchill government would fall. “Some of those in office are ready to say we can finish the Japanese after beating the Germans,” he stormed.
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Australia was not a member of FDR's “War Council,” but many thought she should be, including Murdoch. The
New York Times
editorially called for “Anglo-American Unity.”
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Sir Keith eventually sired a son named Rupert, who inherited his father's publishing empire, greatly expanded it, and went on to display the same pugnacious streak.

To Murdoch's point, it was announced that the Japanese had seized two of the Gilbert Islands, Makin and Abalang. The islands were a part of the British Commonwealth and only 2,000 miles from Hawaii.
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FDR had his own problems with publishers, one in particular. Basil Brewer, the publisher of the
New Bedford Standard-Times
went hard after the Roosevelt administration over the Philippines, the lack of adequate defenses there, and Douglas MacArthur's decision to declare Manila an open city. “The stupidity of removing defenses from Manila and declaring it an open city with the expectation that Japan would respect its civil population finds its expected answer in the death and destruction wrought there today. “ Brewer ripped FDR even further, saying his decisions contained a “profound lack of realism.”
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With the Japanese rapidly moving down the Asian coastline, gobbling up one country after another, one colony after another, one outpost after another, the Australians' impatience was understandable. They were nervous about the Japanese and had recent history on their side to point to. At some point, having taken everything else, the Japanese could be counted on to invade Australia and while the Aussies had a standing army of about 300,000 men, their equipment and training was considered poor. They had a small navy and virtually no air force.
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With no significant prior threats, Australia had never seen the need to invest in their military and was now looking to the United States and Great Britain.

But the British had their point of view as well and they considered it valid. From where Churchill sat, Hitler was more of a threat to the bulk of the British people than Japan. The British Empire may have had 500 million people—factoring in India and other parts of the Commonwealth—but not all of them voted and not all of them had been bombed day and night by the German Luftwaffe. The British in private sometimes shook their heads about the American reaction to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. During their blitz, it wasn't unusual for London to be hit hundreds of times in a single day by thousands of bombs.

Plus, the war with Germany was over two years old. The war with Japan was only three weeks old. First things first.

Out of those war conferences arranged in Washington by President Roosevelt came a consensus for the conduct of the war against the Axis. Speaking for the nearly three dozen countries arrayed against the Axis—all now members of the Allied Powers—“President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill [assumed] dramatic leadership of the . . . war against Axis aggression, spread before the accredited representatives of 33 nations yesterday the advanced blueprints for marshaling every economic and fighting resource of this globe-encircling front.”
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No details were of course revealed but the mere fact that so many countries could agree on anything was in and of itself a miracle. Even America's allies, the Russians and the Chinese, were in agreement. Other countries sending representatives included Mexico, Costa Rica, Honduras, Cuba, and, Paraguay and in fact, nearly all the countries of Central and South America were on hand. Roosevelt said they had made “excellent progress.”
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White House press secretary Stephen Early handed out a statement from FDR which read, in part:

As a result of all these meetings, I know tonight that the position of the United States and of all the nations aligned with us has been strengthened immeasurably. We have advanced far along the road toward achievement of the ultimate objective—the crushing defeat of those forces that have attacked and made war upon us. The present overall objective is the marshaling of all resources, military and economic, of the world-wide from opposing the Axis.
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A surprisingly happy addition to the Allied efforts was the Netherlands as a result of their victories in the Far East against Japanese ships and planes. Truth be told, their military successes in the early days of the Pacific war were greater than those of either America or Great Britain. Just the day before, the Dutch had sunk two Japanese warships. The minister for the Netherlands, Dr. Alexander Loudon, was granted a private audience with Roosevelt and Churchill.
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The Free French were not prevalent at the meeting and it may have been because both Washington and London were miffed at Charles De Gaulle for taking two tiny islands off the coast of Newfoundland without first checking with them. The French then banned any ship from any country to make port in either St. Pierre or Miquelon.
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Some of the representatives simply had to step out of their embassies and hail a cab to take them to the White House for these meetings, but others had more harrowing journeys, including the representatives of eight refugee governments who had been “driven from their homelands or have bowed to the exigencies of war to transfer their principal activities to new centers.”
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Some of them were included in the final meeting of the day: Poland, Denmark, Luxembourg, Greece, Czechoslovakia and others. One more meeting was postponed until the next day because Churchill and Roosevelt had been going non-stop and needed a break after the long Saturday. Churchill would be leaving the next day.

On Sunday, Churchill departed via train for Ottawa where he was to give a speech before the Canadian Parliament. He climbed aboard a private car at Union Station in Washington at 2:15 p.m. and headed north through Baltimore and Philadelphia before stopping in New York at 6:10 p.m. It took three hours to get to Springfield, Massachusetts, where he arrived at 9:40 p.m. In and out of White River Junction, Vermont after 1:00 a.m., he did not arrive in Ottawa until 9:00 a.m. the next morning.
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Cigarettes and the tobacco industry were hugely important to the civilian population and military government, and it was big news when a new brand came out or, heaven forbid, manufacturers raised the price on a pack of cigarettes. The Office of Price Administration raised a stink when American Tobacco wanted to raise its prices by 57 cents on every 1,000 cigarettes. The increase to the consumer would be about one penny for a pack of 20 cigarettes and the OPM pressured nine other tobacco companies not to follow suit.
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The cost of a pack of cigarettes was, depending on where you lived, around 20 cents per pack and over sixty percent of all smokers smoked filterless Lucky Strikes, filterless Camels, or filterless Chesterfields.

Big advertisements filled the magazines of America featuring soldiers and sailors and marines in uniform with cigarettes dangling from their mouths with the screaming headline, WE WANT CAMELS!
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Other ads featured kindly looking doctors with silver-haired temples, dressed in white lab coats, assuring smokers of the healthful benefits of certain cigarette brands. To pre-empt growing anxieties about the bad physical effects of smoking, tobacco companies increasingly featured bogus “medical evidence” that their brands were actually good for you. They also actively curried favor with physicians and physician groups, leveraging the enormous respect and authority that the medical profession enjoyed in society.

Now, with America at war, cigarette advertisements were starting to feature heroic doctors in battle, supplying fighting men with the medical attention—and cigarettes—that they so desperately needed. As one advertisement had it: “[The medical man] well knows the comfort and cheer there is in a few moments' relaxation with a good cigarette . . . like Camel . . . the favorite cigarette with men in all the services.”
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Meanwhile, another government entity, the Office of Production Management, issued new orders of its own to makers of farm equipment. The companies were told to “curtail” the manufacturing of new equipment while stepping up the “output of repair parts.” “The purpose is to conserve scarce metals while assuring that farmers will be able to keep presently-owned machinery in good working condition.” The order, it was said, affected everything “from windmills to wheelbarrows.” At the time, some fifty thousand Americans were employed in the farm manufacturing industry, in which there were approximately a thousand companies churning out milk cans, tractors, combines, harrows, hoes, shovels, pickaxes, spades, and spade shovels; the tools for the men and women who had wrought miracles out of the American wilderness and with those tools, their hands, and their fortitude had fed millions of Americans with high-quality and low-cost food.
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In the cities, where the sophisticates sometimes looked down their noses at their country cousins, they were getting ready for New Year's Eve. To most farmers, it was simply another day but to the city slickers, it was an excuse to get dolled up, men in black tie, women in furs and flowing fur coats. A dinner jacket at Raleigh's Haberdasher in Washington was going for $55, enough to feed a family of four for a month. For the police and fire departments of New York, New Year's Eve would be spent patrolling the Great White Way, looking for saboteurs on the ground and bombers in the air. Big crowds were expected as with each New Year's Eve and officials thought the throngs would be a tempting target to the enemy. The city had been under pressure to cancel the reverie on December 31, but they went ahead and made sure seven hundred of New York's finest were out and about to ensure no harm befell the partiers.

For the women, before going out, print ads reminded them—sometimes in the bluntest terms—to take care of their hygiene. “Go to bed, Mary,” said one ad for Mum deodorant. “That phone won't ring tonight. No one ever calls Mary anymore. No one ever calls on any girl who is careless about underarm odour (sic). You need Mum to prevent odour to come.” Other ads advised women that if they had any chance at all for a man, they'd better use Lux Soap, or Palmolive Soap, or Cashmere Bouquet Soap. “That exquisite, lingering scent is the success secret of your romantic rival. . . .”
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Ivory Snow laundry detergent was recommended for women's increasingly rare silk stockings because “perspiration is acid.”
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Print ads in Los Angeles newspapers urged people to make their reservations now for the Hollywood Palladium where Tommy Dorsey “and his trombone and orchestra” would perform for the revelers on the Palladium's opening night.
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On the bill for that evening was a wafer-thin twenty-four-year-old kid from Hoboken, New Jersey, named Frank Sinatra.

For those who wanted to party New Year's Eve in Hawaii, “intoxicating liquor” was still not available by order of the military governor. The only way to obtain beer, liquor, or wine was with a prescription written by a physician. If the “sick” individual was in the military, then their liquor prescription could only be filled by a military pharmacist. If the “sick” individual was a civilian, well, this one gave new meaning to bureaucracy. “Prescriptions written by civilian physicians, dentists and veterinarians must be submitted in duplicate form to the pharmacist who is required to note on the duplicate the action he takes. Then the pharmacist must forward daily the copy with his notation to the controller of civilian medical supplies. . . .”
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The runaround to getting a drink was enough to drive a man to drink.