December 1941 (81 page)

J. B. Poindexter, the military governor, was cracking down in other ways. Beginning on December 31, all residents of Hawaii over the age of six years old would have to be registered and fingerprinted. Only military personnel were exempted. The entire “Hawaiian Defense Act” took up a full page in mouse type in the December 28
Honolulu Advertiser
. Anything and everything in the islands from gasoline consumption to residences to curfews had rules and regulations. The paper also was running classified ads selling bomb shelters. “Can be installed immediately.”
³⁰

Irony was a part of war. It was reported that “several” of the Japanese pilots who had been shot down on December 7 were wearing class rings issued by the University of Hawaii and McKinley High School.
³¹

Local radio stations in Honolulu came on no earlier than 6:30 a.m. and their broadcasting day ended at just after 10 p.m. No longer would an enemy use the overnight broadcasting of a radio station as a homing beacon as the Japanese had done early in the morning of December 7. The first show on KGMB was, appropriately, “Dawn Patrol.”
³²

The number of Japanese, Germans, and Italians deported from the West Coast and shipped to Montana was increasing. Prisoners who had been held in the Terminal Island Federal jail in the Los Angeles area were cleaned out “and moved to an internment camp.” Further, “This was disclosed yesterday with reports that more than 100 Japanese and German nationals had been transported to the internment camp together with a group from San Francisco.”
³³
Also, all the Japanese-owned shops in the Terminal Island “settlement” were closed.
³⁴

Across the country, rumors went around that employers were dismissing workers of Italian, German, and Japanese descent, even though they were either American citizens or legal aliens and loyal to their adopted country. Attorney General Francis Biddle cautioned Americans against racism and xenophobia. “Among those who died fighting off the treacherous attacks upon Manila and Pearl Harbor were men named Wagner and Petersen and Monzo and Bossini and Mueller and Rasmussen. To bar aliens from employment is both short-sighted and wasteful.”
³⁵
The government then made a high profile arrest of a “Bund Leader” in Los Angeles, Herman Max Schwinn, “one-time alleged West Coast chieftain of the German-American Bund and many other Nazis and Italians have been arrested for investigation by G-men in a surprise and sensational roundup of aliens in Southern California.”
³⁶
Biddle would be an unsung hero of the era, successfully arguing to FDR that the mass internment of Japanese, favored by the military and others, was wrong.

F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover took the credit for busting a German spy ring operating in the U.S. long before the war started. Thirty-three were arrested, and by mid-December fourteen had been convicted in federal court and the remaining nineteen had pleaded guilty. The spies used invisible writing and a “complicated code based on pages from the novel
All This and Heaven, Too
.”
³⁷
Hoover was a master at promoting himself and for taking credit for the hard work of subordinates; this was no exception.

Possibly to make amends to Roosevelt, La Guardia's Office of Civil Defense announced its new operating hours which was all the time. Employees would, for the duration of the war, work twelve-hour shifts.
Time
magazine described La Guardia's operations there as “confused and unprepared” and he as “hen-shaped.”
³⁸

Adjustments in work schedules were also being considered in airplane plants on the West Coast. Though operating on a twenty-four hour basis, the regulations prevented women from working the “graveyard” shifts unless they were paid overtime, even as the men who worked those hours, were paid at the normal rate. It was recommended that this rule be amended or changed because of the national emergency “and because the airplane plants already pay far above the legal minimum wage for women.”
³⁹

The Office of Production Management also “requested” of defense plants, nationwide, that they put in a regular work schedule on New Year's Day. “Since the men at the front, are not taking time off to celebrate New Year's Day, we feel that this should not be considered a holiday for defense plants.”
⁴⁰

Sub attacks on American vessels had declined dramatically; in part because of increased surveillance by the military and decreased provisions for the subs. Navy officials also credited the decline to quiet citizens. Two phrases popped up, “A slip of the lip may sink a ship” and “That friendly chap may tell a Jap.” The Office of War Information and the navy launched a public relations campaign to ask Americans not to talk about “disclosure of . . . ship movements.” One official said, “Much of this information is undoubtedly obtained by enemy agents and fifth columnists from conversations which they initiate or overhear in public places.” He then put an edge on it with the threat. The “federal Espionage Act . . . carries a maximum penalty of 20 years imprisonment for communicating, either directly or indirectly, information relating to national defense.”
⁴¹
Mum's the word.

In its lead editorial the
Los Angeles Times
took up the military's lament against so-called Monday morning quarterbacks, “arm-chair generals, tablecloth admirals and all-round amateur runners-of-the-war.” The long editorial berated readers for all real or imagined complaints against the conduct of the war and defended the War Department. “Our military and naval leaders are among the ablest of their professions in the world.”
⁴²
Most of the complaining came from editorialists and columnists. To wit, an editorial the same day criticized the U.S. military for being taken in by the Japanese, for being foolish enough to believe they would abide by the rules of engagement pertaining to open cities—in this case, Manila—after the Japanese surprise attack. “We should have known that a government capable of such a monstrous crime as was perpetrated at Honolulu would not hesitate at the mere bombing of an open city in defiance of the international code of war. . . .”
⁴³
This hard-hitting editorial ran second to the lead in the
Los Angeles Times
. Few have successfully made a charge of consistency stick to the American press.

The siege of Manila and the Philippines now dominated much of the news and with it, the utter and complete denunciation of the Japanese for their bombing of innocent civilians. Inexorably, Japanese troops were driving toward Manila, and Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana declared the enemy “an inhuman and half-civilized race.”
⁴⁴

The death toll overnight had risen and part of Manila seemed to have more bomb craters than standing buildings. One bomb reportedly hit a church killing eighty people and wounding twenty more. Several nuns were killed.
⁴⁵
The famed Santo Domingo Church, built by the Dominicans in 1590, had been destroyed in the bombings according to reports.
⁴⁶
Despite the fires and the carnage and the danger, many of the residents of the heavily Catholic city attended Mass on the 28th.

The citizenry begged MacArthur to return with the American army in tow to defend the city. But the notion was taking hold that America was going along with Churchill's plan to put the main emphasis of the Allies in Europe. “Despite the Manila news and a steady Japanese advance northward and southward through Luzon, it was reported in Washington that Britain and the United States had agreed, in the interests of a wider strategy, to concentrate on Germany.”
⁴⁷
The Japanese broadcast a message over Tokyo radio which was tantamount to an ultimatum to the Filipino people: lay down your arms and we will stop bombing Manila. A CBS listening post picked up the broadcast. The Japanese demand “was greeted with scorn and derision.”
⁴⁸
A town only 55 miles from Manila, Lucena, now flew the Japanese flag of the rising sun and up to 15,000 ground troops were estimated just in this one area.
⁴⁹
Despite the threat, the Filipino people refused, in part because they believed, as did MacArthur, that American aid was forthcoming. There was no aid coming.

Fortunately, the monument to Ferdinand Magellan, who brought Christianity and western civilization after he discovered the islands in 1521, was untouched amid the destruction.
⁵⁰
A small victory. Meanwhile the streets were strewn with bodies, body parts, blood, and “tattered school books and examination papers from the bombed Intramuros Catholic elementary school. . . .”
⁵¹

The Japanese attack of the day before was enraging to all. They bombed at almost a leisurely pace, wave after wave after wave of planes, doing so in almost three hours, knowing there was no danger from anti-aircraft guns. They also bombed Kuala Lumpur on Saturday and destroyed an ancient mosque, described as one of Malaya's “oldest and finest.”
⁵²
The bombing had taken place when many Muslims there were praying.

Washington politicians were lamenting how America had been “twice burnt” and many thundered for direct retaliation against Japan's cities. Senator Alben Barkley was practically offering to carry the bombs to Tokyo on his back. He accused the Japanese of “sadistic cruelty.”
⁵³
Problem was, those cities were too far off for American land bombers to make the round trip from any airfields controlled by the Allies. And America had no available planes in the area at the time and no secret airfields.

CHAPTER 29
THE TWENTY-NINTH OF DECEMBER

Our Fleet “Is Not Idle,” the Navy Declares

New York Times

Russia, England Agree on Method of War Conduct

Birmingham News

Positive Aid Pledged by Roosevelt and Navy in Philippine Fighting

The Sun

T
he Japanese bombed Manila again around noon, on the twenty-ninth. The city had done everything possible to make it clear it was open for peace, short of taking out ads in the Tokyo newspapers. Any remaining ships in Manila Harbor were towed out—so not to be confused by the Japanese with naval warships—and blown up and sunk.
¹

“The second day of savage, unopposed air-raids left Manila an inferno of burning churches and office buildings. Many persons lay dead among the debris.”
²
The second attack of the day also involved repeated strafing of Ft. Murphy, which General MacArthur had already evacuated. The most famous Catholic statue in Manila, “Our Lady of the Rosary,” was fortunately saved from the bombing campaign “by priests and church servants who braved the flames and entered the church shortly after bombs had wrecked the bell tower and roof” of the Santo Domingo cathedral, first built in 1588.
³
But tragically, a priceless library at the church went up in smoke, destroying 200,000 folios and books. In that library was a complete record of every Filipino dialect spoken over the past 300 years in the islands. “Ironically, the library also contained original manuscripts from Dominican missions in China and Indo-China. They were brought to Manila a few months ago to save them from the ravages of war on the Asiatic mainland.”
⁴

The Japanese state media,
Domei
, announced that the government intended to have the Philippines conquered and catalogued by New Year's Day, which was a big holiday in Japan.
⁵

President Roosevelt, under pressure to do something, pledged aid to the beleaguered country, and to one of his favorite generals, MacArthur. Late the day before, he went on short wave radio and proclaimed his “solemn pledge that their freedom will be redeemed and their independence established and protected. The entire resources of the United States, in men and materiel, stand behind that pledge, the President's message assured.”
⁶
Almost immediately, the navy issued a statement claiming, “The Fleet is not idle. The United States Navy is following an intensive and well-planned campaign against the Japanese forces which will result in positive assistance to the defense of the Philippine Islands.”
⁷
It was bluster. Or disinformation. Other than submarines, there was no attempt or planned attempt involving American surface ships to come to the defense of the Philippines.
⁸

Even if Washington had the ability to send anything, a Japanese blockade of the Philippines was forming up to keep anything from getting in. Some wondered about the whereabouts of the American Pacific fleet, such as it was, and a knowledgeable source said, “Be patient.” Strategic reasons necessitated silence, but the nation was reassured that the navy would strike when the time was right.
⁹

The navy as much as admitted that there had been no military contact between U.S. ships and the Japanese since the beginning of the war. “Naval strategists believe that major contact between the Japanese and United States navies will not occur for some time, maybe months—perhaps a year or more.”
¹⁰
Of course, without naval “contact,” there would be no re-provisioning of the Philippines. The Japanese had complete air superiority over Luzon so that option was out for the American forces. The Japanese saturation bombing of Clark Field and Nichols Field had obliterated hundreds of planes on the ground, and those that escaped were eventually shot down or were grounded for a lack of replacement parts.