December 1941 (84 page)

In accordance with the new restrictions in Hawaii, all 215 buses of the Honolulu Rapid Transit Company had their roofs painted black.
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All movie theatres in Hawaii stopped showing films at 4 p.m. including the Roosevelt, Waikiki, Kaimuki, Kapahulu, Kewalo, Kalihi, and Wahiawa theatres.
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New information and tales kept coming out about the attack.

A young wife, Margaret Bickell, 20, was in Oahu on December 7 with her husband, First Lieutenant George Bickell, 25, eating breakfast when they heard the first attack. Lt. Bickell reported immediately to his base and got up and flew against the Japanese until being shot down and crashing in the ocean, right in front of his wife. She then saw her husband swim to shore, get another plane, take off, and resume the fight.
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Mrs. Bickell also told of “sullen Japanese servants” in Oahu who, after December 7, had turned on lights during blackouts and smoked cigarettes out of doors when the general order was to not light anything for fear the enemy would spot it.
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CHAPTER 30
THE THIRTIETH OF DECEMBER

Britain Bombed Heaviest in Weeks

The Sun

F.D.R. “Pushed Europe into War Against Me,” Nazi Leader Complains

International News Service

Red Men Bury Hatchet to Aid War on Axis

Associated Press

A
s a means of helping Germany with their war effort, a committee of Frenchmen appointed by Vichy French President Marshal Petain seriously considered demolishing the Eiffel Tower and salvaging the 1,000 tons of steel in the edifice worth at the time some $1,000,000. “Paris' 984-foot Eiffel Tower, known to millions since it was built 52 years ago, may be scrapped by a national metal collection committee working under Marshal Petain. . . .”
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The committee's stated purpose was to identify buildings that lacked any real artistic or historical value. Surprising as it might seem, the tower didn't make the cut. One member of the French Academy, writer Henry Bordeaux, deemed Alexander Eiffel's 1889 creation for the World's Fair “an insult to aesthetic taste.”
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However, although controversial when it was first erected, the pioneering steel tower soon became an object of affection and veneration for Parisians—and a symbol of France itself.

After June 1940, the French Tricolor no longer flew from the Eiffel Tower but rather the flag with the menacing black spider of the Third Reich, as German troops had marched into what had been known as the City of Light with near impunity, save the tears of a few old Frenchmen pining for the days of lost Napoleonic glory.

The news of the tower's intended destruction arrived to the world by a circuitous path. “Tokyo radio tonight carried a
Domei
agency dispatch from Lisbon quoting a dispatch from New York based on a British broadcast heard by American short wave listeners.” It had originated on Berlin radio coming from an official announcement from Vichy.
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Small wonder Winston Churchill had little respect for the men of the Seine. In his speech to the Canadian Parliament he acidly said,

The British Empire and the United States . . . are going to fight out this new war against Japan together. We have suffered together and we shall conquer together. But the men of Bordeaux, the men of Vichy they would do nothing like this. They lay prostrate at the foot of the conqueror. They fawned upon him.

What have they got out of it?

This fragment of France which was left to them is just as powerless, just as hungry as, and even more miserable, because more divided, than the occupied regions themselves. Hitler plays from day to day . . . with these tormented men.
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There was still a huge debate raging in Washington over sources of new revenues for the national emergency. In the month of December alone, the war effort had cost nearly $2.2 billion dollars.
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War Bonds, stamps, and the current tax structure wouldn't suffice, according to many of the bureaucrats responsible for having opinions on such matters. Funding for the war was already consuming some 23 percent of the national income, but it would shortly rocket up from there.
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Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of the Treasury, hired a new tax aide, Randolph Paul, who had some interesting notions on tax policy. “Prime obstacle to an effective tax structure . . . is the fact that taxpayers (at least in peacetime) have an insufficient ‘sense of debt to society and little intelligent interest in the continuation of the conditions which enable satisfactory living.'”
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Paul did not stop there. He made fun of companies for wanting to keep “surplus accumulations.” Expanding, he continued that “the primary function of consumption taxes should be to control production, not raise revenue.” Paul had helped Congress write the “Excess Profits Tax” which the government slapped on businesses in 1940 which the rate of earnings—weighted—of “not more than 10%.”
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One thing was for sure. War was not only hell, it was expensive. As Roosevelt and his advisors tallied things, to effectively prosecute the war would take roughly half the national economy by midyear 1943; that was about fifty billion dollars. Yet another name was coined for the effort. It would be called, imaginatively, “The War Program.” Even as the president told the press about such enormous sums, he pooh-poohed the money owed the U.S. by Britain under Lend-Lease. “Bookkeeping and questions of repayment . . . are almost a thing of the past,” he breezily asserted.
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He also announced that the government was seriously considering going on “Daylight Savings” for 1942. “Mr. Roosevelt recalled that estimates were made that as much as 500,000 kilowatt hours of electric energy would be saved each day by a country-wide program extended from the spring to the fall. That, he added, is an awful lot of power.”
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Funding had already gone forth though for a massive building program of Liberty Ships, which would become famous as the backbone of the Maritime navy. The very first Liberty ship, the
Patrick Henry
, had been completed in September of 1941 but was commissioned in December. The initial plan of the Maritime Commission was to build 312 of these workhorse boats, which were used for all manner of transporting goods and troops. The
Patrick Henry
was quickly followed by the
John Randolph
and the
American Mariner
and shortly, hundreds more would be splashed with little fanfare, but much admiration.
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Bond sales had exploded in the month of December as Americans bought more than $400 million worth of the paper notes signifying their loan to the U.S. government, but Treasury officials said, when all is said and done, the total haul could go as high as $500 million. Many banks and Bond offices had actually run out, because of the run on Bonds. November saw less than half that number, around $220 million. “War probably was the big stimulus,” the Associated Press dryly noted.
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Congressman W. Disney, Democrat of Oklahoma, was not fantasizing when he proposed a massive $11 billion dollar tax increase to pay for the national emergency.
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Morganthau said in no uncertain terms that to conduct the war successfully meant a “considerable rearrangement of people's finances.”
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Part of the cost of the new war would go for the proposed new women's volunteer army. A supplementary to the regular army, “Women volunteers in khaki uniforms would be enrolled as privates and officers of the U.S. Army under a plan approved . . . by the War Department and now awaiting congressional action.”
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The plan for voluntary women to back up the men was the brainchild of Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rodgers, a Republican from Massachusetts. The inspiration had come from the auxiliary organizations of women in Great Britain who worked in uniform in the front office to support the men in uniform at the front. Secretary of War Henry Stimson was all for it.

The women, it was proposed, would be stationed right along with the men at military bases around the globe and the pay would be similar to that of the men. These women, it was envisioned, would practice close-order drilling and the officers and noncommissioned officers would be picked by merit. “They would live in barracks and be subject to military discipline. Outside of several drill hours weekly they would do clerical and secretarial jobs and work as teleprinter operators, cooks, bakers, dieticians, pharmacists, telephone operators and hospital and laboratory technicians.”
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Stimson also envisioned they could take over the entire air warning system in the country, replacing the voluntary hodgepodge set up by the Office of Civil Defense.

Cigarettes would not go up in cost after all, at least for the foreseeable future. The millions of smokers in America, from the president down to the neighborhood paperboy, heaved a smoky sigh of relief when the government stepped in to prevent the hike. The American Tobacco Company had refused the request to hold the line on a price increase by the Office of Price Administration so the OPM changed the request to an edict that no tobacco companies could raise the price of a pack of cigarettes. Americans were free to smoke abundantly and cheaply.
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Washington also ordered that manufacturers of soap and paint were barred from hoarding eighteen hundred different kinds of fats and oils. Everything from cottonseed to “lemon, camphor, clove, wintergreen and citronella” was covered by the directive from the OPM.
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The OPM was also displeased with the allocation of all raw materials to the war effort and one official called for the control of all such supplies from the “bottom up.”
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The nation's capital was laying in the final plans for the mandated tire-rationing program to begin January 5, 1942. “The ordinary civilian motorist probably has bought his last new tire for a long time to come.” The administration of much of the program would be laid off on the state governments to administer. One governor when told his state would handle the bureaucracy responded, “Where's the money coming from?”
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Companies such as the Firestone Tire and Rubber Co. took out full-page ads in publications explaining essentially why they could no longer sell new tires. They also produced a booklet entitled, “How to Get More Mileage from Your Tires.”
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Some saw the silver lining in the rubber rationing. According to a Gallup survey, a majority of Americans did nothing for exercise, and that the walking that came with the new realities was a benefit because “health authorities [urged] Americans to take more exercise.” The survey noted that among those Americans who did walk, “the medium average distance walked in any one day is only about one and one half miles.”
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These paternalistic assertions must have come as a surprise to the many Americans who hoed fields, worked with their hands, operated heavy equipment, lifted dirty laundry, shoveled snow off their sidewalks, raked yards, threw newspapers while they pedaled bicycles, carried groceries out of the store and into the kitchen, lifted barges, and toted bales.

Meanwhile, officials of the National Stockyards reported a “marked increase” in purchases of horses and mules.
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As New Year's Eve was fast-approaching, women were buying out the remaining stocks of silk stockings for those under-exercised legs. The previous August, the government had mandated that no more silk stockings be manufactured but retailers could sell out their inventories, though “promotion of Nylon and new constructions of other fibers are expected to expand to cushion exhausting of the all-silk product.”
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Rumors were going around military circles that Adolf Hitler would be ousted in a military coup in 1942 and replaced by a military junta. Rumors were also cirulating that German generals had secretly flown to Ireland for God knows what. A German plane had made a forced landing in Ireland recently, but there was no one above the rank of a sergeant in the plane. German planes were however over London in large waves for the first time in a long time as it was the first anniversary of the giant firebombing of the old city by the Luftwaffe. This bombing lacked the punch of earlier German over-flights and the stiff-upper-lipped Brits brushed off the attack, as they would a buzzing mosquito. “ [D]amage nowhere was serious and the number of casualties were small,” ran one report.
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Rumors were rampant in the Dutch East Indies “that Allied reinforcements were on their way to the Pacific and that a general offensive against Japan could be expected soon.”
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There were no reinforcements coming.

Great Britain retaliated to the renewed shelling of London, by bombing Nazi-held installations along the coast of France all the way to Norway; a thousand-mile front. The British hit munitions plants, synthetic rubber plants, sunk eight ships, blew up oil stores, ammunition dumps, and hit other assorted targets.
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The British attack had more sting with their Mosquito bombers than did the Germans with their Junkers.

Adolf Hitler sat down for an interview with the famed war correspondent Pierre J. Huss, British correspondent for the International News Service. When asked who was the cause of the war, the Führer said, “Ja, Herr Roosevelt—and his Jews.” He also dismissed the rumor that he “chews rugs” when irate. The setting could have been that of a pleasant grandfather—roaring fire, rain pelting at the window, a dog—with a “swastika collar strolled lazily up to Hitler and nuzzled his hand. He stroked the head. . . .” His paranoia of FDR was evident though. “He wants to run the world and rob us all of a place in the sun. He says he wants to save England but he means he wants to be ruler and heir of the British Empire. I first saw this some years ago when Roosevelt began his undeclared war on me through speeches, boycotts and political intriguing in all chancelleries of Europe. Every time I reached forth my hand he slapped it down. When I began to show him that meddling in European affairs was not so easy and might be dangerous, he lost all control of himself and began his campaign of vilification.” He also made reference to the “sabotage of Munich” and how this too was Roosevelt's fault. He also made an anti-Semitic allusion to “Roosevelt and his golden calf.”
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