December 1941 (87 page)

Thursday the First was officially a holiday but many of the 200,000 federal workers had been “asked” by the various agencies to “contribute their holiday in the interests of an ‘all out'—war effort and work New Year's Day.”
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A new campaign by the government, “Salvage for Victory!” also reminded Americans that even on this night the war was never very far from their doorstep. “Save waste paper, rags, old skates, bicycle tires, rubber boots, children's toys . . .”
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One government official puffed out his chest and proclaimed, “in a shooting war our planes, tanks, ships and guns have enormous appetites for metal. Mr. and Mrs. America have already made sacrifices. They must be prepared to make still more sacrifices.”
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The Office of Production Management came up with another slogan, “Get in the Scrap!” extolling Americans to save and salvage, as a way to join the war effort.
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As investors predicted, railroad stocks climbed sharply. With the new restrictions on rubber, people would turn back the pages of time and traverse the country as before, on the B&O and the Lehigh Valley, the Reading and the Erie Lackawanna. Among the various railroad companies, a hundred thousand new boxcars were ordered to accommodate the war effort and the shift by the civilian population from cars and trucks, to trains. While not taking Americans “back to horse and buggy days,” the ban did push the railroads again “to the forefront as movers of passengers and freight.”
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The president of the Association of American Railroads, J. J. Pelley, wrote the presidents of colleges and universities asking that their football teams not travel by train “and keep student travel to a minimum so that we can devote our passenger facilities to troop movements.”
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Stocks in tire companies had plummeted though and theft became widespread.

Some worried that American women's style would falter in the face of the war, but right there on the fashion pages was a shapely model posing in what was sure to be popular haute couture for 1942. “Today's defense worker (or shall we call them war workers?) are going about their jobs efficiently in sturdy denim fashions adapted from men's work clothes. This mechanic's suit is styled for comfort.”
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Ted Williams was voted baseball's “Man of the Year” by the
Sporting News
, making up for the fact that he'd lost out to Joe DiMaggio for MVP.
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He was the first ballplayer to bat over .400 since 1923. The Chicago Bears, winner of the NFL championship, were on their way to New York for the annual All-Star game pitting the defending champs against a team made up of the best players from the rest of the league.

Baseball in January of 1942 was declared essential by the president personally, but even so, so many ballplayers left to join the fight, that the quality of the game fell precipitously. It stumbled through using has-beens, never-weres, old men, young men, and in St. Louis, the joke of the league Browns, used a one-armed ballplayer, Pete Gray, in the outfield because he could not serve in the military. The Browns won the American League pennant in 1944.

Citizen Kane
was chosen as picture of the year by the New York Film Critics, and the annual list of the ten best dressed women in the world was released.
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Topping it for 1941 was the Duchess of Windsor, the twice-divorced and many-loved Wallis Simpson, for whom a man gave up a throne, a crown and an Empire and in so doing, changed the course of history for Great Britain and the world. Sentimentalized in the press as the “Love Story of the Century,” the reality behind Simpson and Edward was actually quite tawdry. Unknown to the public at the time, Simpson remained promiscuous, even while married to Edward. For his part, the weak-willed Edward showed Nazi sympathies and proved such a security risk that an angry Churchill demanded that the erstwhile king be isolated from any secrets of state. The public saw the Duke of Windsor as a romantic figure, when, in fact, he would prove a royal embarrassment for many years to come.

After one last transmission from General MacArthur's command, all official communication stopped from Manila as of 3:35 a.m. (EST) the morning of December 31. “The enemy is driving in great force from both north and south. His dive-bombers practically control the roads from the air. The Japanese are using great quantities of tanks and armored units. Our lines are being pushed back,” was the last message heard.
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A Tokyo broadcast was monitored calling on the American forces to cease all resistance in the Philippines “to assure the safety and protection of lives and property in Manila.”
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The Netherland press reported that Allied relief was just over the horizon. “Allied reinforcements were reported by Dutch newspapers tonight to be en route to the Pacific war theatre. . . .”
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No such luck. It was also reported that Winston Churchill had cabled Australian Prime Mister John Curtin with assurances that resources would be made available to defend his country. But there was, again, no mention of the Philippines. The Philippines eventually fell and MacArthur was forced for a time onto the tiny island of Corregidor and then, ordered off that island fortress by FDR and sent to Australia. Meanwhile, thousands of American, British, Australian, and Filipino troops fell into the hands of the murderous Japanese and faced a long death march in Bataan.

Things continued to go badly for the Americans in the Western and Central Pacific in 1942 with ships such as the
Langley,
the
Edsall,
and the
Peary
and many others sunk by the Japanese until Chester Nimitz, with three aircraft carriers and a hell of a lot of luck, sank four of the Japanese fire line carriers at the Battle of Midway in June of 1942. All four of the carriers had been used in the attack on Pearl and everybody marinated themselves in the joy of revenge. Still, some members of congress called for Nimitz's impeachment because he did not—they felt—more aggressively pursue the badly damaged and limping Japanese armada.

His predecessor knew something about being unfairly hounded. Admiral Husband Edward Kimmel, broken and bitter, took an early retirement in 1942 and spent most of the rest of his life trying to pick up the pieces of his shattered reputation, even as his son Manning was killed aboard a navy sub in 1944.

Twenty years after his command was destroyed before his very eyes, he wrote a book simply called
Admiral Kimmel's Story
, attempting to exonerate himself, but the book was filled with bitter recriminations against Roosevelt. The forward to the book could only muster this defense of Kimmel: “It must be remembered that Admiral Kimmel was never formally charged with dereliction of duty . . . .”
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Admiral Husband Kimmel, in his book, went so far as to call Roosevelt a “criminal.”
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General Walter Short also retired from the military in early 1942. He moved to Dallas and seemed less obsessed with restoring his name than Kimmel. Short died in 1949 of heart disease.
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Kimmel and Short were exonerated on several occasions in later years, through studies, papers, and reports but as a result, rather than being scapegoats, they morphed into victims and no real fighting man wanted to be regarded as either.

An act of congress in 1947 allowed every man in uniform to receive the lifetime benefits of his highest rank in the war, except for two: Kimmel and Short.

Singapore had been hit again in late December of 1941 four times by Japanese bombers and looting broke out as the social structure began to break down. The pattern that was playing out in the Philippines and had played out in Hong Kong and Guam and Wake Island was now playing out in the Malaya city. Blitzkrieg bombing night and day to neutralize the enemy planes and ground batteries while unnerving the civilian populations, were followed by a massive, quick striking invasion, all supported by a naval bombardment. Martial law was declared in Singapore to help stabilize the state of affairs. Spain, while officially neutral, was unofficially acting as a leader in the cheering section for Japan when the state radio in Madrid said the Japanese, in bombing Manila, had only hit military targets. Madrid said it had Tokyo's word on that.
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Douglas MacArthur and other American officials had assured and reassured the people of the Philippines that a relief effort was on the way; in fact Washington had ordered most of the American navy to withdraw to Australia to save what ships it had left, operating in the Western Pacific. Only a number of U.S. subs remained. “The little Asiatic Fleet, based in the Philippines, was never intended as anything other than a harassing and delaying fleet . . . it was never expected to prevent Japanese landings.”
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This, plus the fact that the only reliable port was in Singapore, also crippled the navy's operations in the South China Sea, and the U.S. subs that were operating got poor reviews. In fact, the navy would not take any significant action until February of 1942 when the
Yorktown
and the
Enterprise
attacked the Japanese in the Marshall and Gilbert Islands.
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In one of his final communiqués before evacuating his command post, MacArthur promised to mete out revenge for the bombing of Manila. Eventually, he moved his family and forces to the Bataan section of Luzon and then, onto the island of Corregidor for one last stand before he could return.
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Word was spreading that MacArthur's position was tenuous, faltering. “Private advices received in New York indicate that the fall of Manila is imminent.” MacArthur had attempted to evacuate three hundred wounded by ship.
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“Yankee and Filipino soldiers fought desperately to block the assault, but the sheer weight of Jap numbers and equipment forced our men slowly back towards the capital.”
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The Japanese were crowing about their successes in the Pacific, claiming to have destroyed over 540 American, British, and Dutch aircraft, and to have sunk or badly damaged 33 large warships and four smaller vessels. They also claimed to have killed over 3,000 Allied troops while capturing 7,000 POWs.
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One sailor they did not kill, but whose own government thought they had, was Clifford Kickbush, 19, who “saw a grave marked as his own and talked to a friend who thought he had helped bury him in the Hawaiian Islands informed his parents he was very much alive.” He contacted his very relieved parents and assured his startled shipmate that he had not seen a ghost. “What the devil! I helped bury you yesterday.”
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The story only became public three weeks after the attack.

Most Americans had assumed that the Burma Road was a vital link to China and the Free Chinese Forces, along which munitions, medicine, and materiel passed from the Allies; in truth, the road was a highway of pirates, privateers, con men, crooks and murderers. “It has been, and still remains both a national scandal and a national disgrace. Because the Burma Road has for years been dominated by racketeers and war profiteers . . . 10,000 Chinese soldiers have gone without rifles, hand grenades or munitions.”
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Thousands of tons of materiel destined for the Free Chinese never made it, left alongside the long road, stolen, destroyed, or which ended up on the black market, ever since its opening in 1938.

Mohandas Gandhi, the “Little Leader” stepped down as the head of the All-India Nationalist Congress because of his commitment to nonviolence. India, where opposition to British colonial rule was brewing, conditionally supported England. Some there wanted to leverage support for England in exchange for independence, but Gandhi would have none of it. “I could not identify myself with opposition to war efforts on the ground of ill-will against Britain.” In essence, he would not support violence in exchange for peace. “If such were my view and I believed in the use of violence for gaining independence . . . I would consider myself guilty of unpatriotic conduct.”
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The decision by the Indian government was a practical one though. The Japanese were threatening to bomb Calcutta. They were also suspected by the navy of having opened up submarine operations in the waters off Alaska.

Closer to home, the U.S. Congress wrapped up a rather eventful first session. In the 77th Congress, all they did was declare war on three countries, pass a huge new defense budget, give the president extraordinary authority under the War Powers Act, including the ability to censor just about anybody and any entity, pass a huge tax increase, pass the Lend-Lease Act, undo most of the Neutrality Acts of the 1930s, pass a new Selective Service Act, and conduct numerous investigations including corruption and fraud in defense lobbying.

Legislation they did not get around to passing included anti-lynching laws, stopped by a ferocious filibuster in the Senate. Proponents of the law thought that 1941 would be their year to finally get federal laws against lynching moved through Congress, but it was not to be so. The
Birmingham News
, while opposing a federal law against lynching, said hopefully, that in all of 1941 there had only been four in the country, according to the Tuskegee Institute. This was down from thirty-nine lynchings in the years 1936 to 1941, and over three hundred from 1922 to 1936. “Almost any year now the nation may be able to go through an entire 12-month period without a lynching. This would be about the best answer to those who persist in agitating for a federal anti-lynching law.”
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