December 1941 (9 page)

Washington was still hopeful for a workable solution to the crisis with Japan. Meetings took place and an exchange of documents continued between the Japanese embassy and the State Department, and the diplomats continued talking. Some publications took a decidedly “wait and see this will all blow over” posture on developments in the Pacific. Others, like the
Baltimore Sun
, were more breathless. “A single additional act of aggression by Japan may be sufficient to provoke instant large-scale retaliation by British forces—with the United States taking an active supporting role,” greeted readers in Charm City the morning of December 2.
¹¹⁴

Roosevelt had had a light schedule that day, seeing now more than half a dozen people over the course of the day. He dined that evening with his personal secretary, Grace Tully, from 7:30 p.m. until twenty minutes after midnight. He then turned in at 12:35 a.m.
¹¹⁵

In a fashion, tensions seemed to have diminished in twenty-four hours, and while coverage of the situation in the Far East continued by the nation's newspapers, it faded somewhat against the backdrop of the ongoing war in Europe. A columnist wrote, “If there is to be war, it will start under strange auspices. The American people have no hate in their hearts for the Japanese. For generations a mutual admiration has been developing between the two countries and, despite the differences in language and customs, some warm friendships have sprung up.”
¹¹⁶

CHAPTER 3
THE THIRD OF DECEMBER

“British Rush Troops to Libya”

Sun

“Nazis Rush Reinforcements”

Tucson Daily Citizen

“Tokyo Must Explain Actions”

Washington Post

“Airport Coffee Shop Refuses to Serve Colored Quartet”

Washington Evening Star

W
inston Churchill, along with influential Jewish leaders in Great Britain, America, and Palestine, called for the creation of a separate “army of Jews” to fight in the war. Thousands of young men from Palestine, America, and other countries stepped forward to volunteer for the unique fighting force. “What people, what group have more at stake?” said Emanuel Neumann, an American Jewish leader. “Hitler has openly proclaimed the annihilation of European Jewry as one of his war aims.” Henry Stimson, secretary of war, voiced his support. Ultimately, “entrenched bureaucrats” inside the British government threw enough monkey wrenches into the works and the concept withered. One London bureaucrat smarmily said that the British government was fighting both the Nazis and “Zionism.”
¹

Newspaper stories and editorials on the situation in the Pacific waned somewhat, as their attention was diverted to the Russian Front, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and North Africa, where the real fighting was going on. The situation there was simply more pressing.

More and more American correspondents were becoming embedded with Allied forces, especially with the British in North Africa, and poignant stories of heroism, humor, and sacrifice were appearing in American publications. One popular columnist, John Barry, sent back regular dispatches via his “War Diary” column.
²
Photos and their captions of the African war zone had to be approved by the British before being released for publication in the West.
³

So it was with a good deal of news coverage that President Roosevelt publicly announced on December 3 that Lend-Lease aid would be extended to Turkey. In actuality, the U.S government had been covertly aiding the strategically important country for some time, as it was a target for takeover by Germany. Roosevelt said, “The defense of Turkey [is] vital to the defense of the United States.”
⁴
Billions under Lend-Lease had already gone to Great Britain, Russia, Free French operations, and other allies in the war against the Axis powers. Allegations arose that Washington was playing favorites with its lending and leasing policies, putting Great Britain ahead of the Soviets, but Roosevelt's spokesman, Stephen Early, dismissed them. Congress had just allocated $78 million more for Russia.
⁵
It was later revealed that under Lend-Lease, FDR was also aiding India.
⁶

When it came to a president's ability to make war, the
Baltimore Sun
editorialized in no uncertain terms, “We know from the experiences of other countries that Fascism results when the legislative branch of the Government surrenders to one man its powers to make decisions for the people. In the face of this same trend toward Fascism in America the immediate duty of the American people is to return to Congress only those representatives who faithfully execute the people's trust.”
⁷

Meanwhile, Edward R. Murrow of CBS, already a journalistic legend, was the guest of honor at a dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria and in front of over one thousand celebrants said that “unless the United States enters this war Britain may perish.” The establishment was out in full force to honor a charter member of the establishment; telegrams were read from FDR, the British ambassador Lord Halifax, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and Brendan Bracken, the British minister of information. Murrow went on to say the war would be decided along the “banks of the Potomac” and not in North Africa or on the Russian Front.
⁸
By now, Halifax was sending daily confidential memos to Roosevelt, advising him on British advances and defeats.
⁹

The Philippines government first issued a confusing statement from President Quezon as to where it stood in the Pacific mess; it was blamed on a medical condition for which he received a complete checkup. He then issued a loyalty oath to FDR—and to the United States.
¹⁰

To checkmate German designs on Greenland, from where their subs and ships could more easily continue their now unrestricted warfare against American and British ships, the American military was contemplating its own bases along the east coast of Greenland, including the island of Jan Mayen, in an area that had been discovered by Henry Hudson in 1607. Germany had already conquered Norway, and its sights on Greenland were simply an extension of its plans to dominate the North Atlantic and, eventually, the world.
¹¹

Russia, a large beneficiary of Lend-Lease, claimed anew to have successfully pushed back the German advance on Moscow and that their troops “were finding the frozen bodies of Germans wrapped in flimsy blankets; huddled in roadside ditches.”
¹²
Russian troops also reported recapturing some towns first taken by the invading German army. Still, the information came from the state-owned media of the Soviet Union, and other news reports were less glowing about the Red Army's successes. A news report from the Associated Press said that German troops had broken through the Soviet lines and were advancing once again on Moscow.
¹³

The British meanwhile were “reorganizing” in Libya,
¹⁴
mounting an effort at a counteroffensive against Gen. Erwin Rommel and his 16th Panzer Division and the rest of the German “Afrika Korps” as reported by Edward Kennedy, an “Associated Press War Correspondent.”
¹⁵

Consternation was running high in America over Europe and to what extent Congress and America would allow FDR to set national policy. Secretary of State Cordell Hull emphasized the disagreements with other countries including “the basic doctrines of law, justice, morals and equality of treatment among nations—especially in trade—and settlement of controversies by peaceful negotiation rather than by force.”
¹⁶
Hull, in private, was not confident about a favorable outcome in the Far East.
¹⁷
The issue of Japan, which had ebbed and flowed over the past several days, was beginning to flow again.

More bluntly, the senator from Montana, Burton K. Wheeler, Democrat and first among America Firsters, acidly said, “The President's foreign policy meant the plowing under of every fourth American boy. The only time the administration has intimated that we should go to war with Japan is when the British Empire is threatened.”
¹⁸
Everybody in the Roosevelt White House hated Wheeler. Wheeler had already announced he would investigate “interventionists” in Hollywood.
¹⁹
Just a year earlier, in 1940, John L. Lewis, head of the mine workers union and another isolationist and Roosevelt-basher, had tried to convince Wheeler to run for president.
²⁰

In truth, Hollywood in 1941 was reluctant to take on the subject of fascism overseas and whether America should intervene in Europe's troubles. Germany was a huge and profitable market for American films, and the movie moguls were reluctant to alienate the cultural gatekeepers in Berlin. At the end of the day, Hollywood was first and foremost a business. When Charlie Chaplin's
The Great Dictator
was released in late 1940, many critics panned his satire of Hitler as left-wing propaganda, earning Chaplin the lasting enmity (and surveillance) of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. It was only after America entered the war that suddenly Chaplin's film was seen as a courageous masterpiece.

For fifteen years, Sergeant Major Robert Smith, stationed in San Diego, had been a technical advisor to Hollywood on movies about the military. Smith observed that all inductees were essentially klutzes, both the real kind and the reel kind. He singled out actors Randolph Scott and John Payne as leading men who were “all thumbs.”
²¹

Nevertheless, the winds in 1941 were slowly starting to shift the weathervane of American opinion, as reflected by the drubbing that the America First Committee was taking from the commentariat. One columnist went so far as to suggest that the America Firsters were in league with Berlin. “It has begun blackmailing our Representatives and Senators with the threat that they will not be re-elected unless at this moment they play the Axis game. They are threatening the country . . . which would . . . lose us the war and lose us the peace. In the whole diplomatic game, the America First Committee has been the only ace in the whole for the Axis.”
²²

On Capitol Hill, a much debated bill on curbing strikes in war industries, passed the House, 252–136. If it passed the Senate and FDR signed it, the measure would mandate a “60 day ‘cooling off' period” before a union could undertake any strike in an industry that supported the war effort, and it could be argued that all industries somehow supported the war effort.
²³
In San Diego, the U.S. Navy was concerned about a strike among shipyard workers. Some referred to union strikes as “sabotage.”
²⁴
Unsurprisingly, according to Gallup, large majorities of Americans opposed strikes in defense industries.
²⁵
A ban on aid from the government to unions that affiliated or employed “members of the Communist party, the Young Communist League, and the German-American Bund” was also being discussed in the halls of Congress.
²⁶
The
Los Angeles Times
editorially supported the measure, saying there was no “right to strike.” “What about the right of self defense and self-preservation which, though the first law of nature, these unioneers call it their right to deny and to imperil?” the paper stormed.
²⁷

The American labor movement had additional problems. Congressman Martin Dies said the Congress of Industrial Organizations (which later merged with the American Federation of Labor to become the AFL-CIO) was “marked by a coalition of communism and criminality.” High officials had been charged or convicted of “petty larceny, grand larceny, burglary, grand theft, carrying concealed weapons, assault and battery, robbery, white slavery, holdups, conspiracy, attempted arson, receiving stolen property, felonious assault, extortion and forgery.”
²⁸

It wasn't just the unions that were seen as hotbeds of communist agitation. New York City was also concerned with the “red menace” in their very own high schools, according to a report prepared by the New York state senate. “Communist students in the New York City colleges and high schools are taught to lie, cheat and create disturbances in the classroom and on the campus. . . . Young Communist League branches are found in four colleges, nine high schools, teachers groups and the Navy Yard in Brooklyn.” Teachers, students, and staff were suspended or fired as a result of the report and hundreds openly claimed membership.
²⁹

On December 3, the
Birmingham News
had a different take on New York: “The gay side of war—laughing soldiers, sailors and mariners promenading the streets, many with girlfriends clinging admiringly to their arms—is showing itself increasingly as the volume of American preparedness grows.”
³⁰
But the numbers weren't growing fast enough.

Roosevelt criticized the Selective Service for being too selective. Over 20 percent—nearly 200,000—of men rejected were because of “defective teeth.” After the president intervened, the decision was to enlist the men into the army and then turn them over to the dental division for repairs.
³¹
A headline in the
Hartford Courant
said, “5 Negros Among 197 Given Tests” in a story about the draft in Connecticut. It also noted that “such things as fever, sore throats and certain correctible defects are reasons for temporary rejections.”
³²
In New Hampshire, the
Portsmouth Herald
announced that thirty inductees were being called and they published the names of all thirty in the newspaper.
³³