CHAPTER 27

THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OF DECEMBER

Japs Blast Undefended Manila

Birmingham News

Papers in U.S. Hit New Peak in Circulation

Atlanta Constitution

Ban Tires for Family Cars

Chicago Daily Tribune

On Christmas Day in Rhode Island, Henry “Daddy” Johnson celebrated his 107th birthday. Henry was a former slave, who had met Abraham Lincoln after the Emancipation Proclamation and was in remarkably good health, perhaps because he chose to never marry so he could “stay out of trouble.” Until the prior year, he’d lived unaided in a rough cabin in the woods of the tiny state.¹ Andrew Jackson was president when Johnson was born.

In Missouri, General John M. Claypool, 95, of the former Confederate Army of the Confederate States of America and, by 1941, the national commander of the United Confederate Veterans, was photographed signing up for civil defense work in St. Louis.² James K. Polk was president when Claypool was born.

Meanwhile in Georgia, William Jones, 105, led more than three dozen former slaves in prayer “that this country may be victorious, as the Atlanta Ex-Slave Association held its annual Christmas party. . . .”³ Martin Van Buren was president when Jones, a former slave himself, was born.

In 1941, the grandsons of slaves and grandsons of Confederate generals took up arms together, united to fight a common enemy which had embraced a perverted aim of elevating a “Master Race” over the rest of humanity. Ironically, the U.S. Armed Forces were, at the time, racially segregated, mirroring the color barrier throughout the rest of American society. This great paradox would be tackled with full force, but not until after the war.

Just then the Democratic political machine in Chicago was having its own problems with race, as the chief justice of the Windy City’s Municipal Court, Edward Scheffler, refused to recognize the appointment of a black attorney, Patrick B. Prescott Jr., as an associate justice on the same bench. The appointment of Prescott was made by the Illinois’ Republican governor, Dwight Green.⁴

There was a bond growing between Churchill and Roosevelt. Philosophically, they disagreed on much, one the liberal the other the conservative, but they liked each other personally and respected each other’s political skills. They also shared the same basic worldview, particularly against the backdrop of Nazism. Certainly their love of the sea was an important bond as well. During the First World War, Roosevelt had been assistant secretary of the navy, the same time that Churchill had been First Lord of the Admiralty in Britain.

They both had suffered political reversals and rejections and had come through those trials as hardened and tougher men. They’d first met in 1918, when they were far younger, somewhat callow, and neither carried a cane. Both were the children of rank and privilege, though Americans would sometimes complain they had no royalty. The Roosevelts, the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, the Whitneys, the Cabots, and the Lodges defied that hollow protest. Classless society, indeed. A mordant ditty made the rounds, among high society and hoi polloi alike: “New England, land of the bean and the cod, where the Lodges talk only to the Cabots, and the Cabots talk only to God.”

The next time they met wasn’t until, fittingly, on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic, the Augusta, in August 1941 to produce the Atlantic Charter. The document was not a mutual defense treaty but a framework for how democracies should conduct themselves in relation to other democracies. Churchill had sailed to Newfoundland to confer Roosevelt on the Prince of Wales, the very same battleship sunk later by the Japanese.

While both men were known for their humor, Churchill’s was more intellectual; he could be devastating but was also self-depreciating. At his lunch with the congressional leadership the day before, Senator Josiah Bailey of North Carolina told him that ever since the Boer War, “I have always believed that you would be Prime Minister of Great Britain” to which Churchill replied, “Senator you are wrong. My future is behind me.”⁵

The after-action reports continued to roll in for his landmark speech to Congress and they were 100 percent favorable. Everybody knew when the Atlanta Constitution editorialized, “It was a great speech. It was moving, inspiring and full of power” and then singled out his reference to Gettysburg for accolades that the world had indeed changed in those twenty days since December 7, that America was a changed country. Factionalism—at least for the moment—had been set aside.⁶

The only countries where it had been predictably, badly reviewed were Germany and Italy. The German “view is that the catastrophic situation in Anglo-American conduct of war has led to this meeting.” The Italian press said it was one more “step by England along path of political submission to United States.”⁷ In one other regard were Roosevelt and Churchill similar; they were supreme egotists, obsessed with praises but also brickbats.

Some saw it in a broader context that Congress, even with the bombing of Pearl Harbor and with America losing the war for the Pacific, still needed to hear from Churchill to gain a greater perspective on what was at stake in the war for the world. Churchill had to remind his American audience they his people also “had the same feeling in our darkest days.”⁸

Said syndicated columnist David Lawrence, “He brought with him a tonic of reassurance and confidence that makes long range planning for victory seem comprehensible in spite of the setbacks and defeats of the immediate future. Nothing compares with it. . . .”⁹

That Saturday, FDR had eight separate meetings, all dealing with the war, and Churchill attended six of them. Some of the meetings dealt with better communications and co-ordination among not just Great Britain, Russia, and America but also Australia, Norway, and Belgium, the latter [two] having “refugee governments.” They also met with Soviet Ambassador Maxim Litvinoff who, like all the Russians it seemed, had to be handled with kid gloves.¹⁰

The war planners were also still trying to decipher the Third Reich’s next move. Some thought a renewed effort in North Africa, where the British had finally gained the upper hand, or an invasion of Turkey or an invasion of Spain. Hitler’s surprise moves of the past seven years had kept his enemies guessing and had not changed.

Meanwhile, another man of the sea, Admiral Chester Nimitz, reported to Pearl Harbor to assume his new command as head of the Pacific fleet.

The Japanese agreement with General MacArthur to treat Manila as an “open city” and thus not to be touched by either’s military, lasted exactly one day. By the twenty-seventh, the Japanese renewed their heavy bombing campaign, apparently only waiting for MacArthur to move his anti-aircraft guns out of the city so they could attack with impunity. In all the destruction falling from the sky, not one shot was fired from the ground in retaliation to the silvery and glistening twin engine bombers.¹¹

Attacking an unarmed city filled with innocent civilians offended sensibilities, no less so than if a country attacked another and then declared war after the attack. War, according to the Geneva Conventions, was supposed to be conducted civilly and that meant not making unnecessary war on noncombatants. “Rivaling if not surpassing the stab-in-the-back assault on Pearl Harbor, the raiders visited terror upon the helpless metropolis . . .¹² They sank one and badly damaged another ocean-going liner at anchor in the Manila harbor while also damaging two American war ships. While bulletins and news reports on the battle for the Philippines were readily available, very few photos of the carnage and destruction were appearing in any of the nation’s broadsheets. Many of the stories were angry and graphic though, including the strafing of civilians in the Intramuros district of the old city.

Even the normally unruffled and fact-based Associated Press wire service hotly reported, “Japan treacherously violated the laws of human decency anew Saturday when Japanese bombers savagely attacked Manila, killing many and setting fires, 24 hours after the Philippine capital had been declared an open, undefended city.” Much of the bombing campaign had focused on the area around a large hotel “where several hundred Americans and Britons were sheltered.”¹³ Dozens of planes over many hours pounded the city and the first estimates were of fifty killed and many wounded but the count of the dead multiplied as the day went on.

A 350-year-old church, Santo Domingo, was hit by Japanese bombing planes and caught fire. Much of the old walled portions of the city built hundreds of years earlier by the Spanish were leveled. A radio report said the church had been “smashed by one direct hit.”¹⁴ Japanese ground troops were even closer to the city now, just over sixty miles away. Americans and Filipino forces were falling back, again and again, to fight and fall back yet again. The bombing campaign by the Japanese had pretty much wiped out what was left of MacArthur air corps and air fields. Oil fires were everywhere, the Manila port was a bombed-out wreak and the U.S. naval base at Cavite had been spewing black smoke for over two days. Explosions of gas and ammo dumps were frequently heard.

Cordell Hull, Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, was asked his opinion of the Japanese regard for the international law and the civility of war. The normally understated elderly man let loose comparing the behavior of the Japanese to those of Nazi Germany, saying they were “practicing the barbaric methods of cruelty and inhumanity that Hitler had been using in Europe.” He noted the cruelty also of the Japanese when they invaded China in 1937. Senator Burton K. Wheeler, Democrat of Montana and noted isolationist before December 7, said of the Japanese, “we face only a half-civilized race and in the future they have to be treated as such.”¹⁵ Then he could not resist a shot at FDR and Lend–Lease saying how much he regretted not having the bombs to “bomb the hell out of” Japanese cities because “we have given them away!”¹⁶

Bert Silen, an NBC broadcaster in Luzon said over the air, “The cry is for help—help from America. And if this does not come soon, all of us have resigned ourselves to the inevitable.”¹⁷ The Japanese were reportedly dropping bombs all over the island and while Tokyo said nothing about violating the rules dealing with open cities, Berlin radio ridiculously said the Japanese did not recognize it as such because MacArthur had not consulted with the civilian population before announcing his decision. The Berlin broadcast was picked up by NBC short-wave radio.

Late in the evening of the twenty-sixth, the War Department issued a communiqué on the crisis in the Philippines. “Philippine theatre. Fighting in the Lingayen Gulf area north of Manila, is of desultory character. Combat operations in the southeast, in the general vicinity of Lamon Bay, are very heavy. The enemy is being continually reinforced from fleets of troopships in Lingayen Gulf and off Atimonan. Enemy air activity continued heavy over all fronts. There is nothing to report from other areas.”¹⁸ Lamon Bay was on the east coast of the Philippines and Lingayen was on the west coast of the Philippines and Manila was right in between.

The Japanese navy minister Shigetaro Shimada went before the Diet and claimed that the Japanese had nearly destroyed the British and the American navies and air forces operating in the Western Pacific. “He asserted British and American naval losses included seven battleships sunk, three heavily damaged and one less seriously damaged; two cruisers sunk and six damaged; a destroyer sunk and four damaged; nine submarines, nine gunboats, seven torpedo boats and sixteen merchant [ships] sunk and fifty captured.” He also said they had destroyed 338 American planes in the Philippines and together, including British planes lost, had destroyed 803.”¹⁹ Again, the Allies did not dispute the enormous and impressive claims and again, all this was widely printed in the Western newspapers, and there was little the U.S. government could do to censor the stories or gloss them over. The word “retreat” appeared in a number of those stories.²⁰

Bulletins appeared of how friends and associates of General MacArthur feared for his life. In the “world war” he was known to take risks—some which were thought to be reckless—and his capture by the Japanese would be a huge propaganda victory for Tokyo and equally disheartening for Americans. “MacArthur’s headquarters staff in Manila went to an air raid shelter each time Japanese planes approached, but the general remained in his office, smoking and studying war maps.”²¹ Of great concern too was the safety of his wife Jean and their son, Arthur. Of the fight for the Philippines, the American High Commissioner, Francis B. Sayre summed it up in one short sentence: “We will fight to the last man.”²²

The Japanese were not only destroying, they were also restoring. In Borneo, retreating British engineers had laid waste to some 150 oil wells, in the hopes of denying or delaying the precious liquid for the enemy. The ploy failed as the Japanese, within days, brought seventy of them back on line, producing by their estimate some 700 tons of oil a day.²³ The Japanese alacrity in restoring the oil wells underscored the degree to which their conquest of East Asia was in large part predicated on their strategic need to capture rich oil resources, once controlled by the British. The Japanese knew full well that without sufficient oil to power their war machine, their aspirations for greater Empire would be futile.

In capturing the area of Sarawak from the British, the Japanese, had fall into their lap, tons of precious tin, rubber, guns, “armors cars” and other spoils of war.²⁴ Additionally, a report from the British colonial office said the Japanese were now “operating” in the Gilbert Islands which were approximately halfway between the Hawaiian Islands and Australia. “The announcement expressed fears that some European residents of the little chain of 16 coral atoll islands might have been taken prisoners.”²⁵

Americans were following the news of their country and the news of the world as newspaper circulation reached an all-time high, according to Editor and Publisher.²⁶ Morning papers were up, afternoon papers were up, and Sunday papers were up. Most papers cost 2 to 3 cents.

For weeks, women had been warned that the days of silk stockings—at least during the war effort—were probably over and now it appeared they were, as many department stores had pushed their purchase hard for the Christmas buying season. The National Association of Hosiery expected inventories to run out, as there had been a run on them since December 7. Silk would be needed to fill more important roles including parachutes and the powder bags for the large guns on warships if the Allies were going to get a leg up over the Axis Powers.

Washington finally got its policy together on civilian purchase of new tires during the war and the course of action was essentially “Hit the road, Jack.” Plain, everyday citizens had no hope (at least legally) of getting new tires but neither did cabbies or those who lived in rural areas. Tires in 1941 were not steel-belted or vulcanized or pneumatic or nylon-belted and did not last for thousands of miles. They were essentially a thin rubber balloon inside a hard circle of rubber that wrapped around a steel rim, and the contraption did not last long. A board with nails, glass in the road, were daggers at the throat of these poorly made tires. Even if they did not meet their demise due to puncture, they wore out very quickly as did the tread. Getting stuck in snow, ice, and mud was an everyday occurrence and the solution for many was to place chains around their tires which also destroyed the soft tar of city streets. An outright ban on tires was essentially a ban on driving. This was not an inconsequential decision by the government. The cessation of the sale of new tires had a broad and potentially devastating ramification for the economy. As many people drove their cars to work each day or took cabs, it would definitely have an effect on employment. Goodyear pitched their flimsy contrivances saying, “You can safely run your tire until the non-skid tread design practically disappears. Then you can have them safely regrooved. Later, if your tire carcasses are sound, you can safely have them retreaded and drive them nearly as far again.”²⁷

“The nation’s 32,000,000-odd motor car owners today face an almost complete tire famine,” said one story.²⁸ Local rationing boards were set up with three members from each community, like the Draft Boards and the Enemy Alien Boards. The members would be appointed by each state’s governor and would be empowered to issue certificates for purchase “to those few operators that come under the classifications outlined by Washington and all law enforcement agencies have been asked to aid in enforcing the rationing rules.”²⁹

The rubber shortage was such that people were advised against going for Sunday drives, to walk more, and to only drive for essential reasons and when one did, combine all your errands together. Comedian Bob Hope was in newspaper ads astride a Schwinn bicycle.³⁰

New tire sales were limited to police and fire departments, doctors, nurses, veterinarians, trucks that delivered oil, farm tractors and other equipment needed for the production of food, and delivery trucks for scrap metals and trucks for “garbage removal.”³¹ For delivery vehicles like milk trucks, it was no go. The Office of Production Management later amended their rules to allow for the manufacture of fire hoses.³² American farmers were urged to plant a Russian imported dandelion as some scientists saw the weed as being able to produce a modicum of rubber to replace at least some of the shortage, according to the National Chemurgic Council.³³ One side effect of the new rule: “Stores were quickly cleaned out of golf balls.”³⁴

City fathers in Detroit of all places made plans to bring out of retirement over a hundred streetcars to fill the need for public transportation created by the tire shortage.³⁵ The shortage was so severe in Great Britain, the Minister of Supply issued an outright ban on anything made out of the now-rare substance including “corsets . . . golf tees and garden hoses.”³⁶

With all the seriousness and seriousness of purpose in America, it was sometimes difficult to remember that the country also still had a seedy underside, fueled by easy money, notoriety, and booze. Young millionaire heiress Gloria Vanderbilt was so often in the news it was reasonable to assume she employed an army of publicists. But she was also a “Jonah,” bringing trouble and bad luck to everybody around her it seemed. At her engagement party, two men who claimed to be princes got into a fistfight and this made the newspapers, even as war was raging all around and even as young American boys were fighting and dying.³⁷

Just as American families were getting over the weeklong food festival of Christmas week, they were staring down the barrel of yet another festival of food and fun during New Year’s Week. Still, with the new regulations on tires, Americans would have plenty of opportunity to walk off the extra poundage they gained over the holiday season. Ralph’s, a chain supermarket in the Los Angeles area, was touting all sorts of meats, fruits, vegetables, and staples for customers to restock their shelves. Interestingly, of all the staples listed, including salt and pepper, Maxwell House coffee (1 pound was just 31 cents), and potatoes (10 pounds for 27 cents), sugar was nowhere to be found in their print ads. They also now carried the new disclaimer at the bottom, “We Reserve the Right to Limit Quantities.”³⁸

They would also have plenty of jobs in manual labor to sweat over, building the arsenal of democracy. Government planners in a myriad of agencies, including the National Youth Administration, were conceiving new job training programs for men and women, as there was a “skilled labor gap.” The effort involved “federal, state and local agencies” who were “cooperating in an all-out program to provide skilled workers to fill the wide gaps in industrial plant rosters growing out of the acceleration of production to meet war needs.” The plans included moving workers around the country to meet the needs of various industries. Also, women would be “encouraged” to join the work force. “As a first big step, the big-scale employment of women looms, hence they are now being trained for jobs now reserved for male workers. Women soon will dominate in many machine shops, drafting rooms, engineering departments, light assembly divisions, light riveting and spot welding.”³⁹

The American government continued its crackdown on “enemy aliens” in the country. In Alabama, fruit orchards owned by Japanese nationals were seized by the Department of the Interior, while the Justice Department issued a terse statement that all “Japanese, German and Italian nationals in seven Pacific coast states” had until 11 a.m. on Monday, the twenty-ninth to surrender to authorities any radio-transmitting equipment, especially short-wave radios, as well as any cameras they owned. Those states the edict applied to were Washington, California, Utah, Montana, Oregon, Idaho, and Nevada.⁴⁰ A second group of twenty-three enemy aliens was trucked from San Francisco to “a Missoula internment camp. . . . About 100 local aliens previously have been sent to Montana. Several carloads of Southern California aliens were scheduled to be placed aboard the same train at Sacramento.”⁴¹

If possible, security measures were becoming even tighter in America three weeks after the outbreak of war. Additional cordons were thrown up around defense plants, identification cards for workers were being issued, and tightly controlled and law enforcement officials often pulled over drivers for no apparent reason. Washington tightened even further the border with Mexico, not allowing anyone to carry any form of correspondence across the boundaries. All letters would be confiscated.⁴²

While nobody used the phrase “Police State,” a blanket of state-sponsored security—along with the acquiescence of most Americans—was settling over the country. The Santa Anita thoroughbred racing meeting was canceled for the first time ever. Public officials were debating banning any gathering of more than 10,000 people. To enter the Los Angeles harbor—as with others around the country—specially issued photo identification was needed but they also contained “fingerprint, status of citizenship and physical description of the holder.”⁴³

The harbor had already been designated a “Navy sea defense district” by presidential order. “Photographing in the area is prohibited and no one can divulge movements of shipping or naval activities under penalty of violation of the Espionage Act or other Federal or state laws. . . .”⁴⁴

The costs for civil defense had gone up exponentially. As a result, money available for other municipal programs was severely restricted. The lead editorial in the Los Angeles Times read, “Where to Cut to Save Money for War.” Editorials in the New York Times, the New York Herald-Tribune, the Indianapolis News, and others applauded the new restrictions and offered advice to citizens on how to stay out of trouble.⁴⁵

If anybody did complain about all the censorship, shortages, rationing, checkpoints, blackout drills, ubiquitous guards, and any number of other infringements and inconveniences, the Pavlovian response was, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” as if the questioning party was somehow unpatriotic.

The matter of the Japanese, German, and Italian legations was still to be resolved, though the United States pledged to abide by the international conventions. The German staff and ambassador had been removed from Washington and were comfortably ensconced at the Greenbrier hotel in West Virginia, mostly eating and drinking too much. They were awaiting their deportation which was delayed because of the niceties of diplomats, the intermediary Swiss, and foot-dragging bureaucrats.⁴⁶ The Germans though weren’t in any hurry to leave.

Further, the Roosevelt administration pledged that in the matter of Japanese prisoners of war, here it too would abide by the 1929 articles of Geneva endorsed and ratified at the time by forty-seven countries. Ominously, Japan never ratified the conventions. “The United States has informed the Japanese government that all Japanese prisoners captured by American armed forces will be treated in accordance with the prisoner-of-war convention. . . .” The Americans expected the Japanese to reciprocate and “grant all American prisoners of war reciprocal fair and humane treatment.”⁴⁷ It was asking a lot.

The Japanese already had a sizable number of American POW’s including the marines taken at Wake Island, in China, and at Guam, plus the sailors taken off a gunboat captured in Shanghai. The Americans only had a handful including several pilots shot down in Pearl and the crew of one of the “midget” submarines captured in that battle. According to the 1929 document as created by the International Red Cross, prisoner exchanges had to be arranged and POW camps opened for international inspection.

Representatives of the World Alliance of the Young Men Christian’s Association, including Dr. Darius Davis, had gone on an inspection tour of the Russian, German, French, and English POW camps and found that each was generally abiding by the Geneva Convention, although the Germans fed their Russian prisoners less than prisoners “of other nationalities. “Each day, the Russians were given “a cooked turnip ‘with a little codfish thrown in.’”⁴⁸ Many governments sent “supplementary” food to their captive men: Davis was asked if prisoners could survive without supplementary food and he remarked that the Serbs and the Poles got nothing from home, “And they are still able to live.”⁴⁹ No inspections had yet been made of Japanese POW camps and, of course, there was no mention of the German concentration camps where the extermination of millions of human beings was just getting underway.

As abruptly as the torpedo attacks along the California coast had begun, they by and large ceased. No doubt the increased surveillance by civilians and the law enforcement along the shore, as well as vastly increased over flights by the military and the additional precautions taken by ship captains, combined to have a positive effect. However, it could also have been that the subs—presumably Japanese—had run low on fuel and supplies and were thus forced to withdraw to safer waters to re-provision. Still, fishing on the West Coast was severely restricted because boat insurance had jumped up and with it, the cost of sardines.⁵⁰

The American people had digested the situation with more than some aplomb. There was never a general panic among the populace and given what submarines were capable of doing to defenseless ships and shore emplacements, they would have been justified in panicking more. Shipping along the coast was vitally important to the local economy at the time. There were few roads up and down the West Coast.

Airplanes were not big enough to haul sufficient quantities of food and other goods, so it was up to ships and trains to carry the load. The very thought of commercial ships being sunk at random could have set off a panic, sending food prices spiraling upwards with runs on grocery stores and yet, those Americans along the West Coast had taken the whole matter in stride, perhaps inured a bit to the new vicissitudes of war.

For them, war and sacrifice already had become a way of life. Little could Americans realize, in those heady first days of rekindled patriotism, just how long and costly this global conflict would prove to be.