Pearl Harbor Christmas (12 page)

Christmas Eve 1941 was the only public occasion when Roosevelt and Churchill spoke from the same platform. As they gathered with guests and the White House staff in the East Room an hour before the ceremonies at five, the Marine Band on the South Lawn struck up holiday music, beginning with “Joy to the World,” accompanied by choirs from nearby churches. Outranking the Prime Minister in the party were stately, beautiful Crown Princess Marthe of occupied Norway and her princely husband, the future King Olav V.
⁵
Marthe, whom FDR adored, was one of the rare women he kissed whenever they met. With her children, she had been offered a temporary White House residence after fleeing Norway, until she could find an American home, which she did nearby in Maryland. In what seemed like a royal gesture, each White House employee was presented with a signed photograph of Franklin and Eleanor.

When the sunset gun at Fort Myer, across the Potomac, boomed, the band began “Hail to the Chief,” and the President, on the arm of an aide, was escorted slowly out to the south balcony with Mrs. Roosevelt and the Prime Minister. Following them, the White House party, many shivering in the chill evening, watched as FDR pressed a button lighting the big evergreen at the lower slope of the lawn. The crowd applauded, their eyes especially on Churchill. Then the Rev. Joseph Corrigan, rector of Catholic University in northeast Washington, delivered a brief invocation tailored to the times. “Hear an united people, girded for battle” he began, looking up, “dedicate themselves to the peace of Christmas.” He confessed “strangeness” in such a contradiction in words, yet “All the material resources with which Thou has blessed our native land, we consecrate to the dread tasks of war.” It was what Churchill wanted to hear and the reason he had come.

Radio carried their voices across the country and abroad. As the Christmas lights glowed, Roosevelt spoke directly to the event. “It is in the spirit of peace and good will, and with particular thoughtfulness of those, our sons and brothers, who serve in our armed forces on land and sea, near and far—those who serve and endure for us—that we light our Christmas candles now across this continent from one coast to the other on this Christmas evening.”

Now, he added, “my associate, my old and good friend” wanted to speak to Washingtonians and to the world. No one in hearing distance had any doubt as to who that was, especially once his rolling, almost antique, voice echoed across the lights and shadows. “This is a strange Christmas eve,” Churchill began:

Almost the whole world is locked in deadly struggle, and with the most terrible weapons which science can devise, the nations advance upon each other. Ill would it be for us this Christmastide if we were not sure that no greed for the land or wealth of any other people, no vulgar ambition, no morbid lust for material gain at the expense of others has led us to the field. Here, in the midst of war, raging and soaring over all the lands and seas, creeping nearer to our hearts and our homes, here, amid the tumult, we have tonight the peace of the spirit in each cottage home and in each generous heart. There, we may cast aside for this night at least the cares and dangers which beset us, and make for our children an evening of happiness in a world of storm. Here, then, for one night only, each home throughout the English-speaking world should be a brightly lighted island of happiness and peace.

President Roosevelt (with Prime Minister Churchill behind him) on the White House portico lighting the White House Christmas tree.
Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library

While far from his own hearth and family, he continued, “Yet I cannot truthfully say that I feel far from home.” He referred to his kinship with his audiences, listening rapt on the White House lawn, and nationwide:

Whether it be ties of blood on my mother’s side, or the friendships I have developed here over many years of active life, or the commanding sentiment of comradeship in the common cause of great peoples who speak the same language, who kneel at the same altars, and, to a very large extent, pursue the same ideals, I cannot feel myself a stranger here at the centre and at the summit of the United States. I feel a sense of unity and fraternal association which, added to the kindliness of your welcome, convinces me that I have a right to sit at your fireside and share your Christmas joys.

It was, he conceded, “a strange Christmas eve,” with war “raging and roaring over all the lands and seas, creeping nearer to our hearts and homes.” Nevertheless, the PM concluded, using the English equivalent for Santa,

Let the children have their night of fun and laughter. Let the gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie before us, resolved that by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world.

And so, in God’s mercy, a happy Christmas to you all.

Not knowing whether to cheer or remain in reverent silence, the crowd registered a mélange of emotions. The presidential party withdrew indoors, and the thousands on the lawn and beyond moved toward Pennsylvania Avenue, some seeking, in the darkness, their safeguarded Christmas packages. Waiting trolley cars, their interior lights pale yellow, many drawn out of retirement to replace buses gone into military service, waited. Soon the lights on the tall evergreen cast shadows on White House grounds that had emptied.

As on the evening before, guests reassembled in the Red Room, the President and PM arriving late after conferring briefly with Secretary Knox, Admiral Pound, and Brigadier (General) Leslie Hollis to discuss emergency needs as the situation in Malaya and the Philippines continued to deteriorate. Roosevelt agreed to permit a British brigade embarked on the American transport
Mount Vernon
for Colombo, Ceylon, to proceed instead to Singapore. With Australia already endangered, Army Air Forces general George H. Brett, then in China, was ordered to proceed Down Under to take charge of aircraft and crews to be ferried there or were already lengthily en route via Africa and India. All the carrying capacity of available shipping was in use. Because heavy bombers could somehow, with refueling stops, fly to Australia, Brett was to establish a subcommand only nominally under MacArthur, with “action to be taken in view of situation in Philippines at that time [of arrival].” The radioed message was signed “Marshall,” but that meant Eisenhower.

Better news had come from Libya, where General Claude Auchinleck’s forces were advancing. An “Enigma” decrypt had already revealed that German panzers were withdrawing, and that afternoon Auchinleck had telegraphed, “Royal Dragoons occupied Benghazi this morning. The Army of the Nile sends you hearty greetings for Christmas.” (The euphoria would not last. Its supply lines overextended and the Germans resupplied by air, the Eighth Army would be driven back early in 1942.)

At Christmas 1940 the White House had throbbed with a noisy gathering of Roosevelt grandchildren. Now, given the lack of family and the preponderance of unusual guests, the President planned to forgo a family tradition going back to the childhoods of his five children, four of them (but for Anna, his only daughter) now away at war. He would not read aloud, very likely to Eleanor’s relief, Charles Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol,
in which, annually, he had taken all the roles in different voices.

In the Red Room Crown Prince Olav, with Marthe, and the British guests—Churchill, Wilson, and Beaverbrook—shared predinner drinks with the Roosevelts, an hour marred by Eleanor’s reminding her husband that he had not telephoned holiday greetings to Missy LeHand, FDR’s secretary and confidant over two decades, with him even before Roosevelt’s paralysis. Marguerite LeHand had been invalided by a stroke in June 1940. He confessed that it had escaped him. “The sudden influx and the increasing work made it practically impossible for him to think too much about any personal sorrow,” Mrs. Roosevelt would write, explaining that it was their first Christmas without her imperious mother-in-law, Sara, who had died in September at eighty-six. But Eleanor was peeved that he brushed aside calling Missy, who in some ways had taken over the First Lady’s own role with the President. (What seemed like callousness to Eleanor was her husband’s almost total detachment from formerly close relationships once their usefulness had passed.) When Marguerite’s sister, Ann Rochon, wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt after a visit to Warm Springs that Missy had enjoyed “all the wonderful Christmas presents” received from the White House, very likely it was the first that FDR knew about them.

Roosevelt and Churchill at Christmas dinner in the White House.
Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library

Informal Christmas dinner conversation at the White House got around, inevitably, to food, Percy Chubb recalled. Chubb, a marine insurance executive, had known the Roosevelts since FDR had been assistant secretary of the Navy in the earlier war. The food supplies being shipped to Britain, Churchill had commented only half-seriously, included “too many powdered eggs. The only good thing you can make with them is Spotted Dick.” (The traditional steamed English pudding was made with raisins and currants—the spots—in a dough of suet, eggs, and flour.)

“Nonsense,” said the President. “You can do as much with a powdered egg as with a real egg.”

“I opened my mouth for the only time all evening,” Chubb recalled, “to ask how you could fry a powdered egg.”

December 25, 1941

Christmas Day

T
HE JAPANESE HAD CLAIMED to have taken Midway in the first days of the Pacific war, but the three-segment coral atoll, little more than a refueling stop in peacetime for amphibious Yankee Clippers en route to Manila, had held off landing attempts and repeated bombardments. At 11:40 P.M., anticipating the holiday on his side of the Date Line, a Midway serviceman at the communications shack, after a long silence from the island, radioed the
New York Times
news desk cheerily: “We are still here. Merry Christmas.”

At Wake Island, to the east of the Date Line, more than fifteen hundred military and civilian-contractor survivors, excluding a few dozen officers kept separately, squatted on the shell-pocked airfield runway, two hundred feet wide, in sun and then rain, where they had been herded since surrender, many first bound with telephone wire. For Christmas they were each given a bowl of thin rice gruel. In the United States the dispiriting but misleading headlines made the newspapers on Christmas Day. According to the
Dallas Morning News,

DOFF YOUR HATS, U.S.,
TO MARINES ON WAKE!
Fighting Huge Odds, 385 of Them
Give Japs Hell for Fourteen Days

In a cartoon by Ralph Lee, a battered but defiant Marine on Wake Island, December 1941, shakes his fist angrily at Japanese planes overhead.
Department of Defense, USMC

There had been 388 marines in the detachment on the atoll, plus bluejackets, aircraft mechanics, VMF-211 Hellcat pilots, and medical staff—522 in all—and 1,146 Morrison-Knudsen Company employees. Forty-nine marines and navy men had died as well as sixty-five construction workers, many fighting with whatever weapons were available. More would be executed on Wake, die aboard ships to Shanghai and to Japan, and in prison camps, often near coal mines where they were forced to work.