Pearl Harbor Christmas (13 page)

AMID HEAVY GROUND FIGHTING and bombardment on Christmas morning near incongruously named Happy Valley in Hong Kong, artillery sergeant Charles Barman’s battery, about to withdraw further, received a radio message from Royal Governor Sir Mark Young:

IN PRIDE AND ADMIRATION, I SEND MY GREETINGS THIS CHRISTMAS DAY TO ALL WHO ARE FIGHTING AND TO ALL WHO ARE WORKING SO NOBLY AND SO WELL TO SUSTAIN HONG KONG AGAINST THIS ASSAULT BY THE ENEMY. FIGHT ON, HOLD FAST FOR KING, COUNTRY AND EMPIRE. GOD BLESS YOU ALL IN THIS FINEST HOUR.

Christmas Day in the British army in more serene times was given over to light-hearted reversal of the traditional norms. Sergeants took early morning tea to the ranks, still in bed, and officers waited on them at table. It was an interlude of uninhibited fraternization, football matches, and jolly intemperance. In Hong Kong more than half the island had been overrun, and the defenders were still grudgingly giving way—nearly sleepless Middlesexers, Scots, Canadians, Australians, Rajputs, and Punjabis—reduced to a few light machine guns, rifles, and hand grenades. All were on nearly depleted short rations of food and water. A Red Cross flag on the War Memorial Hospital, where a group of Winnipeg Grenadiers were offered tots of whiskey and a routine “Merry Christmas!” by Lieutenant Colonel George Black, MD, a sixtyish veteran of the earlier war, furnished no respite from shelling. Soon the wounded were being bayoneted in their beds.

The last radio message from abroad before communications failed had been from the Prime Minister to Sir Mark Young. Empty of reality and heedless of the human cost, it directed that “the enemy should be compelled to expend the utmost life and equipment.... Every day that you are able to maintain your resistance you help the Allied cause all over the world, and by a prolonged resistance you and your men can win the lasting honour which we are sure will be your due.”

What early Christmas dinner Sir Mark was served in shelled Government House is unrecorded. His military commander, Major General Charles Maltby, with his aide, Lieutenant MacGregor, sat on upturned ammunition boxes and shared a tin of asparagus and a half-bottle of lukewarm Liebfraumilch. Others on the staff opened tins of bully-beef and biscuits, and beer, pickled onions, and cognac—anything that was left. At 3:15 P.M.—early morning in Washington—General Maltby, informed that the situation everywhere was “damned sticky,” issued orders to break off fighting. Early that evening he and Sir Mark surrendered the remnants of their forces—and the island—to Lieutenant General Sakai. About four thousand defenders had died and nine thousand were wounded. Thousands more, soldier and civilian, would die in grim prisoner of war camps.

“The report of the fall of Hong Kong came,” Admiral Ugaki noted. “It seemed that they had a hard fight with the English troops who defended well. Indeed the English troops should be praised.” Like other senior Japanese officers, he condemned retreat and saluted standing to the end.

The Japanese trooping into Hong Kong the day after the British surrendered on Christmas Day, 1941.
University of Hong Kong History Archives

“Jolo was successfully occupied this morning,” he also recorded. Southwest of Mindanao, Jolo was a small undefended Philippine island east of Borneo, where the British were fighting off a second Japanese landing attempt on Sarawak. (Mili, to the far northeast, had been occupied easily on the fifteenth.) At Kuching, the capital of the semi-independent protectorate with a ruling “White Rajah,” third in the family line, who had left Sarawak for Sydney, Australia, “enemy ships attacked one destroyer,
Sagiri,
besides four [troop] transports. Torpedoes struck the [destroyer], and she sank.... Half of the crew were saved.” Soon after, a minesweeper and transport went down in the bay off Kuching. The Southern Expeditionary Force had asked for air support from carriers, but there was “no spare strength.” Kuching was overwhelmed, more expensively than anticipated, beginning the movement south into Dutch-held Borneo.

What Ugaki did not note was that on December 25 the Japanese celebrated not the Western Christmas but the fifteenth anniversary of the succession of Emperor Hirohito to the Imperial Throne, according to tradition, the 124th direct descendant of Jimmu, legendary first ruler of the empire of the Rising Sun. All over the Home Islands, and wherever loyal Japanese lived abroad, festive toasts invoked the imperial reign.

From the emptying Marsman Building in Manila, bombed on Christmas Day, Admiral Hart, uninformed in advance by MacArthur about the open-city declaration and the withdrawal to Corregidor, telegraphed the general furiously, “While, as you have been repeatedly informed, it has been our intent to carry on the war here from submarines as long as possible—this denial of the use of the facilities within the metropolitan area very much shortens the period during which these operations can be carried out from here.” Hart would have to evacuate, and leave behind for destruction, the remaining fuel storage facilities at Cavite. He ordered the disabling of the moored submarine tender
Canopus,
which could no longer cope with the open sea. In mid-February what was left of his command in the Indies would be put—briefly—under a Dutch admiral, after which Hart returned disconsolately to the United States (via Australia and Africa) to retire.

Another of many problem vessels in Philippine waters was the Guam station ship
Gold Star.
When Guam vanished into Japanese occupation, the freighter, en route home, had returned to Malangas on the southern coast of Mindanao and then to Cebu in the mid-Philippines. Its hold included coal, a thousand tons of cement, a thousand tons of rice, fifteen hundred cases of San Miguel beer, thirty cases of Scotch whiskey, Christmas toys for children of Guam personnel—now captives—and crates of bubble gum. New orders were to offload instead at Port Darwin in Australia, where the rigidly unionized longshoremen bridled about hauling any American cargo ashore, even the five thousand drums of cement, in which the inadequate and overstretched facilities were in short supply. After several days of delays, the Harbor Master “graciously allowed the
Gold Star
the use of an anti-submarine net crane, not needed in its primary function at night.” In darkness the crew offloaded everything, including the cement, distributing provisions among American warships arriving at Darwin.

“YESTERDAY—a long day in the train,” Oliver Harvey wrote. “When it got light to-day we were getting near Murmansk.” Five hours later, at about noon, the returning British diplomats reached the dilapidated subarctic city and were driven sixteen miles to the anchorage for their ship and the treacherous voyage back to Scotland. “We did not sail until about 4:30 P.M. owing to some confusion over our luggage which was sent off to another ship by mistake. I thought we would never get off. It took about an hour to get down out of the estuary into the open sea, and then we were [in] for it! Very rough, ship pitching in all directions—no Xmas dinner for me! I rushed to my cabin, piled all my coats on, [and] went to bed practically in my clothes it was so bitter—far the coldest spot in all our journey.” Harvey made no mention as to how Anthony Eden fared.

The train from precarious Moscow had bypassed even more precarious Leningrad, which had been cut off from land communication with the rest of Russia since September, but for a narrow, heavily forested, 220-mile route, often shelled, to Tikhvin to the west, recaptured only on December 9. Surfaced with logs and branches, the crude road sometimes lay above the many frozen workmen who had died of exposure or shellfire building it. The alternate “Road of Life” across broad Lake Ladoga to the north had not been available until November 26, when the surface had iced over to eight inches thickness, enough to bear the weight of supply trucks. On Christmas Day, when 3,700 inhabitants in Leningrad died of starvation or the bitter cold, the daily bread ration was increased from 8 to 10.5 ounces.

A crude method of making cellulose flour from shell packing had been developed at the Leningrad Scientific Institute, and wallpaper was stripped where possible to salvage the paste for what was called bread. Little fuel was available for cooking or heating; sanitation and medicines were rare. A city official in Leningrad, which would be blockaded for nine hundred days, wrote, “Death would overtake people in all kinds of circumstances. While they were on the streets they would fall down, never to rise again, or in their houses, where they would fall asleep and never awake; in factories where they would collapse while at work. There was no transport, and the dead body would usually be put on a hand-sleigh drawn by two or three members of the dead man’s family; often, wholly exhausted during the long trek to the cemetery, they would abandon the body halfway, leaving the authorities to deal with it.” At the Piskarevskoye Cemetery on the northern edge of the city, once and now again St. Petersburg, 800,000 dead during the siege would be buried.

RARELY SEEN AT RELIGIOUS SERVICES at home, Churchill accompanied the President to the Foundry Methodist Church, “surrounded,” Colonel Ian Jacob recorded in his diary, “by bevies of G-men, armed with Tommy-guns and revolvers.” (The Secret Service had inspected the area in advance and returned, not quite inconspicuously.) Roosevelt seldom attended church in Washington because of the disruptions which security details created and the awkwardness of fitting his locked and then unlocked leg braces into a pew—and he did not want to be exposed in a wheelchair on an aisle. Asked why he wanted to forgo an Episcopal service on Christmas morning, he explained, “What’s the matter? I like to sing hymns with the Methodys.” And as the White House party set off in a queue of black automobiles past LaFayette and Farragut Squares for the church on 16th Street, its original building constructed in 1815 on land furnished by Henry Foxall, whose foundry had made weapons for George Washington’s army to fight the British, Roosevelt quipped, “It is good for Winston to sing hymns with the Methodys.”

Roosevelt and Churchill attending Foundry Methodist Church on Christmas morning, 1941. Mrs. Roosevelt is second from left.
Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library