Pearl Harbor Christmas (21 page)

CHURCHILL WAS TO LEAVE Washington for Canada later in the day. The PM’s laid-back managerial style was often literal. His first meeting, Marshall told Eisenhower, “took place at nine-o’ clock . . . in Mr. Churchill’s bedroom.... The Prime Minister was propped up in bed with his work board resting against his knees and the usual cigar in his mouth or swung like a baton to emphasize his points.” Nearly five years later, when Churchill came to a postwar Conservative Party conference in the hometown of Paul Johnson, the aspiring historian, then sixteen and without adult inhibitions, slipped close and asked, “Mr. Winston Churchill, to what do you attribute your success in life?”

“Conservation of energy,” said Churchill. “Never stand up when you can sit down. And never sit down when you can lie down.”

With Marshall, the PM, from bed, discussed the almost-settled issue of unity of command in Southeast Asia. Although even his senior admiral in the conference had conceded the issue, Churchill was unconvinced about including naval forces. “What would an army officer know about handling a ship?” he challenged. Although Wavell was Churchill’s own man, he did not want a general—even a field marshal—commanding the Royal Navy anywhere.

“Well,” said Marshall, who was never less than direct, “what the devil does a naval officer know about handling a tank?” The problem, he contended, was not about sailors or tankers but about “getting control.” When Churchill resorted to the history books, Marshall said he was not interested in the bygone era of Drake and Frobisher but “in having a united front against Japan.... If we didn’t do something right away, we were finished in the war.” His directive, he went on, was “to meet the onrush of the Japanese in the South Pacific, where they were overwhelming an ill-prepared, pitifully equipped collection of British-Australians, Indian [s] and Indonese, Americans and New Zealanders. . . .” Someone had to be in charge, and that someone did not have to be “an expert in all the particulars.” Roosevelt, he added, had overall responsibility for the American war effort, “and he doesn’t know about any of it.” To his sister, Marshall wrote, exasperated, of the “so-called holidays.”

Worn down, Churchill drafted a cable to the Cabinet in London, agreeing “provisionally” with the proposal as “strongly endorsed by General Marshall.” It would be the precedent for all Allied theater commands throughout the war. In square miles the ABDA theater from Burma to Australia was as large as the United States, and its military unity was largely rhetorical. In his diary Eisenhower wrote impatiently, “Good start! But what an effort. Talk-talk-talk.” Yet it proved more than talk, and Eisenhower himself would receive one of the commands, and then another.

THE PRESIDENT MET with his service advisers and the ubiquitous Hopkins at 11:45 A.M. Admiral King reported that the first naval priority was protecting the line between Hawaii and Midway Island, with the second priority of safeguarding the supply line from Hawaii through Samoa to Australia. Roosevelt asked about the possibility of “some kind of contact with the Japanese navy” so that Americans would feel that withdrawals were not the only option, and he asked Marshall about sending troops in small batches to Britain “on current convoys.” FDR also wanted several freighters about to be converted to escort aircraft carriers rescheduled for refitting as troop transports. He wanted to say something publicly—he was thinking of his State of the Union address to Congress on January 6—about American forces taking “stations” in the British Isles. And he termed the proposed North African venture “a guess operation.” Agreeing, Marshall again warned that a premature landing under Vichy French fire at Casablanca might meet “an initial reverse which would have a very detrimental effect on the morale of the American people.”

Much remained to be done before Churchill traveled to Ottawa for the address to Parliament. Roosevelt had arranged to have his presidential Pullman car, the
Ferdinand Magellan,
attached, for the PM’s comfort, to the returning Canadian train. Churchill would travel with his physician, valet, Air Chief Marshal Portal, a security detail, and secretaries. The rest of the British party would remain for continued discussions.

Other working meetings dealt with dismal prospects. Even in North Africa, where General Auchinleck’s Eighth Army seemed to be moving relentlessly along the Libyan coast, General Rommel’s resupplied Afrika Korps counterattacked, sending the survivors of the surprised 22nd Armoured Brigade into retreat. The Japanese had landed a small force near Davao on the big southern island of Mindanao, second largest in the Philippines. MacArthur radioed Washington from his isolated headquarters on Corregidor that, although he had evacuated his remaining B-17 bombers to Java, he hoped to hold on to airfields in Mindanao to protect the inner islands of the Philippines. It was an empty prospect because the eighteen additional B-17s that Marshall announced would be leaving for the Far East the next day, far short of the clouds of planes needed but yet unbuilt, had no likelihood of being flown from Australia for missions from doomed Mindanao.

That Manila had been declared an open city and remained undefended did not restrain the Japanese from bombing suspected military targets. Formerly isolationist senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana vowed nevertheless that the “Japs will pay” for the outrages. To MacArthur came an encouraging but unrealistic radio message from Marshall that “the President [has] personally directed the Navy to make every effort to support you. You can rest assured [that] War Department will do all in its power to build up at top speed air power in Far East to completely dominate that region.” However, the promise had a long fuse, and Marshall—privately—considered MacArthur effectively “a prisoner on Corregidor.”

BEFORE CHURCHILL ENTRAINED for Canada he met with FDR and Secretary of State Hull about the Gaullist seizure of St. Pierre and Miquelon, which impaired already difficult relations with the Vichy French. Hull referred to the “so-called Free French” and called the haughty de Gaulle “a marplot acting directly contrary to the expressed wishes of Britain, Canada, and the United States.” Trivializing the episode in drafting his postwar memoirs, Churchill claimed that Hull, “for whom I entertained the highest respect” (which was untrue), had “pushed what was little more than a departmental point far beyond its proportions.” He kept that in but excised his charge that Hull cut “a rather pathetic figure” about an incident that “did not enter at all into our main discussions.” Yet it had. Churchill warned that forcing out the Gaullists would impair his fragile relations with the Free French movement. Roosevelt and Hull wanted to retain ties with Vichy, as a sizeable French fleet still remained out of Nazi hands. It was not the only cause of friction, as the discussions covered the world. Churchill was trying to preserve an empire that would never again be as it was, while Roosevelt saw the disintegrating British colonial anachronism as unworthy of saving.

Informed by the PM that he had to accept the already fraying ABDA appointment, Wavell responded to Field Marshal Dill that he hoped no announcement would be made before he received his instructions. When Dill radioed a summary, Wavell responded that he felt that he had been left not holding the baby, but quadruplets. Although his official appointment would not arrive from Washington until January 3, the BBC and the Australian press had already announced it.

CHURCHILL DEPARTED LATE that afternoon for the overnight trip to Ottawa, dictating and receiving cables and making telephone calls en route. He cabled Australian Prime Minister John Curtin about the appointment of Wavell, with American army air forces major general George H. Brett as his deputy and an “appropriate joint body” in Washington to oversee affairs. “The decision has come from them,” Churchill explained. “I have not attempted to argue the case for or against accepting this broadminded and selfless American proposal, of [the] merits of which as a war winner I have become convinced. Action is urgent. . . .” There would be another South Pacific area theater, he predicted, including most of Australia, under an American commander.

In Washington, when Hopkins reported the difficulties with the Australian government in accepting an imposed ABDA command, with all but the northern rim of the island continent excluded, Marshall recommended that Australian and New Zealand representatives in Washington be involved in further “joint” arrangements—the “sovereign rights” aspect. Visualizing an American umbrella, the Australian government quickly accepted. Despite the country’s vastness, it had almost no air force, a very small navy, and an army largely overseas and at great hazard, augmenting the British in Libya and also in Singapore—where many Aussie survivors ended up as prisoners of war building the bridge on the River Kwai.

UNKNOWN TO ALL, an unreported episode in occupied Europe, “Operation Arthropoid,” would have repercussions months later. An RAF Halifax bomber at 10:00 P.M. Berlin time, which was mandated for occupied Czechoslovakia, dropped Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík, with seven soldiers from the Czech army-in-exile, by parachute near what pilots thought was Pilsen but was actually Nehvizdy, east of Prague. Their mission was to assassinate the notorious Nazi overseer of Bohemia and Moravia (Slovakia was split off into a puppet state), Reinhard Heydrich. Although his blood-stained reputation was well known, his most newsworthy act of the week was to order a statue of wartime President Woodrow Wilson, a gift of American Czechs in 1928, removed from its place in front of Prague’s central railway station. As a gesture of quiet defiance, local citizens had been placing flowers at its base. Hiding in safe houses and on the run, the conspirators after the Reich Protector would finally catch up to him on May 27, 1942, throwing an antitank grenade into his open Mercedes-Benz. After Heydrich died of shrapnel wounds in Prague seven days later, Hitler ordered the SS and Gestapo to “wade in blood” to find the killers. Thousands were arrested. Kubiš was killed in a gun battle; Gabčík committed suicide rather than be captured; the village of Lidice was destroyed in reprisal and all 199 male residents executed. Weighing the price of reprisals, Churchill would order a halt to further plans to kill high-ranking Nazis.