Pearl Harbor Christmas (8 page)

At the Mayflower, where they arrived from Union Station in a fleet of cars, the lobby windows and doors had been blackout darkened, to their surprise after the blaze of lights elsewhere, and emergency first-aid supplies were visibly in reach in case of air raids no one expected. The VIP visitors were shown by the hotel management how to access whiskey, beer, and a substance for cooling them known as ice, and each was given fifty dollars in cash, courtesy of the State Department, for minimal essentials.

On the roof above the hotel’s ten floors, night and day, were lookouts for air attacks, and some buildings nearby had anti-aircraft guns of dubious usefulness atop, largely to suggest that there was a war on. The Germans had no long-distance bombers and at best might be able to fire short-range shells from surfaced subs hazardously venturing close to shore. The morning newspapers, already available at the front desk, were fat bundles advertising feasts of luxuries on the inside pages and litanies of bad news, all from far away, on the front pages.

Waiting for the group was American air forces chief, Lieutenant General Henry H. (“Hap”) Arnold, who pulled aside Charles Portal and “Bomber” Harris for a brief talk. Arnold wanted to emphasize that the United States “could not afford to see the Philippines pass by the board.” He hoped to “build up our air strength in the Philippines, Australia and the Dutch East Indies as rapidly as possible” and that “we would cram into Australia such airplanes, combat crews and other air force personnel as possible to get there by air, by boat, or any other way” to assist General MacArthur. Yet despite MacArthur’s imaginative communiqués and Arnold’s impulsive unrealism, the Philippines were unsalvageable.

Promoting Churchill’s line, Portal pressed for control “of the whole North African shore of the Mediterranean.” And he “looked forward,” Arnold wrote in his minutes, “to the time when U.S. bombers could be stationed in England to help out their bombing effort.”

Sir Charles Wilson, the PM’s physician, had barely turned on the lights in his hotel room when the phone rang. Restlessly pacing the Rose Room, Churchill could not sleep. He wanted Wilson to supply him with a sleeping pill if it would do no harm. Ferried by a White House car, he arrived within minutes and found his patient merely too agitated to relax. There was so much to do. Churchill had already torn through early editions of the morning papers. “He must have a good night,” the doctor wrote in his diary. Wilson offered two barbiturate sleeping pills for “bottling up his excitement” and returned to the Mayflower.

Given the late arrivals and Churchill’s usual late mornings, conferences were scheduled for the “forenoon.” Armed with newspapers, mail, and messages, Roosevelt himself usually breakfasted in bed. His butler, Alonzo Fields, knocked on the Prime Minister’s door and was invited in to find a tangle of bedclothes and the floor littered with newspapers. The Prime Minister was barefoot and in long underwear. “Now Fields,” Churchill began, “we had a lovely dinner last night but I have a few orders for you. We want to leave here as friends, right? So I need you to listen.” The PM wanted no talking or whistling in the corridors. (Fields was puzzled as there never was any.) Further, “I must have a tumbler of sherry in my room before breakfast, a couple of glasses of scotch and soda before lunch and French champagne and 90-year-old brandy before I go to sleep at night.”

“Yes, sir,” said Fields, who was unlikely to run out to fetch ninety-year-old brandy.

Breakfast, Churchill instructed, as he donned a zippered RAF jumpsuit, long called by the amused British his “siren suit,” had to include something hot—“eggs, bacon or ham, and toast”—and also “two kinds of cold meats with English mustard and two kinds of fruit plus a tumbler of sherry.” He also expected prompt delivery of the red government dispatch boxes, symbols of high office, which would arrive from the British embassy. Fields kept his thoughts to himself and bowed out.

The private “forenoon” meeting at the White House, before many of the principals could be gathered, followed late breakfasts for Roosevelt, Churchill, and Harry Hopkins—a night prowler, like the PM. Also present was H. Freeman Matthews, head of European Affairs at the State Department. He had been on his way to London when recalled to assist Secretary Hull, who arrived as the meeting wound up. The subject was “Gymnast,” the ambitious operation to occupy French North Africa. Although Churchill and Roosevelt hoped to induce General Maxime Weygand, the rump Vichy government’s army chief, to join the attempt, Matthews warned that Weygand’s loyalty to Pétain would cause any intervention to backfire. Weygand would refuse to cooperate, the Marshal would be informed, and the Nazis in his entourage would learn of the scheme and move troops into Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria. As Weygand’s prestige allegedly meant much in North Africa, FDR and the PM conceded that they were prepared to take that risk. Matthews was asked to take an oral message to Weygand via Ambassador Leahy in Vichy—as the United States still had fragile diplomatic relations with the Pétain regime—and Matthews had been Secretary at the Paris embassy when France fell. The scheme would not work, he argued. His presence would arouse the Gestapo. Besides, even though Weygand had been recalled from his North African command, he would not betray his colleagues. Roosevelt suggested his sending Weygand, whom he had known since 1918, a message couched subtly in terms of a Christmas or New Year’s greeting—which he would do on December 27.

The conference broke up at noon so that Churchill could meet with representatives of the British and Empire press. He conceded that the situation in Malaya was dire and that Hong Kong was close to falling but that Britain had avoided “the worst possible situation”—being attacked by Japan alone, with America remaining out of the war. “On balance we could not be dissatisfied with the turn of events.” With Russia “fighting back magnificently” and the “powerful assistance” of the United States to come, he looked ahead “with hope and confidence.”

The first major conference of principal players, at 1:45 P.M., followed a quick vegetarian lunch (kedgeree and grilled tomatoes) at the White House. All the ranking conferees were present, plus Harry Hopkins and General “Pa” Watson as resident appointments secretary. General Marshall took notes. Roosevelt began by presenting a draft declaration “that no one power would make peace without an agreement with the associate powers”—the smaller nations already at war or plunged into the war. He reported agreement with Churchill on sending bombers and three American divisions to Britain, withholding American troops from the “Near East” (Egypt), and maintaining a “flying route” across Africa via Brazil. The British vowed (perhaps with fingers hidden and crossed) to “hold” Singapore while the United States built up forces in Australia to assist “operations in the north including . . . the Philippines.” With Churchill, the President assumed that Japan had unleashed all its offensive strength and would not risk attacking Russia.

The Prime Minister conceded shortages in everything, from munitions to manpower, and wanted the Americans to take over Iceland from British forces to free them for deployment elsewhere. He thought that French North Africa was ripe for invasion unless the Germans got there first. The British could have “55,000 men with transports ready for shipment for such a purpose and that they could be in Africa in twenty-three days.” (It was as unrealistic as his expectation that the British could hold Singapore for half a year.) He suggested that if Vichy cooperated, even passively, “the future France would be protected at the peace table.” Roosevelt added “that he considered it very important to morale, to give this country a feeling that they are in the [European] war, to give the Germans the reverse effect, to have American troops somewhere in active fighting across the Atlantic.” (He had no idea how unready the United States was for concerted action anywhere, even had the catastrophe at Pearl Harbor not happened.) Similarly unrealistic, as French malaise was profound, Secretary Stimson “spoke of the importance of timing in relation to movements into [Northern] Ireland and those projected for the Mediterranean, with relation to its effect on the French people. He thought that our movement into Ireland would have a very definite effect on the French mind, which would facilitate arrangements for a movement into Tunisia and Morocco by the British and French.” No one questioned his illogic. America was a new player.

Reviewing other fronts, Churchill warned that although the British presence in Libya and Egypt was precarious, “it would be a tremendous disaster to give up the [Suez] Canal—Turkey would go, Africa would be overrun.” He suggested an expedition against Vichy French Dakar, on the hump of West Africa, to secure the air route from Brazil and as a jumping-off point for further operations. “I assume,” Marshall questioned in his minutes, “this was on a basis of some agreement with the French.” And Churchill again promised, in Marshall’s notes, “Singapore to hold out. It ought to be a matter of six months before the Japanese can close in.” (The “Gibraltar of the Pacific” would fall in six weeks, with more than a hundred thousand British and Empire troops taken prisoner—far greater than the Japanese forces in Malaya pushing south through deft strategy and defensive incompetence.)

At four o’clock, with the combined staff meeting temporarily adjourned, the President, wearing a grey pin-striped suit with a black mourning band on the left sleeve (his mother had died at eighty on September 10), was wheeled into the small, cluttered press room just inside the West Wing entrance to the White House. It would be his 794th press conference, this time with a guest at his side, attired now in short black jacket, striped trousers, and polka-dot bow tie. Cameramen stood on chairs to get a better shot of the Prime Minister, who was nearly a head shorter than FDR. The formal reason for the press’s attendance was Roosevelt’s announcement of the formation of the Office of Defense Transportation, but reporters expected Churchill to be there, and he was, sitting at FDR’s right, a silver thermos of what was assumed to be water at his reach. As a record audience was filing in, press secretary Steve Early told the President, “They are checking credentials very carefully, and there are so many it is going to be slow.”

Roosevelt repeated the message to the PM, joking, for the front rows, “We are afraid that there might be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Churchill could barely be seen in the crowd. As newsmen shouted, “Can’t see him,” the President said to the PM, “I wish you would stand for one minute and let them see you. They can’t see you.” To loud cheers and applause from the journalists and broadcasters, Churchill, jaunty and ruddy, climbed on the seat of his chair.

Roosevelt cut his announcements to eight minutes, then noted, at Early’s prompting, “There are many here who are not familiar with the rules of the conference, Steve says, and I would suggest that they remember that there are no ‘quotes’—nothing is to be quoted. Everything is to be in the ‘third person,’ and can be used, with the exception of two matters. The Prime Minister doesn’t know this [practice] himself. A thing that is ‘background’ may not be attributed to the President, or the Prime Minister, but it is for your information in writing stories. A thing that is announced as off-the-record is for your information, but not to be disclosed under any circumstances.”

Then he turned the floor—literally the chair—to Churchill. “Go ahead and shoot,” FDR told the reporters, and one began, “What about Singapore, Mr. Prime Minister? . . . What would you say to be of good cheer?” When the PM vowed that the British would do their utmost to defend Singapore “and its approaches,” another pressman interposed, “Mr. Prime Minister, isn’t Singapore “the key to the whole situation out there?”

“The key to whole situation,” Churchill said, long accustomed to dodging direct questions in the House of Commons, “is the resolute manner in which the British and American Democracies are going to throw themselves into the conflict.” Conceding that the situation in the Far East looked gloomy, he could not contend that the war was turning round “in our favor.” On balance, the PM said, “I can’t describe the feelings of relief with which I find Russia, the United States and Great Britain standing side by side. It is incredible to anyone who has lived through the lonely months of 1940.” Asked how long it would take to “lick these boys”—a demeaning cliché about the Japanese already catastrophically wrong, Churchill quipped, “If we manage it well, it will only take half as long as if we manage it badly.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at their joint press conference in the president’s White House office, December 23, 1941.
Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library

Close-up of Roosevelt and Churchill at joint press conference, December 23, 1941.
Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library