Read Online Pearl Harbor Christmas by Stanley Weintraub - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Stanley Weintraub
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conference, December 23, 1941. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library
“How long, sir, would it take if we managed it badly?”
“That has not been revealed to me at this moment. We don’t have to manage it badly.”
However clever the quips, the war was being managed badly, especially by Churchill himself, but the evidence would emerge slowly if at all before peace finally came. In Malaya, as earlier in the Mediterranean (especially in Greece), he was squandering resources to stave off inevitable humiliation.
Other questions ranged from the Eastern front (he saw the Germans as “joggling backwards” and praised Russian “resiliency”) to plans afoot in Washington (“we have to concentrate on the grim emergencies”) and to anticipations of new German initiatives. He foresaw a possible enemy “attack in the Mediterranean” and referred to “talk about their getting ready for an invasion of England next year.” He thought something might come of it, but he could not predict where. “I will be glad to be informed. Gentlemen, if you have got any information, it will be thankfully received.” What he received was laughter, and although a reporter thought that it seemed a closing remark and called out the ritual, “Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister,” several other questions delayed the end. The last was, “What about a Christmas message for the American people?”
“I am told I have to do that on Christmas Eve,” Churchill said, “but I won’t give it away beforehand.”
“The smiling President,” Newsweek would report, “looked like an old trouper who, on turning impresario, had produced a smash hit. And some thought they detected in his face admiration for a man who had at least equaled him in the part in which he himself was a star.”
As soon as pressmen rushed to typewriters, telephones, and microphones, Churchill slipped out to call Clementine in England. “He might have been speaking from the next room,” she wrote to their daughter Mary the next day. “But it was not very satisfactory as it was a public line and we were both warned by the Censors breaking in that we were being listened to!” News of the press conference was furnished to Adolf Hitler by his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Hitler at dinner with his staff some days later described it “truly Jewish” theater produced by “imposters” who had deceived their nations. Goebbels was particularly pleased that war in the Pacific had created “a complete shift in the world picture.... The United States will scarcely now be in a position to transport worthwhile [war] materiel to England let alone the Soviet Union.”
Hitler had not been so confident. As early as December 12, meeting with Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, he asked, “Is there any possibility that the U.S.A. and Britain will abandon East Asia for a time in order to crush Germany and Italy first?” Reassuringly, Raeder replied, “It is improbable that the enemy will give up East Asia even temporarily. By doing so Britain would endanger India very seriously, and the U.S. cannot withdraw her fleet from the Pacific as long as the Japanese fleet has the upper hand.” Just in case, he added, he was ordering additional submarines to proceed “as quickly as possible” to the American east coast, where the lights had not yet dimmed. There was a different lighting problem in the east—in New York City, where sixteen thousand traffic signals placed under central air-raid control disrupted traffic in Manhattan and Brooklyn during an alert. Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine forbade air-raid wardens to indulge in further tampering. The lights remained on.
ALTHOUGH THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS was uninvolved in ongoing war planning, Archibald MacLeish, its director, a poet and occasional speechwriter for the President, had worried about the safety of the founding documents of the nation in his charge. After Pearl Harbor he inquired to Secretary of the Treasury Henry
“How long, sir, would it take if we managed it badly?”
“That has not been revealed to me at this moment. We don’t have to manage it badly.”
However clever the quips, the war was being managed badly, especially by Churchill himself, but the evidence would emerge slowly if at all before peace finally came. In Malaya, as earlier in the Mediterranean (especially in Greece), he was squandering resources to stave off inevitable humiliation.
Other questions ranged from the Eastern front (he saw the Germans as “joggling backwards” and praised Russian “resiliency”) to plans afoot in Washington (“we have to concentrate on the grim emergencies”) and to anticipations of new German initiatives. He foresaw a possible enemy “attack in the Mediterranean” and referred to “talk about their getting ready for an invasion of England next year.” He thought something might come of it, but he could not predict where. “I will be glad to be informed. Gentlemen, if you have got any information, it will be thankfully received.” What he received was laughter, and although a reporter thought that it seemed a closing remark and called out the ritual, “Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister,” several other questions delayed the end. The last was, “What about a Christmas message for the American people?”
“I am told I have to do that on Christmas Eve,” Churchill said, “but I won’t give it away beforehand.”
“The smiling President,” Newsweek would report, “looked like an old trouper who, on turning impresario, had produced a smash hit. And some thought they detected in his face admiration for a man who had at least equaled him in the part in which he himself was a star.”
As soon as pressmen rushed to typewriters, telephones, and microphones, Churchill slipped out to call Clementine in England. “He might have been speaking from the next room,” she wrote to their daughter Mary the next day. “But it was not very satisfactory as it was a public line and we were both warned by the Censors breaking in that we were being listened to!” News of the press conference was furnished to Adolf Hitler by his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Hitler at dinner with his staff some days later described it “truly Jewish” theater produced by “imposters” who had deceived their nations. Goebbels was particularly pleased that war in the Pacific had created “a complete shift in the world picture.... The United States will scarcely now be in a position to transport worthwhile [war] materiel to England let alone the Soviet Union.”
Hitler had not been so confident. As early as December 12, meeting with Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, he asked, “Is there any possibility that the U.S.A. and Britain will abandon East Asia for a time in order to crush Germany and Italy first?” Reassuringly, Raeder replied, “It is improbable that the enemy will give up East Asia even temporarily. By doing so Britain would endanger India very seriously, and the U.S. cannot withdraw her fleet from the Pacific as long as the Japanese fleet has the upper hand.” Just in case, he added, he was ordering additional submarines to proceed “as quickly as possible” to the American east coast, where the lights had not yet dimmed. There was a different lighting problem in the east—in New York City, where sixteen thousand traffic signals placed under central air-raid control disrupted traffic in Manhattan and Brooklyn during an alert. Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine forbade air-raid wardens to indulge in further tampering. The lights remained on.
ALTHOUGH THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS was uninvolved in ongoing war planning, Archibald MacLeish, its director, a poet and occasional speechwriter for the President, had worried about the safety of the founding documents of the nation in his charge. After Pearl Harbor he inquired to Secretary of the Treasury Henry
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