December 1941 (64 page)

To build planes, trains, automobiles, tanks, ships, guns, ,etc., raw materials were needed—and lots of them. So the government's requisitioning of privately owned material accelerated. “OPM Priorities Director Donald M. Nelson yesterday announced the seizure by the Navy of more than one million dollars worth of critical scarce materials being held in warehouses and railroad terminals for shipment to foreign countries. The requisitioning, first under new powers granted to the Office of Production Management by Executive Order, included more than 13 million pounds of steel, 31/2 million pounds of copper, 34,000 pounds of tin and 70,000 feet of teakwood. The steel had been located by OPM research and statistics bureau's survey of lost, hidden and frozen inventories . . . . The owners of the property taken . . . will be compensated for the value of the materials.”
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The navy also helped itself to “four of [the] Gulf's finest yachts” in Mobile, Alabama.
¹⁸

With astonishing speed, the U.S. government had not only identified privately held metals, woods, and other materials but had also taken them for the war effort. Government was all-pervasive by the twentieth. Not since the special powers that President Lincoln had appropriated for himself during the Civil War had the centralized authority of the U.S. government moved with such alacrity and such trampling of private property, if not of the Constitution for that matter. During the existential crisis of the Civil War, Lincoln used his war powers to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, proclaim a blockade, and spend funds without congressional authorization. Most of his actions were subsequently upheld by Congress and the courts. Now, America faced another existential crisis, and FDR had precedent for dispensing with a few inconvenient democratic niceties.

The
Wall Street Journal
fretted about the new war powers granted FDR by Congress. “President Roosevelt now holds greater powers over life and property than any President before him. Legislation to give him still more power already is being planned. Two additional legislative grants of power are to be asked soon, government officials disclose. Also, it is anticipated that the President will soon ask Congress to eliminate the Tabor amendment to the Property Requisitioning Bill.” If eliminated, it would allow outright seizure of factory equipment by the government for the war effort.
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Unlike some editors in the Civil War who had been ordered imprisoned by Lincoln because their opposition had displeased him, Roosevelt made no such move against newspapers that opposed him, including the
Journal
.

The Office of Production Management was being reorganized. This, for the few defenders of an unfettered free market, was cause for concern. The OPM regulated just about everything already, from rubber to salad oil. Now it was poised to directly manage all of industry and the entire workforce, including “the curtailment of production for civilian use.” It was also preparing to take over the “pulp and paper; printing and publishing; lumber and building materials; plumbing and heating; electrical appliances; automobiles; transportation and farm equipment; industrial and office machinery.” The list just continued on and on.
²⁰

Because of the rapid expansion of the federal war bureaucracy, some government functions were actually suggested to be outsourced to other locations around the country to make room for the war effort in Washington. All in all, twelve federal agencies including the Patent Office, the Rural Electrification Administration, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and others were proposed to be moved to New York City, St. Louis, and Chicago, among other locations. For the 10,000 federal workers potentially being displaced, the government promised to pay their moving costs and help them find adequate housing, or, if they could not move, the government promised to help them find comparable jobs.
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The forced private-sector layoffs came with no such guarantees.

America's medical schools on the East Coast announced that becoming a board certified physician would now take only three years, as opposed to the usual four-year plan because of the desperate need for doctors in military hospitals. A “Victory Book” campaign was organized nationally to get people to send works of fiction and nonfiction to servicemen for their reading pleasure. The Girl Scouts organized a “Senior Scout” program to train their elder girls “in emergency feeding, messenger service, care of children, preparation of emergency shelters and packing of emergency rations and equipment.”
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A contingent of members of the Canadian Air Cadets came through New York on a publicity tour, with the idea of starting a similar program for American boys. The ages of the air cadets were fourteen to eighteen, and they were described as the “kindergarten of the Royal Air Force.”
²³

Perhaps because of the Christmas season, the city of Washington was displaying a pubic spiritedness not normally associated with the Capitol of Cynicism. Dupont Circle and Glover Park organized air-raid watching groups, as did Takoma Park in Maryland. A “D.C. Committee of 70” was set up to collect scrap paper, rubber, metal, and old rags.
²⁴

Blind Americans were also doing their part for the war effort. At “fifty-four workshops for the blind in twenty-seven states,” they were churning out for the military “brooms, mops, deck swabs, mattresses, cocoa mats, pillowcases, whisk brooms, mailing bags, mop handles and similar articles.”
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Because skilled labor was needed, some of the new vocational and academic teaching programs for the blind came as a direct result of the war effort, because skilled labor was needed. Over 2,000 patriotic sightless citizens working in these various plants wanted to kick the stuffing out of the Axis thugs too.

Even Fido was being recruited for the war effort. The commander of the Los Angeles harbor, Colonel W. W. Hicks, put out an all-points bulletin for “canine recruits.” He “said the dogs could be of all sizes or breeds, but must be in good health and sufficiently intelligent to pass the canine equivalent of the Stanford universal achievement test.” What the lucky dogs would be engaged in was termed a “military secret.” It was recalled that “in the last war, they were used at the front to carry messages.”
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It may have been the holiday season that brought people together, but marriages still ended and some badly. In order to secure a divorce, a public notice ran in the
New York Times
: “My wife, Phyllis Zenerino, having left my bed and board . . . [I] will not be responsible for her debts. Frank Zenerino, 608 9th Avenue, New York.”
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The spirit of Christmas and esprit de corps and sacrifice were almost everywhere else though. In the Philippines, the 6,000 criminals of the penitentiary offered to donate blood for the Allied cause and to fight the Japanese if released. “The prisoners reaffirmed their faith in the United States and the Philippines.”
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A group of thirteen criminals, most of them serving life sentences, went one better and offered themselves to FDR as a “suicide squad.” They wrote a letter to Roosevelt, which the warden allowed to go to the White House and in which they proposed “to serve as human torpedoes to help crush the Japanese. It is far better to sacrifice one life than to lose thousands,” the missive said.
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Sacrifice for a higher calling, even among crooks, was deep in the American creed.

Across America, religious and seasonal Christmas songs burst forth in department stores, on city sidewalks, in government buildings, in public schools, on radios, and all across the country. Everybody wished everybody else “Merry Christmas!” and no one was offended. Bibles were everywhere, as were crèches—scenes of the manger where Christ was born. Big write-ups in all the papers detailed planned church festivities, and there were extensive stories in the Washington papers of the planned activities of the Roosevelt clan on Christmas Eve. Christmas lighting had been kept to a minimum, but the sacrifices of war made the American people all the more resolute and, indeed, righteous in wanting to celebrate the birthday of Jesus Christ. The fact that America was fighting for its life made the Christmas of 1941 deeply meaningful because it represented, to most people, the very thing that made fighting worthwhile. Understandably then, beneath the Christmas joy was a seriousness of purpose among the American people.

So much so, that many factories were humming and operating on December 25. “To supply steel for war, many plants in the industry, will operate on Christmas Day for the first time in 24 years, or since the first World War.” Some of the plants that would be open included Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corporation, Republic Steel, and, appropriately, Bethlehem Steel. All workers would receive time-and-a-half, and the president of Carnegie, J. L. Perry, remarked, “It is not longer a question of how much steel can be provided to industry but how quickly. Delay in the production of steel means delay in the production of material vital to national welfare.”
³⁰

Christmas was being celebrated in Hawaii, albeit it in a truncated manner. Blackouts were still in effect, but during the day, Navy enlistees in their white uniforms were spotted carrying packages on the streets of Honolulu. “Nobody seems downhearted. Nevertheless, the territorial office of civilian defense has established a public morale section to promote loyalty to the United States and interracial harmony . . . This section is headed by an American, with one Chinese assistant and another of Japanese-American ancestry.”
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But what was on everybody's mind in Hawaii was when the bars and nightclubs and liquor stores would open back up.
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Even with the massive disruption in the national economy, consumer spending was projected to increase greatly in 1942 “despite higher taxes and rising prices.”
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After years of grim deprivation during the Depression, there was a huge pent up demand for consumer goods and a better life. Anticipating the upswing in the economy, the Spiegel Company of Chicago, a department store and mail-order house, announced it was for the first time offering a credit plan for mail orders, with no interest charges, only a small “carrying charge.”
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Adding to the holiday spirit was the release of a new Shirley Temple movie,
Kathleen
, after a two-year hiatus for the hugely popular young movie actress.
³⁵

Reality was always deeply woven into the fabric, however. There were ongoing discussions about cancelling the annual New Year's Eve festivities in Times Square in New York City. Boston's archbishop, William Cardinal O'Connell, canceled the traditional midnight Mass for Christmas Eve because of the fear of what could happen to a large group of unsuspecting churchgoers. “The action was taken in a move to co-operate with defense authorities by eliminating the possibility of congestion of hundreds of persons after dark in the event of an emergency.”
³⁶
A letter had gone out to every Catholic church in America to be read at Mass on Sunday, the twenty-first, asking all parishioners to get involved in war work.

The Jews of Europe were also grounded in reality, a monstrously horrible one: “the Paris municipal government ordered new measures against Jews in the German-occupied capital and surrounding Seine department.” Jews were required to notify Gestapo officials of any change in their addresses. “For the last week, the Gestapo has been rounding up Jews and sending them to concentration camps. Travelers arriving at Vichy said several thousand had been arrested.”
³⁷

Navy sources also revealed that German U-boats had been sighted off the Eastern Seaboard, sometimes within eyesight of land. The main Philippine island of Luzon was under increased assault by Japanese forces, which had made yet another successful beachhead on the island.
³⁸
American and Filipino soldiers and flyers were doing their best under impossible circumstances.

Just a few weeks earlier, most Americans could probably not find Luzon on a map. Now they were learning about faraway places they had never before heard of, with odd and even funny names, but which were quickly becoming very important to them and their country. Just that day, they learned that American forces on Mindanao near the town of Davao were engaged in “some of the most serious battling of the war,” where the Japanese had opened yet a new front in the fight for the Philippines. Meanwhile, the British had taken Derna and El Mekili in North Africa.
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From the Russian Front, “Tarussa, sixty-five miles northeast of Kaluga, and the town of Kanino, southeast of Kaluga, also were reported captured. Kaluga is an important rail junction on the line running south to Bryansk and Kiev.”
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They also learned that American fighter planes had downed four Japanese bomber planes over Chungking.
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However, twenty-four Japanese planes bombed, again, this time hitting the U.S. base at Cavite near Manila Bay.

The situation in Hong Kong worsened for the British. Giant fires were seen in the area, and there were reports of hand-to-hand fighting in the streets. Wake Island was enduring its thirteenth day of attack. They'd been undergoing an underreported story of “long hammering by bombs and shells, of endless hours without rest or sleep, of the dogged spirit which has turned aside attack after attack in more than 300 hours of almost constant attack.”
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The island was no more than 2,600 acres, and “the highest point above sea level is 15 feet.”
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The tough marines and navy seamen on the island repelled another two attempts by the Japanese to take the little atoll.