Pearl Harbor Christmas (17 page)

Listening on the radio in Norris, Tennessee, from which he directed the Tennessee Valley Authority, the massive power and flood-control system that was a New Deal initiative, David Lilienthal judged the speech a “masterpiece” with “wonderful balance and alliteration.” At one point, he marveled, Churchill “made a growling sound . . . like the British lion!” At Passfield Corner, the home in Liphook, Hampshire, of old Socialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb, now in their feeble eighties, the couple listened, at 7:30 P.M. British time, “with an all-out admiration,” Beatrice wrote in her diary, to the “oration” to Congress of their old Tory political enemy, Winston Churchill, and reveled loyally in the “deafening” applause. “His opening allusion to his American mother was perfect in its tact; the summary of past events, of present difficulties, of future prospects . . . was all exactly suited to the occasion.” As one who saw Stalin’s Russia as without flaw, Mrs. Webb perceived, nevertheless, its “one weak point.” It was Churchill’s “tacit refusal to recognize the Soviet Union as the equal to the U.K. and the U.S.A. in determining the terms of the eventual peace and practically the paramount power in deciding what shall be the new international order. . . .”

Mackenzie King arrived in Washington too late for Churchill’s performance, his special train from Ottawa arriving at Union Station at 3:45 P.M. FDR’s aide General “Pa” Watson met him and escorted him to the Mayflower Hotel, where he checked in before his appointment with Secretary Hull at the State Department, after which he was to see Roosevelt and Churchill, who were busy with larger matters than the islets off Newfoundland which were roiling relations with the Vichy French.

Although Churchill had already suggested feints against the coastline of occupied Europe to divert German troops from the Eastern front and spread thinner those guarding what Hitler referred to as the Atlantic Wall, he was closemouthed about one already in progress that dawn. “Operation Archery” had targeted Vågsøy Island, at the mouth of Nordfjord, far above Bergen. A force of 570 Commandos supported by the cruiser
Kenya
and four destroyers (in short supply elsewhere), and RAF bombers and fighters, went ashore to raid fish-oil production plants and to induce the Germans to transfer more strength to the far north of Norway. One of the Commando officers was Major “Mad Jack” Churchill. Thirty-five and no relation to the Prime Minister, “Mad Jack” was born in Hong Kong and was a between-the-wars soldier reactivated in 1939. An eccentric who coveted danger, he carried a longbow and bagpipes into action, and with a Manchester regiment in France in 1940 he brought down a German sergeant with his bow and arrows, very likely the only such fatality in the war. Emerging from his landing craft at Nordfjord, he began playing “The March of the Cameron Men” on his bagpipes and heaved a grenade.

Like most Commando operations it was a very mixed success. When the British, with a dozen Norwegians from an exile company, began their withdrawal at 2:00 P.M.—the day darkened early in the north—they evacuated to their landing craft under greater fire than anticipated. Unknown to the strike force, a
Gebirgsjäger
(mountain troop) unit was on leave there from the Russian front, and house-to-house fighting broke out in the town of Måløy. Commandos claimed 120 enemy dead and took 98 prisoners. Their chief prize was a German naval codebook. The Royal Navy lost four killed, and the Commandos seventeen. The commander of the Norwegian unit died in an attack on German headquarters. The RAF lost eight planes.

Hitler sent thirty thousand more troops to safeguard Norway. Jack Churchill received the Military Cross. Later he would lead Commando units in Sicily and at Salerno, after which he received the DSO. Still carrying his bagpipes, he led Commandos supporting Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia, where he was taken prisoner and brought to Berlin for interrogation, then incarcerated at notorious Sachenhausen, from which he and an RAF officer escaped and were recaptured. In April 1945 Churchill was sent to a prison camp in the Tyrol which the Germans then abandoned. He walked 150 miles to Verona, where he met an American tank column. Eager for more, he rejoined the British and was sent to Burma, arriving too late for action. “If it wasn’t for those damn Yanks,” he complained, “we could have kept this war going for another ten years!” Yet he found more war, playing an archer in a film version of
Ivanhoe
in 1946, then qualifying as a parachutist and joining the Highland Light Infantry in Palestine. There, as the British Mandate ended meanly in 1948, he came to the aid, with twelve of his men, of the Hadassah Hospital convoy evacuating patients and medical staff from Mount Scopus under withering fire from the Arabs. In Australia afterward he was an instructor at the land-air warfare school. Retiring in 1959, he returned to England, where he died in Surrey at ninety. Winston Churchill must have felt some pride in his feisty namesake.

“Operation Archery” on the Norwegian coast concludes with the evacuation of British commandos, December 27, 1941.
Imperial War Museum

AT 4:30 THAT AFTERNOON, Roosevelt and Churchill and their military and civilian advisers met in the White House. It was, Secretary Stimson noted in his diary, “a sort of interim conference to see how the Chiefs of Staff had been getting on in their conferences and everything seems to be going well.” Field Marshal Dill reviewed once more the chancy “proposition” of sending troops to Vichy French North Africa, and General Marshall, replying to FDR’s question as to whether that would “impair” supplying England, said that it would depend on how large an invasion force “was necessary to appeal to the French in such a way that the occupation would be expedited.” Employing his usual salty language, Admiral King seized upon the “impairment,” as Marshall cloaked it in his minutes, contending that a North African operation, soaking up shipping in short supply, would delay his convoying American troops and war materiel to Britain, which was far more crucial than a dicey adventure to Morocco or Algeria.

With both sides embarrassed by King’s choice of metaphors, Churchill intervened to emphasize the need to relieve British troops in Iceland and Northern Ireland for duty elsewhere and wondered what might be done to rescue the dire situation in Malaya and Singapore. Unity of command across Southeast Asia then came up, with Churchill observing that only where there was “a continuous line of battle,” as in France in 1918, was such unity practical, and the operating areas this time were vast and widely separated, but Secretary Knox contended that a “scattered condition of command” was in itself an argument for unity, exercised somewhere, perhaps even from Washington.

While the conference continued, Secretary Hull sought compromises with Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King to cope with the embarrassing minor victory that had emerged the day before Christmas. Saint-Pierre and Miquelon had maintained a powerful radio station broadcasting Vichy propaganda to French-speaking Canadians and communicating with Vichy itself. The British also suspected that it was communicating cryptic data to German subs about convoys in the North Atlantic. To try to edge Vichy away, even slightly, from its Nazi overseers, the Americans and the British, including the Canadians, had not wanted to upset the status quo. De Gaulle called the seizure a purely internal French affair.

Cordell Hull, seventy and ailing, was furious at the caper, but the issue had not seemed of sufficient military importance to make the conference agenda. He determined to put it on his own agenda. For Hull it was a violation of the long-standing Monroe Doctrine of noninterference by outsiders in hemisphere territories. That post-Christmas afternoon he proposed to King unsuccessfully that the Gaullists be pressured to withdraw but that the operation of the islands’ radio be placed under allied supervision.

In his diary Mackenzie King wrote, “I told him it would not do to have the Governor restored, as he was pro-Axis, and his wife a German.... Canadian feeling was relieved and pleased with the de Gaulle accomplishment.... We would have to be careful to see that whatever was done would not appear that we were sacrificing the Free French. I said to Mr. Hull I would try to get Mr. Churchill to view the matter in this way. Mr. Hull and I then went over to the White House where we joined the President and Mr. Churchill in the Oval Room at tea. . . .”

A 5:00 P.M., an armed Bureau of Printing and Engraving truck—from the agency that printed American currency—pulled up to a loading platform at the Library of Congress. Alongside was another vehicle with guards holding automatic weapons. Workmen loaded the sealed founding documents so carefully packed before Christmas and headed for Union Station. There the cargo was loaded into Compartment B, Car A-1, on the Pullman sleeper
Eastlake
of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Secret Service agents moved into compartments on either side, and others manned the corridor. The train left the station at 6:30, en route to Louisville, Kentucky.

AT “TEA” IN THE WHITE HOUSE—King had sworn off alcohol for the duration—the French islets issue was largely settled. Mackenzie King mollified Hull by contending that the Secretary “had a better idea” than bringing the Governor back—“which was to let de Gaulle feel that, while he had been precipitate, he had cleared up a certain situation thereby making it possible to have the whole supervision of radio messages properly arranged for.... Mr. Hull said he thought he and I were 98 per cent agreed on what should be done. Mr. Roosevelt said he thought it would be best for Mr. Hull and me to work out a suggested arrangement and then it could be considered tomorrow.” Churchill, armed with a scotch and soda, agreed. De Gaulle would be emboldened for further capers.

Before dinner that evening, which included White House friends, Churchill, Roosevelt and Hopkins, with Mackenzie King and Lord Beaverbrook, discussed further the problem of Far East command and its huge boundaries. Marshall defined the area as ABDA (American, British, Dutch, Australian). Churchill favored direction by a combined group in Washington. Roosevelt also wanted an on-site commander, intending, as Marshall had suggested to him, to propose Field Marshal Sir Archibald Wavell, then commanding British Far East forces from India. He had been successful against the Italians in Egypt and Libya, but nowhere else, and had the misfortune of commanding largely when his forces were disadvantaged. He had fought in the Boer War, lost an eye in the trenches in France in 1915, and became a proponent of tank warfare. Wavell was fluent in Russian, read Latin and Greek, and even wrote poetry. Other than his having commanded, without distinction, an operational theater (in the Middle East), nothing but his rank and availability made him a logical choice.

Churchill kept his dark suspicions to himself. Obviously, Wavell would be filling a slot until the reason for his command evaporated. Hopkins had already whispered to the PM, “Don’t be in a hurry to turn down the proposal the President is going to make to you before you know who the man is we have in mind.” Churchill’s military deputy Colonel Ian Jacob, who must have intimated his concerns, noted in his diary that unity over such distances would be purely symbolic—that their new partners in arms “foresaw inevitable disasters in the Far East, and feared the force of the American public opinion which might so easily cast the blame . . . on to the shoulders of a British general.”