Pearl Harbor Christmas Read Free

it, “Over all this vast expanse of waters Japan was supreme, and we everywhere [were] weak and naked.”
    On the other side of the continent, thoroughly open to attacks if there were to be any, the Prime Minister, having embarked from the River Clyde in Scotland on December 14, was already in the mid-Atlantic on the new battleship Duke of York amid violent, frigid gales. Aware from his office of her husband’s falling behind schedule, Clementine Churchill cabled him from London on December 19: “You have been gone a week & all the news of you is of heavy seas delaying your progress—plans to change into planes at Bermuda, so as to arrive in time, & then those plans cancelled.... May God keep you and inspire you to make good plans with the President. It is a horrible World at present. Europe overrun by the Nazi hogs, & the Far East by yellow Japanese lice. I am spending Christmas here . . . & going to Chequers on Saturday the 27th.”
    In Washington the American brass worried even before Churchill departed about having the PM at Roosevelt’s elbow, where, despite Britain’s weak hand getting even weaker, he could employ his glib persuasiveness and imperial visions.

 
    En Route
    C HURCHILL AND HIS STAFF had taken the overnight train from London to Greenock on the Clyde. They reached the Duke of York on the morning of December 13, three days after its sister ship, Prince of Wales, and heavy cruiser Repulse, had been sunk by Japanese torpedo bombers off Malaya. Vice Admiral Sir Tom Phillips had rushed both warships north toward the enemy invasion fleet without any air cover. The shock and humiliation were great, and the strategic loss was irreversible. Still, the Prime Minister could claim confidence that American involvement—and American industrial potential—would inevitably reverse the Axis tide.
    By radio aboard—and twenty-seven code clerks working round the clock—the PM kept in touch with events. The Germans were deep into Russia but slowed almost to stalemate by stiff resistance and heavy snow. Blaming faltering commanders for the crisis, Berlin radio reported, Adolf Hitler had assumed supreme command of the Wehrmacht . The Japanese were already exceeding their own expectations in Malaya and the Philippines and intent on driving the Dutch from the oil fields of Borneo. Hong Kong’s invaders, ordered to take mainland Kowloon and the island in ten days, were experiencing unexpected resistance, but there were no escape routes. While the sandbagged and surrounded Repulse Bay Hotel on the beautiful eastern shore, packed with frightened guests and refugees and defended by grimy, nearly sleepless, soldiers, was being shelled, an English lady who had paid a steep £10 a day for her stay complained loudly, “What are all those Chinese people doing here?”
    From the start the Duke of York and its passengers and crew endured a rough crossing. Swept by gales and high seas, the splashed decks were off limits for the first three days. Over the protestations of Dr. Wilson, Churchill dosed himself below with Mothersills Seasick Remedy (“Stops travel nausea on your vacation trips,” the label advertised), and he began offering seasick stories to his queasy companions. At the dining table, when the PM chatted gaily about the special-purpose buckets he had once seen on the bridge of a destroyer, Sir John Dill made a queasy exit. There was no stopping the former First Lord of the Admiralty, who told about the desperate passenger on an ocean liner who was rushing to the nearest rail when a steward warned, “But sir, you can’t be sick here!”
    “Oh, can’t I?” said the passenger as he kept going.
    Reaching the Azores without incident, the Churchill party could transmit business there safely by radio. A hundred miles farther out, plowing ahead of buffeted light escort vessels, which were forced to turn back, the battleship maintained outgoing radio silence, but events did not make that easy for the Prime Minister.