Pearl Harbor Christmas Read Free Page A

“Our very large deciphering staff,” he recalled, “could of course receive by wireless [radio] a great deal of business. To a limited extent we could reply. When fresh escorts joined us from the Azores they could take in by daylight Morse signals from us in code, and then, dropping off a hundred miles or so, could transmit them without revealing our position. Still, there was a sense of radio claustrophobia. . . .”

    IN WASHINGTON radiograms brought in increasingly bad news. In the central Pacific a handful of marines and marine pilots had held off the Japanese at isolated Wake Island after repelling a landing on the eleventh, but after another attempt, their overwhelmed remnants were buckling. The nation had been electrified by a brash radiogram from Wake, “Send us more Japs!”—but it was at best an imaginative misreading of a much more gloomy message. Although the isolated garrison was doomed, it had accomplished a feat never repeated during the war—fending off an amphibious force with coastal guns.
    In the doomed Philippines on the twenty-second, General Douglas MacArthur, having boasted before Pearl Harbor that he was ready to meet any Japanese thrust, sat in his headquarters in an historic old fortress in Manila near his hotel penthouse flat as alarming reports came in about troop withdrawals. Forty-three thousand Japanese began swarming ashore at Lingayen Gulf in central Luzon, although MacArthur prepared defiant communiqués claiming otherwise.
    Like the British in Malaya withdrawing southward on the four hundred-mile-long Kra Peninsula toward theoretically invulnerable Singapore, protected by the natural moat of the Strait of Johore, MacArthur’s ground forces were unprepared, under-equipped, and quickly shorn of air and naval support. American subs off the Philippines had attacked enemy transports, but their poorly designed torpedo fuses did not work. Much of the air force on Luzon had been destroyed on the ground, although MacArthur had received ample warning about likely attacks. But for sporadic air raids met with futile anti-aircraft weapons geared in altitude settings for an earlier war, Manila was quiet. Its population, with nowhere to go, was passive and anxious. Preparing to leave for the tadpole-shaped “rock” of Corregidor in Manila Bay, considered as impregnable as Singapore, the general drew up a proclamation, its release still withheld, declaring Manila an open city. By the laws of war ignored by the Japanese elsewhere, the declaration meant that by Christmas the city would be undefended and thus exempt—on paper—from bombardment.
    MacArthur then sent for Lieutenant Colonel Sid Huff, a retired naval officer who had become a personal assistant commissioned on the general’s behalf. “Sid,” said MacArthur, “I’ve forgotten to buy Jean a Christmas present.” Whatever would be purchased would be less than useless on Corregidor, but Huff was to think of something for Mrs. MacArthur. Philippine money would also be useless, and the general had plenty of it to lavish on Manila shops. Loyally, Huff went off to places he knew Jean patronized and would know her size (twelve), returning with boxes of dresses and lingerie bound with Christmas ribbons. MacArthur crossed the street from venerable, walled Intramuros in Calle Victoria, took the elevator to his Manila Hotel penthouse flat on the sixth floor—with seven bedrooms and a state dining room and a ten thousand–volume military history library built for him in 1935. He advised Jean to open the gifts right away. Christmas Eve might be too late.
    War tension was lost on little Arthur IV, who would celebrate his fourth birthday in a tunnel on Corregidor in February. He had a gaily decorated Christmas tree in the family penthouse, and his presents were in a closet, never to be stacked under the tree on Christmas Eve after his bedtime. That evening his parents announced it was the day before Christmas, which it wasn’t, and extricated