Pearl Harbor Christmas Read Free Page B

his presents for unwrapping. One was a tricycle, which he pedaled happily round the spacious flat and its balconies while his mother opened her own gifts with pretended joy. She examined each, holding the contents one at a time to admire. “Sir Boss, they are beautiful,” she said as she began rewrapping them for departure. “Thank you so much.” Mark Twain’s fictional Connecticut Yankee who dominated King Arthur’s court was addressed as “Sir Boss,” and Jean had adopted it.

    KEEPING BUSY AT SEA, Churchill dictated position papers on “The Atlantic Front” and “The Pacific Front” to offer the President, suggesting the dispatch of American troops to Northern Ireland and bomber squadrons to Scotland in order to relieve British forces for action. Overestimating the American pace of preparedness, he envisaged beginning the liberation of Europe little more than a year later—the subject of a third paper, “The Campaign of 1943.” In the postwar publication of his papers, silently edited, he omitted the paper on the Pacific front, giving that title to a fourth, originally “Notes on the Pacific.” He may have felt embarrassed about the hopes he had held for Singapore, expected to hold the Japanese back for six months until rescue. What he did print, however, was equally complacent, expecting that by May 1942, only five months distant, the Allies could mass a formidable battle fleet in the Pacific, bolstered by aircraft carriers yet to be built and “improvised carriers” converted from existing merchantmen and warships. The Royal Navy had begun employing “escort carriers” for convoy duty, and Roosevelt would initiate a program to refit freighters under construction as small carriers, then order escort carriers designed as such. (Of 151 American carriers constructed during the war, 122 would be escort size. Only 5 would be lost to enemy action.)
    Ever the optimist, Churchill saw the military resources of Japan, dependent on what could be exploited from occupied territories that he expected the allies to retrieve, as a “wasting factor” leading to inevitable defeat. His two service chiefs, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound and Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, concurred. Abetted, apparently, by Portal, the PM promoted deploying air power that did not yet exist from locations that also did not exist for massive air assaults on Japan itself to retard further “overseas adventures” and bring the war directly to the Japanese islands. “The burning of Japanese cities by incendiary bombs,” he wrote in a paragraph he did not reprint postwar, “will bring home in a most effective manner to the people of Japan the dangers of the course to which they have committed themselves.” That would indeed happen, three years later, but not because American planners and aircraft engineers had read the PM’s papers.
    Field Marshal Sir John Dill, who had been replaced at the War Office by Brooke, was expected to remain in Washington as liaison. Although Churchill had sniffed about him as “DillyDally,” he had the backbone to disagree with the Prime Minister and took some risky decisions for which the PM would take postwar credit. Pushing Dill out of the way so that Churchill could run the war through personal surrogates proved inadvertently to be one of the Prime Minister’s best appointments. Remembered for his observation, “It takes a lot of moral courage not to be afraid of being thought afraid,” Dill became an intimate of American chief of staff General George Marshall, and he was so highly regarded throughout the war that on his death late in 1944 he was buried, with Congressional approval, at Arlington.
    After FDR had sent Churchill a memorandum suggesting a “Joint Staff Conference” with their American counterparts “as to how we are going to fight the war together,” the PM convened his own military advisers aboard on December 18, along with the Minister of Supply, Lord Beaverbrook. Canadian-born