What Was Christmas Like in 1941? A Book Review

Pearl Harbor Christmas: A World at War, December 1941, by Stanley Weintraub. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, November 1, 2011. 224 pp., $24.00.

“Pearl Harbor Christmas” may sound like the title of a 1960s-era TV holiday spectacular set in Hawaii, in which Bing Crosby had sung a duet of “Mele Kalikimaka” with Rosemary Clooney.

It’s not.

It is actually a tightly-packed but readable account of the “12 days of Christmas” beginning two weeks after the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on the U.S. Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor (Sunday, December 21 to Thursday, January 1). It begins with the arrival of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Washington for talks with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and ends with the ceremonial signing of the “Joint Declaration of War Aims” by representatives of the nations allied against the Axis Powers.

In between, author Stanley Weintraub takes his readers on a day-by-day (sometimes hour-by-hour) account of the political, diplomatic, and military events of that crucial week and a half. He circles the globe, drawing on public documents, letters, and diaries from not just the United States and Britain but also from the Philippines, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaya, Singapore, Australia, France, North Africa, the Soviet Union, Germany, and Japan.

I picked up Pearl Harbor Christmas by chance at a local bookstore and bought it on a whim, thinking that it primarily would focus on the home front in the weeks following the Pearl Harbor attack and how Americans adjusted their holiday celebrations to the new realities of having been thrust into war.

The book has some of that, and Weintraub is able to draw an adequate picture of what the Christmas season of 1941 was like.

Wartime black-out rules had not yet dimmed Christmas lights, and Christmas trees themselves, Wientraub says, “were plentiful, seldom priced at more than a dollar or two.” Rockefeller Center presented its annual Christmas show, featuring the Rockettes, and people were still reading comic strips and going to the movies.

“The hit book for Christmas giving,” he writes in a prelude, “at a hefty $2.50, was Edna Ferber’s Reconstruction-era romance Saratoga Trunk. For the same price, war turned up distantly yet bombastically in a two-disc set of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, performed by Artur Rodzinski and the Cleveland Orchestra.”

Weintraub goes on to list the prices of crates of citrus fruits (“$2.79 at Bloomingdales”) and new cars (“soon to be unobtainable”) for $900. Silk stockings were $1.25 a pair, and nylon stockings – which would also quickly disappear as the fabric was needed for parachutes – were $1.65.

In a clever, parenthetical turn of phrase, he writes about upscale clothing shops:

“Hattie Carnegie’s designer dresses began at $15. The upscale Rogers Peet menswear store offered suits and topcoats from a steep $38. (At recruiting stations nationwide, the army was offering smart khaki garb at no cost whatever to enlistees.)”

The book, however, is mostly about politics, not domestic life.  And the politics and diplomacy that are the focus of Weintraub's research are fascinating in themselves.

Churchill’s extended visit to Washington included bibulous dinners at the White House, a joint press conference with FDR, two visits to local churches (on Christmas and New Year’s Day), a speech to a joint session of Congress, a side-trip to Ottawa to address the Canadian parliament, and the British Prime Minister’s only shared public appearance with the American President, at the annual lighting of the White House Christmas tree.

The account of the Christmas Eve speeches is one of several sections of the book that could have used a better editor’s eye, because Weintraub’s writing is redundant on two facing pages.

On page 80, Weintraub writes that Churchill began his speech with the phrase “This is a strange Christmas Eve,” and then quotes extensively from his remarks, including a passage about “war, raging and soaring over all the lands and seas, creeping nearer to our hearts and our homes.”

Three paragraphs later, on page 81, Weintraub repeats the passage:

“It was, [Churchill] conceded, ‘a strange Christmas eve,’ with war ‘raging and roaring over all the lands and seas, creeping nearer to our hearts and homes.’”

This is not an isolated incident of sloppy editing.

In a description of how actor Robert Montgomery – by December 1941 an officer in Naval Intelligence assigned to the White House – set up a map room for the President’s use, Weintraub writes on pages 75-76:

“Space was limited; toilets and sinks were removed from a ladies’ cloakroom in the basement, as Montgomery superintended the conversion of a ladies cloakroom in the basement into a secure information center...”

Similar repetitiveness is found on page 92 (“Rarely seen at religious services at home, Churchill accompanied the President to Foundry Methodist Church…”) and 94 (“Churchill – not a churchgoer at home…”).

Still, these errors, while distracting, do not significantly mar the flow of the story that Weintraub tells, and Pearl Harbor Christmas is a real page-turner as the narration flies from place to place, sometimes describing high politics and sometimes describing the hardscrabble efforts at survival of seamen and grunts.

The book reveals how, simultaneously, the United States was caught unawares by the Japanese attacks in the Pacific, leading to the quick fall of the Philippines under what Weintraub seems to characterize as arrogant and incompetent military leadership of General Douglas MacArthur – but that it was also able to turn on a dime and, within weeks, ramp up its military and industrial operations to meet the needs of facing down hostile enemies in both Europe and the Pacific.

The 12 days of Christmas in 1941 included delicate negotiations about how the war would be pursued. As a direct result of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the American people were angry and eager to take the war into the Pacific and strike back at the Japanese immediately. Churchill and Roosevelt, however, recognized that the greater threat came from Hitler’s Germany and that the initial focus of the war should be in Europe. Japan would have to wait.

In the course of events, the war was fought on both fronts, but the defeat of Hitler came first, with Japan to fall several months later.

What’s remarkable to see, in that regard, is the predictions made by military and political leaders of that time about how long it would take to bring the war to an end. Not precisely correct, Churchill thought that a frontal invasion of the European continent would occur sometime in 1943, with the war to end by 1944. He was off by a year but, on the general shape the war would take, he was eerily prescient.

The intersection of wartime and Christmastime is a particular focus of Stanley Weintraub's prolific work. He is also the author of Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce (2002); 11 Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944 (2007); and General Sherman's Christmas: Savannah, 1864 (2009); as well as General Washington's Christmas Farewell: A Mount Vernon Homecoming, 1783 (2007).  Could Christmas in Kandahar be next?  (There is already a song by that name but, so far, no book.)

If one is primarily interested in social history (as I was, when I purchased this book), Pearl Harbor Christmas could turn out to disappoint, because it is primarily about political and military history. In my case, the initial disappointment ended quickly, because the story that Weintraub tells is compelling, with many revealing details about the first weeks of the Second World War that otherwise would be buried in archives and dusty memoirs.

'The War Powers Resolution: Its Implementation in Theory and Practice'

This book review appeared initially in the New York Tribune on Monday, September 3, 1983.

BOOK / RICHARD E. SINCERE JR.
The War Powers Resolution: a siege on presidential power
 
The War Powers Resolution: Its Implementation in Theory and Practice by Robert F. Turner, Philadelphia: Foreign Policy Research Institute, 1983, 147 pages, $4.95.

Clement J. Zablocki, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told The Milwaukee Journal on July 3: “The Wars Powers Resolution is uniquely crafted in that it accommodates to the reality of our modern, nuclear world. . . However, the distinctive virtue of the resolution is that it reserves to the Congress its constitutionally mandated responsibility of ultimately deciding the full legality of a presidential action. “In short,” said Zablocki, author of the 1973 law, “the War Powers Resolution is too fundamental in both its constitutional anchorage and its practical benefit to be dismantled” by the recent Supreme Court ruling that the so-called legislative veto is unconstitutional.


Inaccurate optimism
Zablocki’s assertions are wrong, according to attorney Robert F. Turner, formerly a legislative assistant to a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  Turner argues in “The War Powers Resolution: Its Implementation in Theory and Practice” that the law “is — in essence — unconstitutional, ineffective and unwise.”

Experience of the past decade demonstrates that the War Powers Resolution is not only ineffective, it is probably harmful. “Rather than fostering an atmosphere of cooperation partnership in decisions to commit U.S. forces to hostile situations, the War Powers Resolution has had the opposite effect: it pits the two branches against each other on essentially procedural grounds at the precise time that national unity is needed to deal with a potential crisis.”

The War Powers Resolution was doomed from its beginning. It was passed by a Congress that refused to acknowledge the congressional role in the conduct of the Vietnam War. Pretending that the near- unanimous vote in 1964 for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution (which granted sweeping discretionary powers to the president for prosecuting the war) never occurred, Congress gave the false impression that its constitutional responsibilities had been usurped by the president. So the law’s purpose was grounded in a historical fiction.

Nixon’s veto
Furthermore, the law’s effectiveness was immediately cast into doubt because it had to be passed over President Nixon’s veto. Sen. Jacob Javits, who co-sponsored the resolution, had hoped that Congress would work out a “methodology’’ for join presidential-congressional action in committing American troops abroad and that the president would then sign it — essentially making a compact between the president and Congress. That hope was not realized when the resolution was, for good reason, vetoed.

The War Powers Resolution requires, among other things, that 60 days after American forces are introduced into “situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances,” the president must terminate American involvement unless Congress explicity acts to continue it. Thus, vital American military aid to a nation under siege could legally be ended simply because the Congress cannot make up its mind! More important, an enemy aware of the president’s time limits could easily delay an offensive or refuse to negotiate peace terms until the 60 days of American military presence had ended.

Turner shows that the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional for several independent reasons, including those cited by the Supreme Court in its recent Chadha decision. Among the others, Turner says, are the resolution’s provisions limiting the power of the Commander-in-Chief to “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces” [Section 2 (c)]. ‘Turner argues: “Any attempt to give legal effect to this provision would be patently unconstitutional.”

Critical omissions
The resolution fails to make the crucial distinction between the Congress’s constitutional power to declare war and the president’s powers to make war. Since after 60 days Congress must affirmatively act to authorize use of U.S. armed forces, the resolution deprives the president of "a fundamental expressed constitutional power,” something “incompatible with our system of separation of powers.”

Turner’s work is a valuable lesson in history and government. It will increase in value as President Reagan and Congress continue to dispute the presence of U.S. forces abroad, particularly in Central America, where fears of “another Vietnam” obscure the realities of the situation.

Congress and the public should take heed of Turner’s analysis, as Sen. John Tower already has, calling the War Powers Resolution “probably the most potentially damaging of the 1970s legislation” that altered the relationship between Congress and president. Tower most surely agrees with Robert Turner’s concluding recommendation:

“Now that its failure has been demonstrated and the acrimony resulting from Vietnam has receded, Congress should take a valuable first step in the direction of improved legislative-executive cooperation in this vital area — and in the process reaffirm its commitment to constitutional government — by repealing the War Powers Resolution.”

Richard E. Sincere, Jr., serves on the board of directors of the American Civil Defense Association and on the staff of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

'Justice and War in the Nuclear Age'

This book review was first published  in The Washington Times on May 11, 1983.  Another version of it appeared in in the May 19, 1983, edition of the Arlington Catholic Herald, the newspaper of the Roman Catholic diocese of Arlington (Virginia); it is that version that appears below.

A Book Review...
Applying Catholic Doctrine to Contemporary Issues

“Justice and War in the Nuclear Age,” edited by Philip F. Lawler. University Press of America, 1983. 113 pages, includes bibliography. Cloth $16.95, paper $5.25.


By RICHARD E. SINCERE, JR.*

Questions of morality and politics inevitably transcend particular political events. “Justice and War in the Nuclear Age” is a collection of essays by five scholars, all actively religious and concerned to examine their tradition — in this case Roman Catholic — and apply its ancient principles to contemporary issues.

Each writer succeeds in producing a useful and thought-provoking analysis of the premier problem of our time: how to secure peace with justice in an age of nuclear weapons. All agree ‘that nuclear deterrence is a moral good simply because it has prevented a general European war for the past generation. All, however, reject the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) which has governed deterrence policies since the Kennedy administration. Instead they seek “a deterrent in which our preparations match our risks, and our potential for destruction is proportionate to the evils we seek to avoid.”

It is a curious paradox that those who accept deterrence begrudgingly often argue that the only way to prevent nuclear war is to make the weapons big and dirty and to target civilians (i.e., MAD). The prospect of war then becomes so awful that no sane leader would risk using nuclear weapons. Those who support deterrence, on the other hand, have since the end of the brief era of “massive retaliation” tended to find the idea of targeting civilians morally repugnant and strategically dubious. Therefore, they have made every effort to reduce the size of nuclear weapons, make them more accurate, and devise defenses against missiles and bombers — all in order to prevent collateral damage, save innocent lives, and mitigate suffering — and concomitantly to strengthen deterrence.

Only recently, culminating with the Catholic bishops’ pastoral letter on peace and war, have we heard arguments from the anti-deterrence side of the debate that counter-city targeting doctrine is intrinsically immoral. However, instead of expressing support for a counterforce or counter-military strategy, these critics have set about undermining the moral basis of deterrence itself. By some trick of logic they have decided if we can’t target people, we can’t target anything.

This volume persuasively shows the correctness of the pro-deterrence, pro-defense position from the perspectives of several disciplines: politics (Robert R. Reillyexamines “The Nature of Today’s Conflict”), philosophy (James V. Schall, S.J., on the “Intellectual Origins of the Peace Movement”), arms control (Thomas F. Payne discusses “The Amorality of Arms Control”), military strategy (Angelo Codevilla integrates “Justice, War, and Active Defense”) and theology (Bishop John J. O’Connor turns to “Traditional Western Criteria for Justice in War”). Together these five essays establish essential foundations for an intellectual defense of flexible deterrence policies and a moral argument for active defenses that will render nuclear weapons obsolete.

Professor Schall and Bishop O’Connor remind us that peace is not the mere absence of war — any tyranny, through coercion and mind control, can stamp out conflict. Peace is more, says Schall, and “always a consequence, not a direct object of our strivings, (but) a result of truth and mercy and charity.” Reilly says that in today’s struggle with the Soviet Union — whose leaders lack mercy, truth, and charity — our duty is to assess accurately “what is at stake in a war, otherwise we cannot judge what exertions are justified for defense.” As Pope Pius XII taught, “There are greater evils than the physical death and destruction wrought in wars.” Relating religious ethics to an empirical view of the global crisis leads to the conclusion that the quest for peace with justice does not automatically exclude the use or threat to use nuclear weapons: neither does it exclude any other means of conflict resolution.

On this subject. the more technical essays — Payne’s and Codevilla’s — have special relevance. Those who argue that any use of nuclear weapons would be immoral must reckon with technological developments over the past 20 years. Weapons can be more precisely targeted now than they were in 1962, when both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had to rely on bombers and primitive missiles, which were effective only against population centers. Today, we also have the means to ward off incoming nuclear weapons if necessary. Codevilla states: “The assertion that nuclear war must be either mass murder or suicide, or both, cannot be founded on fact.”

A 20th-century Voltaire might quip that Mutual Assured Destruction is neither mutual, assured, nor destruction. Recognizing the limited power of nuclear weapons is the first step toward eliminating their horrors. Ballistic missile defense and civil defense are moral and practical alternatives to self-generated vulnerability. The technology exists; only the will to use it seems absent.

Justice, peace, and freedom will be secured when we realize that the ethical foundations of our society face human, not merely technological, threats. Until humanity no longer suffers from sin, technology guided by charity and justice must stave off the evil that overshadows us.


*Richard E. Sincere, Jr., is research assistant for church and society at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and serves on the board of directors of the American Civil Defense Association.

'Waging Nuclear Peace: The Technology and Politics of Nuclear Weapons'

This review originally appeared in the Washington Times on Thursday, May 2, 1985. This is probably the first time it has been readily available in digital form.  (Versions of this book review also appeared in the New York City Tribune on September 3, 1986, and in the spring 1985 issue of Strategic Review.)

BOOK REVIEW/Richard E. Sincere Jr.

A textbook look at our nuclear strategies

Waging Nuclear Peace: The Technology and Politics of Nuclear Weapons
By Robert Ehrlich
University of New York
$12.95 paper, 397 pages

When George Mason University physics professor Robert Ehrlich began to teach a course in arms control and nuclear weapons policy a few years ago, he could find no adequate, single-volume text that was conducive to class discussion and that provided sufficient technical and political background for his students. So, Mr. Ehrlich has produced a readable, detailed and useful primer on nuclear strategy that will also be an excellent reference book for those who are already in the field.

Page 1 introduces the purpose of the book with the question, “Are we discussing the real issue?... Nuclear war is a highly emotional issue,” Mr. Ehrlich points out. “It would be almost irrational not to become emotional when reflecting on the horror that a nuclear war could bring. However, the whole point of thinking analytically about nuclear war is to try to see facts objectively, not as we might wish them to be. It is only by clearing away these misconceptions that we can best assess the most likely course of action to avert catastrophe.”

The practical applications of this view become clear later in a discussion of the 1979 Office of Technology Assessment study, The Effects of Nuclear War, a report often cited as a primary source on the immediate and long-term effects of a nuclear attack upon the United States. Mr. Ehrlich compares the advantages and disadvantages of the United States and the U.S.S.R. that bear on their prospects for survival following a nuclear exchange. He notes that the OTA report concluded that there is no evidence “that the Soviets face a lower risk [than the United States] of finding themselves unable to rebuild an industrial society at all.”

Mr. Ehrlich argues, however, that an objective reader may come to different conclusions from those reached by the OTA report’s authors, and conclude that the Soviet Union is better prepared to survive a nuclear attack than the United States: “It is possible that the authors of this [OTA] study did not want to encourage the belief that nuclear war might be survivable -- especially the notion that it might be more survivable in the Soviet Union than in the United States.”

If Soviet military leaders do believe in the survivability — or winnability — of a nuclear war, the United States is faced with a major problem for strategic policy. And Mr. Ehrlich’s analysis of this problem deserves more prominence in, his book than he gives it.

Among many other issues that Mr. Ehrlich sheds light on, two are of particular current interest, antiballistic missile defense (ABM) and civil defense. One of his views on ballistic missile defense may surprise some pundits: “It would make little sense’ the author argues, “to build an expensive and exotic ABM system of uncertain feasibility without first investing in a much cheaper civil defense system. Such a course of action would be akin to installing an expensive photovoltaic solar-energy collection system n your roof and not bothering first to add insulation in your ceiling -- a much more cost-effective measure.”

This approach is unusually relevant, since the Reagan administration has cut the civil defense budget for fiscal 1986 from $181 million to $119.1 million. There appears to be a trend in administration thinking toward putting all of its eggs in the Strategic Defense Initiative basket -- a prospect that chills arms-control advocates as well as civil defense professionals.

While acknowledging the arguments of Physicians for Social Responsibility and other groups that there may be “insurmountable obstacles” to surviving nuclear war, including long-term climatic damage and the destruction of our national infrastructure, Mr. Ehrlich remains firm in his support for population-protection measures. At the conclusion of his discussion of the effectiveness of civil defense, he writes:

“While there are major obstacles to survival following a nuclear war, it is by no means clear that these obstacles are insurmountable. In the nuclear age the goal of preventing nuclear war must, of course, take priority over surviving one. Nevertheless, because a nuclear war could occur despite our best efforts at prevention, prudence requires that some attention be devoted to the problem of survival.”

The book is rich in its exposition of the myriad issues that students, citizens, and policymakers must face in the crowded debate over nuclear weapons policy. It is well- structured, with divisions into four topical sections: “Introduction to the issues,” “Nuclear Arms and Nuclear War,” “The Effects of Nuclear War” and “Policy Options and Objectives.”

These are further divided into chapters with headings such as “Public Opinion and the Media,” “Long-Term Worldwide Effects of a Nuclear War,” and “Arms Control and Disarmament.” Two appendixes address “The Physical Principles of Nuclear Energy and Radiation” and “Survival After Nuclear War.” Each chapter and appendix is followed by study questions to help instructors conduct class discussions or to devise midterm and final essay questions.

The fact that this book is designed for classroom use should not deter readers who are past the age of worrying about term papers, grades, and spring break in Florida. Waging Nuclear Peace is an important contribution to the catalog of nuclear-strategy books.

Richard E. Sincere Jr. is vice president of the American Civil Defense Association.