Pearl Harbor Christmas by Stanley Weintraub

treatment toward the other ships expected to arrive here” and for permission “to make the return trip as soon as possible.” Its cargo had yet to be unloaded. Wenneker worried about American submarines now reported offshore—although he would have worried less had he known how faulty their fuses were.

    BY EVENING, his Fourteenth Army slowed in high seas, General Homma had landed all his forces aboard transports in Lingayen Bay, but he had not yet come ashore himself. Ordered out of hazardous Manila Bay toward the Dutch East Indies, Admiral Thomas Hart’s pathetic Asian Fleet remnant of three cruisers and twelve destroyers, most of them four-stackers of World War I or postwar vintage, were voyaging toward Surabaja in eastern Java. Many would not survive the first months of engagement. Their first port of call had been Balikpapan on the southeastern coast of Borneo, where the destroyers Ford and Pope received a flash-lamp message from Lieutenant (jg) Henry F. Burfeind: “Greetings to my fellow [Annapolis] classmates. Left Pillsbury in Manila, ordered to Mareschal Joffre to take her south. See you in Surabaja.” The unmilitary Mareschal Joffre was a 14,500-ton, rat-infested Vichy French freighter with a foreign crew who knew no English that was seized by American authorities when the war began. An ensign and twenty-eight enlisted sailors, most of whom had been wounded in the bombing of the Cavite naval base, were added to Burfeind’s crew. En route to Balikpapan it was scouted by two Japanese planes, then left alone. It would continue on to Australia and New Zealand with its Chinese and Indochinese crew and make it to pier 23 in San Francisco via a refueling stop at Acapulco in Mexico, where it would leave without paying a docking fee. In California it was converted into a troopship renamed the Rochambeau . Many of its foreign crew joined the navy there, were paid, and issued uniforms.

    SAILING FROM the Thames Estuary was the nine thousand–ton Norwegian-flag tanker Regnbue (Rainbow) , empty but for ballast, ordered to load fuel at Corpus Christi, Texas. Harry Larsen, the chief engineer, complained as they raised anchor about the horrors at sea at Christmas without “newts or frewts or yin.” The ship’s chandler in London could supply no nuts or fruit, but a lighter had brought out a case of gin and two cases of whiskey. New Yorker journalist A.J. Liebling, hitching a ride home, was assured that although “ordinarily” no liquor was served aboard ship “except to pilots and immigration officers, Christmas was always an exception.” The Regnbue proceeded in a column of eight, one of five groups, with four corvettes as escort. No one expected the ships to remain together in the stormy Atlantic.
    “Much colder as we go north,” Oliver Harvey of Anthony Eden’s party wrote from their train toward Murmansk, and their risky convoy home. “Meals still muddled—we had two breakfasts in succession at 9.30 and 1.30 but no lunch. However we hope to get dinner straight.”
    To their south, the winter war had already gone on so unexpectedly long for the Germans—Hitler had expected it to be over by the time the first snows fell in Russia—that he had issued a much-belated proclamation from “Führer Headquarters,” soon picked up worldwide when it was broadcast on Berlin radio:
    German Volk!
    While the German homeland is not directly threatened by the enemy, with the exception of air raids, . . . if the German Volk wishes to give something to its soldiers at Christmas, then it should give the warmest clothing that it can do without during the war. In peacetime, all of this can easily be replaced. In spite of all the winter equipment prepared by the leadership in the Wehrmacht and its individual branches, every soldier deserves so much more!
    Acknowledging the existence of Christmas to make the appeal more subtle, Hitler was preparing the public to give until it hurt. In a further directive he decreed the death