Pearl Harbor Christmas by Stanley Weintraub Read Free Book Online Page B

from prewar Appeasement, but he harbored doubts about what might be done, where, and how fast. It was quite enough, the PM thought, that the Americans, with their potential, were now in the fight. “I was terribly shocked by Winston’s growth in the egotistic habit of thought. ‘I can do this: I won’t do that, etc., etc.’” Halifax retired to sleep, as did the denizens of the White House. Churchill could not.

 
    December 23, 1941
    A BOARD THE DESTROYER Akigumo in the Pearl Harbor strike force returning to Japan, Lieutenant Commander Sadao Chigusa, the executive officer (later a rear admiral), wrote in his diary just after dawn on the 24th (a day earlier across the Date Line), “At last we are in the very day of our arrival at our motherland. It was very fine weather after a typhoon had passed.” The fleet was poised to enter Bungo Suido Channel between the southern islands of Shikoku and Kyushu en route to Kure on Honshu, and by 7:30 he could see, dimly, the mountains of Shikoku. He felt “deeply moved.” By 9:30 patrol aircraft from the mainland were “dancing in the air over our fleet.” General Quarters was called so that crew not immediately needed could crowd the decks to savor the homecoming. It was a happy gathering. They had already learned that the Hawaiian voyage had earned each seaman a bonus of two months’ pay over his regular salary.
    Sailors had their lunch at noon and an hour later entered the Inland Sea, casting anchor at the Hashirajima berth in Hiroshima Bay. Chigusa’s ship was the last destroyer to dock. “With great relief I could feel refreshed in body and mind and took my first bath in over one month.... All officers gathered in the wardroom and drank a toast to our success in the Battle and congratulated each other. . . .”

    RELATIONS WERE MUCH LESS WARM with their new allies, the Germans. Neither side trusted the other, although a thriving business existed in trading in raw materials like rubber, which the Reich needed for war equipment the Japanese could import or copy. The Germans also wanted the newest Japanese torpedoes that had been so successful at Pearl Harbor, and the “more than 20 British aerial torpedoes” captured by the Japanese in Malaya at Kota Bharu. Admiral Paul Wenneker, the German naval attaché in Tokyo, was asked in exchange “about the state of completion of the German aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin . The Japanese Navy would welcome it if this vessel could be transferred. They do not think,” Wenneker wrote, “that the vessel can play any role in the conduct of German naval strategy any longer.... If the vessel could be brought to the Pacific under Japanese control, it can play a much greater role. I advised [Vice Admiral Minoru] Maeda to arrange for the subject to be discussed in Berlin.”
    Flugzeugträger A —the unfinished Graf Zeppelin —was the farthest along of two carriers that the German admiralty had been building at Baltic ports. Hitler had ordered work stopped in order to conserve manpower and steel for U-boats, then restarted, then halted again, but he refused to let the warship out of German hands. The British had bombed it once, unsuccessfully. It would be scuttled in harbor in 1945, then raised by the Russians. Its hulk was towed to Leningrad to be scrapped.
    German freighters long at sea ran the porous British blockade, usually flying spurious foreign flags, from Bordeaux and around Cape Horn into the South Pacific east of New Zealand and up through the Japanese-mandated Carolines and Marianas to Yokohama. (Italian freighters also slipped through, including one then in port, the Orseolo .) Despite the risks taken by the Kriegsmarine , Admiral Wenneker had constant bureaucratic tangles with Japanese ministries regarding customs, finances, and security. The newest problem was that of the freighter Rio Grande, “to make it possible for the crew to be allowed to go ashore at last.... The German side cannot permit this kind of [suspicious]