had escaped him. “The sudden influx and the increasing work made it practically impossible for him to think too much about any personal sorrow,” Mrs. Roosevelt would write, explaining that it was their first Christmas without her imperious mother-in-law, Sara, who had died in September at eighty-six. But Eleanor was peeved that he brushed aside calling Missy, who in some ways had taken over the First Lady’s own role with the President. (What seemed like callousness to Eleanor was her husband’s almost total detachment from formerly close relationships once their usefulness had passed.) When Marguerite’s sister, Ann Rochon, wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt after a visit to Warm Springs that Missy had enjoyed “all the wonderful Christmas presents” received from the White House, very likely it was the first that FDR knew about them.
Roosevelt and Churchill at Christmas dinner in the White House. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library
Informal Christmas dinner conversation at the White House got around, inevitably, to food, Percy Chubb recalled. Chubb, a marine insurance executive, had known the Roosevelts since FDR had been assistant secretary of the Navy in the earlier war. The food supplies being shipped to Britain, Churchill had commented only half-seriously, included “too many powdered eggs. The only good thing you can make with them is Spotted Dick.” (The traditional steamed English pudding was made with raisins and currants—the spots—in a dough of suet, eggs, and flour.)
“Nonsense,” said the President. “You can do as much with a powdered egg as with a real egg.”
“I opened my mouth for the only time all evening,” Chubb recalled, “to ask how you could fry a powdered egg.”
December 25, 1941
Christmas Day
T HE JAPANESE HAD CLAIMED to have taken Midway in the first days of the Pacific war, but the three-segment coral atoll, little more than a refueling stop in peacetime for amphibious Yankee Clippers en route to Manila, had held off landing attempts and repeated bombardments. At 11:40 P.M., anticipating the holiday on his side of the Date Line, a Midway serviceman at the communications shack, after a long silence from the island, radioed the New York Times news desk cheerily: “We are still here. Merry Christmas.”
At Wake Island, to the east of the Date Line, more than fifteen hundred military and civilian-contractor survivors, excluding a few dozen officers kept separately, squatted on the shell-pocked airfield runway, two hundred feet wide, in sun and then rain, where they had been herded since surrender, many first bound with telephone wire. For Christmas they were each given a bowl of thin rice gruel. In the United States the dispiriting but misleading headlines made the newspapers on Christmas Day. According to the Dallas Morning News,
DOFF YOUR HATS, U.S.,
TO MARINES ON WAKE!
Fighting Huge Odds, 385 of Them
Give Japs Hell for Fourteen Days
In a cartoon by Ralph Lee, a battered but defiant Marine on Wake Island, December 1941, shakes his fist angrily at Japanese planes overhead. Department of Defense, USMC
There had been 388 marines in the detachment on the atoll, plus bluejackets, aircraft mechanics, VMF-211 Hellcat pilots, and medical staff—522 in all—and 1,146 Morrison-Knudsen Company employees. Forty-nine marines and navy men had died as well as sixty-five construction workers, many fighting with whatever weapons were available. More would be executed on Wake, die aboard ships to Shanghai and to Japan, and in prison camps, often near coal mines where they were forced to work.
AMID HEAVY GROUND FIGHTING and bombardment on Christmas morning near incongruously named Happy Valley in Hong Kong, artillery sergeant Charles Barman’s battery, about to withdraw further, received a radio message from Royal Governor Sir Mark Young:
IN PRIDE AND ADMIRATION, I SEND MY GREETINGS THIS CHRISTMAS DAY TO ALL WHO ARE FIGHTING AND TO ALL WHO ARE WORKING SO NOBLY AND SO
Roosevelt and Churchill at Christmas dinner in the White House. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library
Informal Christmas dinner conversation at the White House got around, inevitably, to food, Percy Chubb recalled. Chubb, a marine insurance executive, had known the Roosevelts since FDR had been assistant secretary of the Navy in the earlier war. The food supplies being shipped to Britain, Churchill had commented only half-seriously, included “too many powdered eggs. The only good thing you can make with them is Spotted Dick.” (The traditional steamed English pudding was made with raisins and currants—the spots—in a dough of suet, eggs, and flour.)
“Nonsense,” said the President. “You can do as much with a powdered egg as with a real egg.”
“I opened my mouth for the only time all evening,” Chubb recalled, “to ask how you could fry a powdered egg.”
December 25, 1941
Christmas Day
T HE JAPANESE HAD CLAIMED to have taken Midway in the first days of the Pacific war, but the three-segment coral atoll, little more than a refueling stop in peacetime for amphibious Yankee Clippers en route to Manila, had held off landing attempts and repeated bombardments. At 11:40 P.M., anticipating the holiday on his side of the Date Line, a Midway serviceman at the communications shack, after a long silence from the island, radioed the New York Times news desk cheerily: “We are still here. Merry Christmas.”
At Wake Island, to the east of the Date Line, more than fifteen hundred military and civilian-contractor survivors, excluding a few dozen officers kept separately, squatted on the shell-pocked airfield runway, two hundred feet wide, in sun and then rain, where they had been herded since surrender, many first bound with telephone wire. For Christmas they were each given a bowl of thin rice gruel. In the United States the dispiriting but misleading headlines made the newspapers on Christmas Day. According to the Dallas Morning News,
DOFF YOUR HATS, U.S.,
TO MARINES ON WAKE!
Fighting Huge Odds, 385 of Them
Give Japs Hell for Fourteen Days
In a cartoon by Ralph Lee, a battered but defiant Marine on Wake Island, December 1941, shakes his fist angrily at Japanese planes overhead. Department of Defense, USMC
There had been 388 marines in the detachment on the atoll, plus bluejackets, aircraft mechanics, VMF-211 Hellcat pilots, and medical staff—522 in all—and 1,146 Morrison-Knudsen Company employees. Forty-nine marines and navy men had died as well as sixty-five construction workers, many fighting with whatever weapons were available. More would be executed on Wake, die aboard ships to Shanghai and to Japan, and in prison camps, often near coal mines where they were forced to work.
AMID HEAVY GROUND FIGHTING and bombardment on Christmas morning near incongruously named Happy Valley in Hong Kong, artillery sergeant Charles Barman’s battery, about to withdraw further, received a radio message from Royal Governor Sir Mark Young:
IN PRIDE AND ADMIRATION, I SEND MY GREETINGS THIS CHRISTMAS DAY TO ALL WHO ARE FIGHTING AND TO ALL WHO ARE WORKING SO NOBLY AND SO
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