By the time the first wounded came home from North Africa last week, smiling from their cots in the train that took them to Washington's Walter Reed Hospital, almost a year had passed since that calm Sunday afternoon when the Mare Island Navy Yard intercepted the message: From CINCPAC to all ships present Hawaiian area: Air raid on Pearl Harbor. This is no drill.
When he heard the news from excited Navy Secretary Frank Knox, all that Franklin Roosevelt could utter was an astonished "No!" In their living rooms, on the golf courses, driving in their cars, tens of thousands of profane Americans said: "Why, the yellow bastards!" Said the Hon. Gerald Prentice Nye, senior U.S. Senator from North Dakota, about to address an America First rally in Pittsburgh: "It sounds terribly fishy to me."
That same day: Maxim Maximovich Litvinoff arrived in Washington by plane to take up his duties as Russian Ambassador; in the indignation over the Jap attack, the ruling of the President's coal arbitration board that all captive coalmine workers must join John Lewis' U.M.W. was lost in the shuffle. Day before, Frank Knox, in his annual report, rated the U.S. Navy "second to none."
Jan. 2, 1042: Japs occupy Manila and Cavite naval base.
Ten days earlier, Winston Churchill had arrived in Washington with a delegation of 86, including Britain's top military leaders. From Winston Churchill came magnificent rhetoric, not a single hard, military fact. Franklin Roosevelt seemed preoccupied with nonmilitary affairs: he accepted his labor-management board's peace plan (no wartime strikes or lockouts, all disputes arbitrated, establishment of WLB), reshuffled production under WPB with Donald Nelson in charge.
March 17: General Douglas MacArthur, hero of the delaying action on Bataan, arrives in Australia.
Although the first A.E.F. had landed in Northern Ireland, the eyes of the U.S. people were on the Pacific theater. They learned that a month earlier the Navy had blasted the Marshall and Gilbert Islands. At home they were embroiled in a heated fight over abolition of the 40-hour week. Robert Guthrie, WPB's textile division head, accused $1-a-year men of preventing total conversion of industry to war, resigned in a huff. (The last car had rolled off Detroit's assembly lines on Jan. 30.)
In numberless cities, the names of roads and bridges were changed to MacArthur.
Brigadier General Mark Wayne Clark, up from a lieutenant-colonelcy in two years, announced that the Army would train troops in desert warfare somewhere "west of the Colorado River."
April 9: Bataan falls, on the second anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Norway.
On that same day: Commerce Secretary Jesse Jones, riled by a charge in Eugene Meyer's Washington Post that he had failed to lay in a sufficient rubber stockpile, punched Mr. Meyer at a Washington party; WPB cut out the use of iron and steel in golf clubs 50%; pink-cheeked Gaston Henry-Haye, Ambassador of Vichyfrance, presented Franklin Roosevelt with a bound volume of the speeches of Marshal Petain to "enlighten" the President on the "general principles that the Marshal is following."