{"id":95188,"date":"2018-12-18T22:23:19","date_gmt":"2018-12-18T22:23:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/militarytimes\/uncategorized\/2018\/12\/18\/christmas-in-wartime\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T10:17:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T10:17:10","slug":"christmas-in-wartime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/militarytimes\/news\/your-military\/2018\/12\/18\/christmas-in-wartime\/","title":{"rendered":"Christmas in wartime"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Christmas 1941 was little different for most Americans from that of the previous year, despite the calamity of Pearl Harbor only weeks before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both coasts had begun to post antiaircraft guns \u2014 some obsolete, others wooden fakes, only there for spurious confidence. Sentries, often bearing 1918-vintage rifles, were seen at railway stations and armaments factories. And anxiety about Japanese air raids had resulted in the relocation of the New Year\u2019s Day Rose Bowl<\/a> from Pasadena, California, to Durham, North Carolina, where Duke would play Oregon State.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet shops everywhere burgeoned with holiday goods; Christmas trees were plentiful; and in the traditional Christmas extravaganza at Radio City Music Hall in New York, the Rockettes <\/a>worked hard to dance away any gloom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everywhere across the nation, the Japanese were being thwarted in the Terry and the Pirates<\/i><\/a> comic strip, and Gary Cooper as Sergeant York was defeating the Germans single-handedly in the previous world war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The hit book for Christmas giving, at a hefty $2.50, was Edna Ferber\u2019s Reconstruction-era romance Saratoga Trunk<\/i>. For the same price, war turned up bombastically and distantly in a two-disc set of the 1812 Overture<\/i>, performed by Artur Rodzinski and the Cleveland Orchestra. Gift crates of oranges and grapefruit from Florida were $2.79 at Bloomingdale\u2019s. Hattie Carnegie\u2019s dresses began at $15, while the Rogers Peet menswear store offered suits and topcoats from $38. (At recruiting stations, the army was offering smart khaki garb gratis.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Henri Bendel featured silk stockings at $1.25 a pair; stockings in the current wonder weave,\u201cnylon,\u201d sold for $1.65. Nylon stockings would be almost nonexistent by the following Christmas, when the fabric would be the stuff of parachutes. Among the Christmas toy glut, shops across America advertised a remote-control bomber, at $1.98, that ran along a suspended wire to attack a battleship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Japanese had not needed suspended wires at Pearl Harbor, or in the Philippines, Malaya, or Hong Kong. The Royal Navy\u2019s principal ships in the Pacific were at the bottom of the Gulf of Siam, and the depleted American fleet had only two destroyers available between Vancouver and San Diego.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
The Roosevelt family in the East Room of the White House on Christmas, 1941. (National Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

On the other side of the continent, Winston Churchill crossed the Atlantic on the new battleship Duke of York <\/i>amid violent, frigid gales for a late December meeting with President Roosevelt. The American brass was worried about having the prime minister at the president\u2019s elbow, where he could employ his glib persuasiveness and imperial visions despite his very weak hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At precisely 4:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve, as dusk gathered and the temperature dropped, the red-coated Marine Band on the White House lawn struck up \u201cJoy to the World,\u201d accompanying choirs from area churches. Thousands had gathered in the fading light. After some further carols, the band began \u201cHail to the Chief.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the sunset gun at nearby Fort Myer boomed, the president and Mrs. Roosevelt appeared on the South Portico with a group of guests, and only then did Churchill\u2019s arrival in the United States become news. Roosevelt pressed a button signaling the lighting of the national Christmas tree, as if wartime blackouts elsewhere had no relevance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The band encored \u201cJoy to the World,\u201dbut there was little joy in Washington.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The British and American conferees worked through Christmas on joint planning, breaking in late afternoon for holiday dinner. Army chief of staff George C. Marshall, who rarely hosted formal dinners at Fort Myer, invited some of the British contingent. When Katherine Marshall discovered belatedly that December 25 was Field Marshal Sir John Dill\u2019s birthday, she sent Sgt. James W. Powder, her husband\u2019s paragon of efficiency, to find a cake and candles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite holiday closings he returned with both, and also with miniature British and American flags to press into the icing. Dill, confiding that he had not had a birthday party since he was a small boy, plucked the flags to cut the cake and discovered they were stamped \u201cMade in Japan.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, because Powder had thought of (almost) everything, a Western Union messenger brought a singing telegram \u2014 which was intercepted by a Secret Service detail. There was wartime security somewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
A Navy Christmas dinner, with the menu signed by Cmdr. E.P. Moore, believed to have been photographed in 1942 or 1943. (National Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

During the first full year of war, defense and withdrawal metamorphosed into offense and reoccupation, both in the South Pacific and the Mediterranean. The costs were showing up at home even in small things. Nationwide gas rationing began on December 1, 1942 (four gallons a month, later reduced to three); that and a 35 mph \u201cVictory Speed Limit\u201d kept holiday revelers close to home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although merchants were calling the 1942 Christmas tree supply \u201cpre-war normal,\u201d the number of fathers at home to buy, transport, and trim them had dwindled. In small town America, boys with absent heads of households were taken under the wing of World War I veterans from such organizations as the VFW and the American Legion. That year, and on wartime Christmases to come, these surrogate fathers delivered trees to blue- and gold-star houses and ensured that gifts materialized beneath them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many service fathers did not have much of a Christmas \u2014 particularly those who\u2019d been taken prisoner in the Philippines and shipped, if they made it alive through December, to Japanese POW camps in Formosa and Manchuria. Maj. Gen. Edward P. King Jr., the commander of Filipino-American forces on Bataan, recalled a carol sing-along with other officer POWs and the special holiday treat they were given with their gruel: an apple.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That Christmas, Gen. Douglas MacArthur was supervising the retaking of New Guinea from his new command post in Australia. The commander of the Eighth Army, Lt. Gen. Robert Eichelberger, sent him a present from the front in Buna: a dead Japanese officer\u2019s ornate sword. In French North Africa, which the Allies had invaded in early November, Lt. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower received a more significant gift.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The month before, he had made an odious but seemingly necessary deal to get the Vichy forces to surrender by appointing the chief collaborationist on the scene, Fleet Adm. Fran\u00e7ois Darlan, as head of the French state. On Christmas Eve a young Frenchman named Fernand Bonnier de la Chapelle shot Darlan. He died on Christmas Day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Marines boarding the Navy landing craft LCI-340 on Christmas Eve, 1943. The day after Christmas, they landed at Cape Gloucester on New Britain Island. Photographed at Oro Bay, New Guinea. (National Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In mid-1943, Allied forces jumped from North Africa to Sicily, then to the boot of Italy. During Christmas 1943, while Anglo-American troops were clawing their way up Italy, Eisenhower and his staff were in Algiers, entertained by the visiting Winston Churchill, who was recuperating from pneumonia in a seaside villa Ike had provided. Presiding in a padded silk Chinese dressing gown, Churchill conferred there with high brass on Christmas Day about further landings in Italy. A festive luncheon followed, with turkey and plum pudding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the southwest Pacific, Americans involved in the costly island-hopping toward the Philippines and Japan were hardly aware of the holiday. On Bougainville in the Solomon Islands, soldiers and marines were fighting the tenacious Japanese ridge by ridge. The 1st Marine Division spent its Christmas on pitching LSTs before going ashore on New Britain the next day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

POW Edward King was at a small camp in Manchuria, where for Christmas the Japanese \u201cgave us a little pork and a piece of bread.\u201d The sixteen officers in the camp \u2014 British, Dutch, and American \u2014 improvised a religious service and sang what carols they remembered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of them would have known Irving Berlin\u2019s \u201cWhite Christmas,\u201d which had been introduced by Bing Crosby the previous year in the film Holiday Inn <\/i>and was now being broadcast by Armed Forces Radio everywhere Americans could listen.\u201cI\u2019ll Be Home for Christmas\u201d was the latest hit, but, as the lyrics explained, that joyous return home might occur \u201conly in my dreams.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At home, metal toys for Christmas had nearly disappeared, along with bicycles, typewriters, alarm clocks, and other \u201chard goods\u201d gift items large and small. In 1943, zinc had replaced copper in pennies, but kids expected more than the unfamiliar dull coins from Santa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Opportunistic growers again loaded up on Christmas trees, raised prices, and (according to one overstocked wholesaler) \u201ckept cutting right up to the night before Christmas.\u201d While certain things were in short supply\u2014 bacon, butter, sugar, lamb chops, Kleenex, and new shoes, to name a few \u2014 Christmas trees weren\u2019t among them. Ten million evergreens went unsold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Sailors on the aircraft carrier Lexington, December 1944. (National Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Following D-Day in June 1944, the home front began to smell victory ahead. That winter, the cost of Christmas trees dropped sharply. Trees that had been priced at $4 the year before were now $2.50, while trees sold \u201con the stump\u201d ranged from 25\u00a2 to 45\u00a2, for the fewer fathers around to cut them. Continuing deprivations included silk for dresses, cuffs on trousers, whiskey for grownups, and bubblegum for kids.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Office of Price Administration announced the return of canned vegetables to the ration list, and increased restrictions on butter, sugar, and meats. On Christmas Eve, President Roosevelt spoke to the nation and the armed forces by radio from his home at Hyde Park, saying,\u201cThe Christmas spirit lives tonight in the bitter cold of the front lines in Europe and in the heat of the jungles and swamps of Burma and the Pacific islands.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From an NBC studio, Bob Hope broadcast to seamen on a Liberty ship about to weigh anchor for a Pacific destination, telling them that he knew it took courage to transport a cargo of ammunition. Terry of the Pirates <\/i>strip risked his own white Christmas by flying munitions over the icebound Himalayan Hump to China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMacArthur\u2019s men\u201d \u2014 as he labeled all the troops in his command \u2014 were on Leyte in the central Philippines, where they had driven the Japanese into a corner of the island. On Christmas Eve, the general paced after dark on the veranda of an elegant house vacated by the enemy command.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As he puffed on his corncob pipe, a group of GIs gathered below to sing carols in a steamy climate and setting far removed from the typical American Christmas. Suddenly a low-flying Japanese nuisance raider buzzed over the compound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The singing abruptly stopped, and soldiers dived for the hedges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then searchlights caught the intruder in their crossbeams and a burst of antiaircraft fire dropped it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MacArthur leaned down to thank the returning carolers, and then resumed his pacing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
A youngster, clutching his soldier father, gazes upward while the latter lifts his wife from the ground to wish her a ‘Merry Christmas.’ The serviceman is one of those fortunate enough to be able to get home for the holidays. December 1944. (National Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In Europe, Christmas brought the climax of \u201cthe Bulge,\u201d the dismaying German surprise attack in the forest of the Ardennes that added further misery to a harsh winter. In the days approaching it, only the encircled and bypassed crossroads town of Bastogne stood between the Wehrmacht and the banks of the Meuse. But on December 23, the snowy skies cleared briefly, and previously grounded supporting aircraft could finally pound the enemy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For many beleaguered Americans it was already too late. Two regiments of the 106th Infantry Division and much of the 28th Infantry Division had been shattered, and thousands of GIs \u2014 those still alive \u2014 would spend a cold Christmas in windowless boxcars clattering eastward toward German prison camps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RAF bombers interdicted one train on December 25, killing sixty Americans, including two doctors. Survivors kept spirits up by singing carols; a fortunate few received a potato for Christmas. (Some POWs held in the United States that Christmas fared a good bit better. At Fort Dix, New Jersey, twenty-one lightly secured Italian POWs escaped, had Christmas dinners with hospitable families nearby on whose farms they had worked, and returned happily to camp to face useless AWOL charges.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Undeterred by the weather, Lt. Gen. George S. Patton\u2019s Third Army was pushing north to relieve Bastogne and break the German siege. They were still on the move on Christmas Day, when Patton jeeped among his units in the snow to ensure that, at the least, his troops got hot turkey sandwiches with gravy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It may not have been much, but it would have been a feast to POW Edward King \u2014 now in occupied China \u2014 who knew it was Christmas only because of the marks he made on a crude notebook calendar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
“We were getting our second wind now and started flattening out that bulge. We took 50,000 prisoners in December alone.” American soldier with captured Germans. 1944. (National Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Patton hurried off between inspections to placid Luxembourg City, enjoying Christmas dinner at Gen. Omar Bradley\u2019s well-stocked mess at the Alfa Hotel, where his staff trimmed a tree with scraps from the tinted window of a downed bomber.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Christmas Day at Eisenhower\u2019s headquarters in Versailles, the mess offered roast turkey with all the traditional trimmings, and champagne. The general opened his gifts from home, including fancy bedroom slippers from Mamie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Far to the east, the battle to flatten the Bulge still raged. When tanks from Patton\u2019s 4th Armored Division at last broke through into Bastogne, a crewman climbed out to greet Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, acting commander of the 101st Airborne Division. \u201cGee, I am mighty glad to see you,\u201d said the general.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was just one day too late for \u201cMerry Christmas!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This story <\/i>was originally published <\/i><\/a>in the December 2007 issue of World War II Magazine, a sister publication to Military Times.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amid shortages, rationing, separation, and grief, Americans fought to keep the yuletide spirit alive during the long years of World War 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