Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas -- Remembering December, 1944

When Gus was transferred to a search light battery in San Diego in February 1942, the United States, and really the rest of the world were braced for a long war and were gearing up to fight it.

When he enlisted, the term of service was one year. Shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack, on December 19, the term of service was indefinitely extended to the duration of the war plus six months. All men between the age of 18 and 64 were required to register. At the time the U.S. Army wasn’t much. When Germany invaded Poland, the U.S. Army had 170,000 soldiers, and another 200,000 served in the National Guard.

When the U.S. entered the war, it would take a while before the U.S. could mobilize the sort of armed force necessary to engage in a sustained offensive war. For most enlisted men already in the army, and those being inducted, their immediate prospects were for a long and indefinite period of training and waiting – mostly waiting.

“In the middle of February, [1942], I was sent to San Diego. I was assigned to the coast artillery battery. We were quite fortified there. We had as much as 16 inch guns up there. Point Loma was tunneled. They had the machine gun nests up there and then they had the 16 inch guns on railroad tracks. They could hide them in the tunnels. I worked in the plotting room where they tracked the target . . .” Gus recalled.

It seems the army was in certain state of confusion and flux. When a country begins mobilizing there is no choice other than to begin with what you have. Point Loma is a sand stone peninsula on the ocean side of the San Diego Bay. Its cliffs rise more than 400 feet above sea level and offer an unobstructed view along the far southern U.S. coast to Mexico. Fort Rosecrans, on the south side of the peninsula, was a natural home U.S. Army’s Coast Artillery Corps in both World War One and Two.

Gus never said anything about it, but a nearly two year billet there couldn’t have been an altogether bad thing.  It was southern California – a pleasant climate after all. He had long established California connections. There were not too many targets to track.

In entering the war, Fort Rosecrans was an asset the small military had at hand. It was one of a handful of starting points.

In early 1942, military assignments for enlisted men were unavoidably haphazard. Point Loma was one of those places to begin building a military force from a few hundred thousand into what numbered over 12 million by the war’s end in 1945. Of those 8,300,000 were in the Army.

No one had written a field manual on doing that.

“When I got to San Diego, they didn’t need bakers or cooks. So I was assigned to a gun crew. First I was a gun commander on a 10 inch gun. I had a sergeant’s rank.

“I was in “F” battery and we got orders to go to Alaska. Since I had just come back from Alaska I was transferred into ‘K’ battery. When I was transferred to ‘K’ battery, I was moved to the plotting room. I was shipped to Europe in December 1944.”

Gus’s war began with a long wait. In early 1942 it was apparent it would not only be a long war, but it would be brutal too. The Allied forces had been evacuated from Dunkirk in May 1940. In 1941 Hitler marched almost at will across Eastern Europe to the suburbs of Moscow. From December of 1941 through May of 1942, Filipino and U.S. forces were engaged with the Japanese in the Philippines. By the time battle concluded with the infamous Bataan Death March, of the 150,000 Filipino and American combatants 25,000 were killed, 21,000 were wounded and 100,000 were captured.  

About the only bright spots were the defeat of the Imperial Japanese Navy, in June, at Midway, and a victory at Guadalcanal, following a hard battle that raged on from June 1942 until February 1943. The nature of the war ahead was clear. There were 60,000 U.S. ground forces at Guadalcanal. Overall the battle left 7,100 dead.

On all fronts and among all belligerents, including the U.S., they were more than willing to wage a war of attrition. The war on the Eastern Front, between the Soviet Red Army and the Nazi Wehrmacht, kind of set the tone for things to come.

Winston Churchill met with Stalin in the middle of August 1942, to lay out Brittan’s overall near term war plans which focused on a large attack in North Africa hitting Rommel from the east. Stalin wanted a second front in France and he wanted it now.

Churchill recounted the meeting in his history The Second World War, volume IV. This is how it went:

“I told Stalin that I was well aware that this plan offered no help to Russia in 1942, but thought it possible that when the 1943 plan was ready it might well be that the Germans would have a stronger army in the west. I then said I had good reason against an attack on the French coast in 1942. We had only enough landing-craft for an assault landing on a fortified coast – enough to throw ashore about six divisions and maintain them...

“Stalin who had begun to look very glum, seemed unconvinced by my argument, and asked if it was impossible to attack any part of the French coast. I showed a map which indicated difficulties of making an air umbrella anywhere except actually across the Straits…

“Stalin, whose glumness had by now much increased, said that, as he understood it, we were unable to create a second front with any large force and unwilling even to land six divisions. I said that this was so…

“Stalin, who had become restless, said that his view about war was different. A man who was not prepared to take risks could not win a war. Why were we so afraid of the Germans? He could not understand. His experience showed that troops must be bloodied in battle. If you did not blood your troops you had no idea what their value was…”

Importantly, Stalin’s view about war was different. A soldier either fought to the last bullet or was a traitor. 

Up to that point in the war, the Soviet dead and missing in action numbered nearly six million, according to G. I. Krivosheev, in Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses. Of those nearly five million had been taken as prisons of war. The Red Army had been all but crushed in 1941, but held a line and turned the German Army from the outskirts of Moscow in the winter of 1941-42.

It’s understandable why Stalin was so insistent on an immediate second front in France, but ultimately saw the logic of Churchill’s near term focus on North Africa. Churchill continued later in that passage:

“At this point Stalin seemed suddenly to grasp the strategic advantages of “Torch.” He recounted four main reasons for it: first, it would hit Rommel in the back; second, it would overawe Spain; third, it would produce fighting between Germans and Frenchmen in France; and fourth, it would expose Italy to the whole brunt of the war.”

U.S. ground forces didn’t engage the German land force until the end of 1942 with Operation Torch in North Africa. This was followed by the Invasion of Sicily in July 1943 and Italy with American forces landing on Italian peninsula in September. Rome fell to the Allies in June 1944. Operation Overlord, the invasion of France in Normandy, was launched on June 6, 1944. American forces were fully mobilized.   

So things went. While Gus was stationed in San Diego, waiting, by 1944 the mood of the nation was dark. The uncertainty of those serving in the armed forces, and by extension that of their families, loved ones, and friends, was overwhelmingly breathtaking. That is, as in literally breathless, as if having had the wind knocked out of you.

The lyrics of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas expressed the dark limbo in which enlistees and civilians alike drifted.

The song was written by Hugh Martin for the 1944 movie Meet Me in Saint Louis. Here’s what he wrote:

“Have yourself a merry little Christmas
It may be your last
Next year we may all be living in the past
Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Pop that champagne cork
Next year we may all be living in New York
No good times like the olden days
Happy golden days of yore
Faithful friends who were dear to us
Will be near to us no more
But at least we all will be together
If the Lord allows
From now on, we'll have to muddle through somehow
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now

The business of “It may be your last” and “Next year we may all be living in the past” were too dark for Judy Garland, who had those lines rewritten to “Let your heart be light” and “Next year all our troubles well be out of sight.” A recording of the song, released at the same time as the movie, became hugely popular with U.S. troops.

Gus shipped to Europe in December 1944, at the age of thirty-five, as a sergeant and presumably an infantryman. . .