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the long road back.

 
    December 22, 1941
    F OR THE JAPANESE, “X-Day” had been the simultaneous attacks across the Pacific and Southeast Asia on December 8, Tokyo time—December 7 across the International Date Line at Pearl Harbor. In his diary Admiral Matome Ugaki, bullet-domed chief of staff to Isoroku Yamamoto, planner of “Strike South,” referred to December 22 as “X + 14.” Responding that day to the congratulatory message of Yoshiki Takamura, Yamamoto explained, “That we could defeat the enemy at the outbreak of the war was because they were unguarded and also they made light of us. ‘Danger comes sooner when it is despised’ and ‘Don’t despise a small enemy’ are really important. I think they can be applied not only to wars but to routine matters.”
    Both admirals’ flags flew from the battleship Nagato in Kure harbor, below Hiroshima on the southern end of the big island of Honshu. “At 0500,” Ugaki wrote—it was still the 21st in the United States—“our Philippine Assault Forces entered Lingayen Bay and landed there safe and sound.... They encountered no enemy resistance. I sense that the enemy has lost her fighting spirit.” Smaller landings in the north of Luzon had been unopposed. Japanese newspapers quoting sources in the West, Ugaki reported, “say the United States will defend Singapore even after they abandon the Philippines. But can those who once have abandoned the Philippines keep Singapore? I very much doubt it. And Hong Kong has not many days left. I don’t doubt that Singapore will fall sooner than we expect.”
    At 2:35 A.M. Wake Island time, according to American accounts, the Japanese were engaging marines on the beaches in clashes that, Admiral Shigetaro Shimada, the naval minister wrote, “would have made the gods weep.” American Task Force 14 under Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, steaming to the rescue from Hawaii, was more than four hundred miles away and was ordered, uselessly, by Admiral William Pye, who was in temporary command at Pearl Harbor, to remain at least two hundred miles distant to protect the carrier Saratoga from enemy bombers. A red flare from the shoreline signaled to Japanese transports that the first wave had landed. The marines at Wilkes Island (claw-shaped Wake was the central island of three small reefs) had only 2 three-inch guns as well as their Thompson subma-chine guns to fire at the landing barges in the predawn darkness. In the glare of their two searchlights the invaders kept coming.
    Many of Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma’s landing craft at Lingayen on Luzon included bicycles (as in Malaya) as well as troops, as he was confident from fifth-columnist reports that soldiers could pedal down toward Manila without much resistance. To ensure that, although the skies were dark and an intermittent rain falling, fighter planes machine-gunned the handful of defenders in beach barrios. Then light tanks and motorized artillery lumbered ashore from succeeding landing craft. Troops that had landed earlier at Aparri to the north moved down to meet them, running into resistance only from Filipino training squads fifty miles inland, then firing and bayoneting through. In a few instances overconfident Japanese units marched southward in parade formation, with Rising Sun flags flying and bands playing, and scattering when a few American P-40s attacked. Reorganizing, the Japanese plodded on until nightfall.

    IN FRIGID MOSCOW Anthony Eden’s private secretary, Oliver Harvey, noted in his diary, “We left the station [for Murmansk] at 6”—evening in Russia, morning in America—“after A.E. had a final goodbye meeting with Stalin. [Foreign Minister V. M.] Molotov saw us off and we got back into the same train which had brought us. Bands and guards of honour as before. Our meals on the train got rather mixed up. We had what we thought was a cold Sunday supper about 7—and then it turned out only to be tea and we were threatened with a large