It’s Thanksgiving Day, 1941.
The weather is unseasonably warm all across the country: 62 degrees in New York; 60 in Los Angeles; 56 in Phoenix; 36 in Minneapolis.
The short-skirted baton-twirlers in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade will introduce Macy’s newest balloon, a seventy-five-foot-tall football player straining to catch a twelve-foot-long football.
Those who can’t make it into the city to see the parade can listen to it on the radio.
America’s first peacetime draft has put more than two million men in uniform.
Communities in all parts of the country have offered servicemen free tickets to theaters, shows, sporting events and restaurant meals, and the USO has organized lists of private homes offering them a seat at the family dinner table.
What’ll they talk about?
Sports fans will probably talk about the Yankees beating their arch rival Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series last month.
Movie-goers will gush over Gary Cooper in Sergeant York or Fred Astaire in You’ll Never Get Rich.
And the kids will try to talk funny like the new cartoon characters Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd.
And everybody’s dancing to Glenn Miller’s orchestra.
His big hit right now is Chattanooga Choo Choo.
Christmas shoppers going out tomorrow have lots of bargains to choose from: bras for $1.19 at Macy’s; toy dolls for $3.29 at Sak’s; and Gimbel’s has flannel robes for $5.45.
Ladies silk stockings are on sale for 71 cents a pair, but they won’t last.
Before long both silk and nylon will be needed for parachutes, and young women will learn to paint lines down the backs of their bare legs to simulate stocking seams.
FDR is in his third term as president with a new VP, progressive Henry Wallace, whom conservative Democrats dislike.
He’ll be ousted in favor of Harry Truman in 1944.
FDR is spending his first Thanksgiving in the White House, rather than at his home in Hyde Park or in Warm Springs, Georgia.
He’ll eat a traditional Thanksgiving dinner of turkey, gravy and sweet potatoes with marshmallows, and he’ll be joined by Mrs. Roosevelt and his son, James, and wife.
There’s no time for presidential travel this year.
War clouds have gathered, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is coming to the White House in a few days for a three-week working visit.
Roosevelt has declared an ‘unlimited national emergency,’ freezing German and Italian assets in the US, ordering the closing of German and Italian embassies and consulates, and seizing US assets owned by the Japanese.
The Neutrality Acts are repealed, and the Lend-Lease Act has been in place for eight months.
The US is shipping food and war materials and offering credit to Britain, the USSR, China and the Free French and about twelve hundred American merchant ships are being armed for convoy travel into war zones.
There is an undeclared war going on in the Atlantic and the past few weeks have brought the first taste of bad news.
A German U-Boat sank the USS Reuben James off the coast of Iceland three weeks ago as she accompanied a convoy of merchant vessels en route to Britain.
One hundred men lost their lives.
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her daily newspaper column recently about a letter she had received from the mother of a sailor on board the Reuben James.
The mother asked her to make inquiries about the fate of her son, whose name was not on the survivor list nor on the list of those lost.
About 450,000 Americans currently claim membership in America First.
This group opposes US aid to countries fighting the Axis powers and wants the US to sign a neutrality pact with Nazi Germany.
Its members include Henry Ford and aviator Charles Lindbergh, who has become the organization’s most prominent spokesman.
Former president Herbert Hoover delivered a well-publicized speech a few days ago cautioning against the US sending ground forces into Europe.
He said doing so might contribute to the rise of totalitarianism in America.
Hoover also said the German army would be impossible to defeat in a land war and that US air power would be ineffective against them.
Talks between US and Japanese delegations in Washington are on-going but will soon break down.
The US has required Japan to withdraw from lands conquered in Asia as a condition for peace, and Japan is unwilling to do so.
The Japanese naval strike force set sail for Pearl Harbor yesterday.
The US Navy’s Pacific Fleet now has one hundred thirty ships based at Pearl Harbor.
Thousands of US Army troops are also stationed there to guard against sabotage and prepare coastal defenses for an enemy invasion.
Nazi Germany is at the height of its territorial expansion, occupying all of Europe except for Britain and the neutral countries of Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Sweden and Ireland.
Hitler is pressing Operation Barbarossa, his three-million-man invasion of the Soviet Union, and his troops have reached the outskirts of Moscow.
Special mobile killing squads have followed the German advance east and are engaged in the systematic killing of Jews and others in occupied areas.
But it’s a tough fight for the German infantry, who lack proper clothing to fight in below zero temperatures.
Some of them have been spotted on the battlefield wearing looted women’s fur coats.
A naval blockade has deprived Germany of sufficient wool supplies, and German soldiers in Norway and Romania have been asked to give up one of their blankets so they can be sent to their comrades on the Eastern Front.
Thanks to the RAF, Hitler has had his first military defeat in the Battle of Britain, and he has postponed indefinitely his plan to invade the British Isles.
In occupied France, resistance groups are getting organized and are beginning to coordinate their actions with British operatives.
And Churchill’s “V” for victory sign has begun appearing in chalk on Parisien pavement, walls and German vehicles.
Meanwhile, Britain is currently fighting in Syria, Lebanon and Iran.
The war in Asia, which began with the Japanese invasion of China, is now four years old and volunteer American pilots are flying supply missions to beleaguered Chinese forces.
General Douglas MacArthur commands thousands of American and Philippine troops in the Philippine Islands.
Among them are sixty-six young men from Harrodsburg, Kentucky, who are members of a tank company of the Kentucky Army National Guard.
These “Harrodsburg Tankers,” along with the other Americans and Philippine troops, will fight the Japanese in less than three weeks’ time, holding out, without reinforcements or resupply, until they are ordered to surrender in April 1942.
Some of them will escape to Corregidor, an island in Manila Bay, while the rest will suffer in the "Bataan Death March," but the Japanese will capture all of them eventually.
Thirty-seven of the sixty-six Harrodsburg Tankers will return home in 1946.
Some will say the attack on Pearl Harbor in two-and-a-half weeks will bring America into the war.
But, by Thanksgiving 1941, the nation had actually been involved in it for quite some time.
Some people had just not realized it yet.
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I’ll see you tomorrow.
— Brenda
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