Monday, December 22, 1941. Et in Arcadia ego

The Arcadia Conference, which President Roosevelt and Prime Ministers King and Churchill, and Chinese Ambassador Song attended, commenced.  Churchill, as usual, crossed the Atlantic by battleship.

The conference would reaffirm a Germany first policy in the war, the same having been already secretly decided upon prior to the US entering the war and the news of which had broken just shortly before Pearl Harbor.

Lieutenant Jack Dale of the U.S. Army Air Corps received a Distinguished Service Cross from General MacArthur December 22, 1941 for extraordinary heroism during attacks on Japanese bridgeheads at Vigan.

General Douglas MacArthur was conferring decorations upon American and Filipino airmen in Manila.  Shortly after this, Manila would have to be evacuated.

General Douglas MacArthur, left, congratulates Captain Villamor of the Philippine Air Force, after awarding him the Distinguished Service Cross, December 22, 1941. 

MacArthur has remained an enduringly controversial US military figure, with some individuals regarding him as heroic and others feeling that he was too problematic to fit that description.  No matter how looked at, his early leadership in the fight for the Philippines was oddly inadequate.

43,000 Japanese troops from the Imperial Japanese 48th Division landed at the Lingayen Gulf north of Manila. Their forces included 90 tanks.  American and Filipino resistance was light due to the defenders being made up of mostly poorly trained Filipino troops and being spread too thin.  Effectively, the fate of Manila was sealed.

On the same day, Japanese submarines surfaced and shelled the Navy airfield on Johnston Island and on Palmyra Atoll, both of which are straight south of the Hawaiian islands, albeit over 700 miles south.

US troops landed in Australia.  This was not a good sign, however, as it reflected the diversion of troops originally destined for the Philippines  

Curtiss SOC-1.

In the process the U.S. Navy lost a Curtiss SOC-1 Seagull which was flying an anti-submarine patrol from the arriving convoy.  It simply disappeared and was never found.  It was one of three dispatched for that purpose, with the other two returning safely.

The ice on Lake Lagoda was now 1 meter think, allowing Soviet KV tanks to cross it.

Axis forces began withdrawing from Benghazi by sea.  An Italian minefield off of Misrata ended up sinking an Italian and a German transport ship by accident in the process.

Italian forces defeated partisans at Sjenica in Montenegro.  Tito was upset about the partisan attack as he felt it was contrary to his orders.  The Italians had been aided by the participation of Serbian and Muslim militias on their side of the fight, and it commenced with a Communist partisan attack on their town in horrible snowy weather.

The US increased the conscription age up to age 44, although actual conscription of men above 40 would remain fairly rare throughout the war.  Men from 18 to 65 were not required to register.

The news magazines got into the spirit of the day, in a way.  Time came out on this date with a caricature of Admiral Yamamoto with a heavily yellow background.  Life, noting that people had been harassing all Asians, had a photo display of how to tell the Japanese from the Chinese, or so it claimed.