This Day in History: Pearl Harbor Christmas

On this day in 1941, Navy nurses scramble to create a memorable Christmas for their patients aboard USS Solace, then anchored at Pearl Harbor. It would be no easy chore: The patients, nurses, and crew were still reeling from the unexpected Japanese attack mere weeks before.

Yet hope and optimism were critical for patients to heal, as Chief Nurse Grace Lally well knew. Thus, in the days after the attack, she’d instructed her nurses to be cheerful. “The nurses smiled, joked, laughed at their own stories even when they weren’t funny,” one historian describes. Lally ensured that coffee and sandwiches were always available—as were cookies!

Now she’d find a way to pull off Christmas, too.

The nurses had made some preparations in advance, of course, but as Christmas Eve dawned, Lally realized that she’d forgotten to get a Santa Claus. “In our wardroom,” she later described in a January 1945 American Magazine article, “the nurses who were off duty and I worked frantically against time.”

A yeoman who was a “plump, jolly-looking boy” was recruited to play Santa, and the ship’s sailmaker was handed bunting to make a suit and rope to make a beard. “A department-store Santa Claus won’t hold no candle to him!” the sailmaker declared as he went to work.

The nurses had already obtained 32 pounds of candy to divide among the more than 300 patients and crew. They also had Christmas trees.

“[W]e had managed to collect four scraggy cedars in Honolulu,” Lally wrote, “together with enough tinsel, holly, decorations, toys, and knick-knacks so that every man aboard the Solace would have a gift and a celebration.”

The nurses had been working to make the Christmas gifts personal. An angel food cake was made for a sailor who used to get one from his mother. (The lack of an angel food cake pan admittedly caused some trouble, but the nurses improvised and used a cup from the dental clinic.)

Likewise, the nurses worked to find a blind patient “something he can feel.” Butter pecan ice cream was obtained for a young Texan with his leg in traction. A machinist’s mate was given a mechanical ballet dancer because it was the type of gift that he usually gave his daughter.

A corpsman was found to play carols on his accordion while sailors and nurses sang along.

“And so at nightfall,” Lally described, “when the wards had been fed and the nurses had changed into their best uniforms, Santa Claus—more beautiful than a department store’s—with a bulging seabag on his back, led our small procession below. We sang Jingle Bells as we went, and out of nowhere the ship’s captain appeared. ‘I’m with you, Miss Lally,’ he said.”

Lally felt that the captain’s presence was a huge morale booster for everyone.

Needless to say, the Christmas celebration was a roaring success. “We were right to give the ballet dancer to the machinist’s mate,” one nurse recollected. “When I went back to say good night, there he was, fast asleep, a bit of smile on his face, and the toy clutched in his hand—just like a kid.”

As for Lally, she was proud of her nurses. “They sort of shone,” she concluded, “as if the lights had been turned on inside. There was a mother-thing in all of them that fought fiercely to protect its own from hurt, from neglect. It went beyond nursing, beyond self.”

The Greatest Generation often proved itself in the heat of battle, as you know. But there’s another side to that Generation, too: It gently tended to our soldiers, giving them a reason to smile, even in the midst of war.

How blessed we are that such men and women came before us, putting everything on the line to defend freedom. How much greater our duty to pick up where they left off.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Primary Sources:

• American Women in a World at War: Contemporary Accounts from World War II (Judy Barrett Litoff & David Clayton Smith eds. 1997)

• Emory A. Massman, Hospital Ships of World War II: An Illustrated Reference to 39 United States Military Vessels (1999)

• Joellen W. Hawkins & Irene Matthews, “Tugboat Annie:” Nursing’s Hero of Pearl Harbor—Grace Lally (1897-1983) (Journal of Nursing Scholarship; 1991)

• LCDR Grace B. Lally, NC, USN, The War’s First Christmas (American Magazine; Jan. 1945) (reprinted HERE)

• Ron Devlin, History Book: The area nurse who served in both world wars (Republican Herald; May 18, 2016)

• Winifred C. Woll, They Remember, We Won't Forget (Offspring: The National Newsletter of the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors, Inc.; Fall 2017) (p. 7)