Last night, PBS reprised the 2024 All Creatures Great and Small Christmas episode. It tugged, as usual, at the heartstrngs, but this was set at Christmas 1941, when the world had gone quite mad.

Earlier in the season, the housekeeper, Mrs. Hall, had reunited with her estranged son, only to see his train take him away to a war in progress in Britain since 1939, and to his duty in the Royal Navy.

Word comes over what was called the wireless that her son’s ship, the battle cruiser HMS Repulse, has been sunk, along with the battleship Prince of Wales. The Farnons and the Herriots were about to attend to Christmas dinner when Siegfried, the head of the veterinary practice, had to break the news to the woman who is the emotional glue of the home. When she collapses, the ripple that spreads through Skeldale House is seismic.

The news shouldn’t have been brought because the tragedy shouldn’t have happened. Only three days after Pearl Harbor, the two great ships sailed north heedlessly, without air protecton, and, just as Pearl Harbor had proven, battleships were vulnerable to air attack. 840 British sailors died, the victims of that terrible and seemingly congenital White Man’s disease, arrogance. Swarms of Japanese planes descended on the pride of the Royal Navy in the Far East. Twenty-eight Japanese aviators gave their lives for their country in a running battle that lasted a little over an hour.

The loss of Prince of Wales would have resonance in America, waiting to learn about the destruction wreaked on the American base at Pearl Harbor. The British battleship represented the birth of the Anglo-American alliance that seems to be in grave danger today. It was on Prince of Wales, off the coast of Newfoundland, where Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt met—in person, for the first time— for a conference that concluded with the issuing of The Atlantic Charter, a set of principles that seem to be in grave danger, as well. This is Churchill’s annotated copy:

(Above) Churchill, always fond of cats, greets Prince of Wales mascot Blackie on arriving for the conference. Blackie survived the battleship’s sinking; many of the sailors, attending divine services with the two leaders, would not.

The great ship was ideal for the meeting between the president and the prime minister. One of the similarities that cemented their friendship was their love for the navy. Churchill had served as First Lord of the Admiralty (he used the term “Naval Person” to refer to himself in his correspondence with Roosevelt) FDR, like his wife’s uncle Theodore, had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy.

Three months later, it was appropriate that another battleship, HMS Duke of York ( engaging a German battleship, Scharnhorst, in the 1943 photo below) brought Churchill to America.

On the way to the White House, motoring through Maryland, the Prime Minister regaled the President by reciting, from memory, the Whittier poem “Barbara Fritchie,” about an elderly Frederick, Maryland, woman who defied the invading Confederates by waving the American flag out her window. The poem is very long and not very good, but Churchill relished it—reminding his hosts that he, thanks to his mother, Jennie, was half-American.

Churchill arrived at the White House on December 13 and didn’t return home until January 17, 1942. Along the way he horrified White House staff with his breakfast orders, which included copious amounts of whiskey and soda, remained naked—not counting the cigar— and pink as a cherub when the president visited him immediately after a bath. Churchill, a late-late riser, worried Eleanor because he kept her husband up until the wee hours; the P.M. also made discreet use of the White House’s potted plants because the president adored cocktail hour and invented concoctions for his guests that were said to be truly dreadful.

The meetings were productive but fraught: The two leaders (Churchill may have had a mild heart attack) were enduring the aftershocks of Pearl Harbor and the capital ships’ sinkings: Japanese troops were advancing rapidly in the Philippines, the fall of Hong Kong on Christmas Day crushed the prime minister.

Historians theorize that these runaway Japanese successes, and FDR’s fondness for his new friend, played a key role in the president’s decision to issue Executive Order 9066, which was enforced here, in Arroyo Grande, 2400 miles from Pearl Harbor, 2800 miles from Washington DC and 5400 miles from London.

The aftershocks of December 1941 finally crested here on April 30, 1942. This war spared no one.