Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (10 page)

Following the conquests of 1898, the United States began to pursue a new kind of imperialism that generally avoided the bald-faced seizure of territory. Most scholars emphasize how this period was characterized by informal assertions of dominance exemplified by the Open Door policies in China.
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While the Open Door became an important template for the extension of U.S. power abroad, the era between 1898 and World War II also featured frequent (and largely underestimated) military interventions in Latin America and the accompanying basing of forces abroad.
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In this period, the United States intervened militarily in (and in some cases occupied) Mexico (1914, 1916–19), Guatemala (1920), El Salvador (1932), Honduras (1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1920, 1924, 1925), Nicaragua (1898, 1899, 1909–10, occupied 1912–33), Costa Rica (naval presence 1921), the Dominican Republic (1903, 1904, 1914, occupied 1915–24), Haiti (1914, occupied 1915–34), and Cuba (occupied 1898–1902, 1906–9, 1912, 1917–22).
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The military occupations in particular depended on the establishment of local military bases and garrisons to station U.S. troops. In Nicaragua, for example, between 1930 and 1932, the United States established at least eight military garrisons.
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In Panama, where the United States intervened 24 times between 1856 and 1990, the nation built fourteen bases as part of gaining access to the Panama Canal Zone in perpetuity, as well as extensive powers of land expropriation and interference outside the Zone.
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Like Cuba, Panama became an “American colony in all but name.”
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Elsewhere in the hemisphere, during World War I, the Wilson administration grew worried that Germany would overrun Denmark and create a base in the Danish Virgin Islands. In a move that foreshadowed both the unprecedented expansion in the number of U.S. overseas bases and Stu Barber’s Strategic Island Concept, the government purchased the soon renamed U.S. Virgin Islands from Denmark for $25 million.
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DESTROYERS FOR BASES

On September 3, 1940, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt informed Congress that as commander in chief, he was authorizing an agreement
with the United Kingdom to provide nearly bankrupt wartime Britain with fifty World War I–era destroyers in exchange for U.S. control over a string of air and naval bases in Britain’s colonies. Under a program known as “lend-lease” or “destroyers-for-bases,” the United States acquired 99-year leases and near-sovereign powers on bases in the Bahamas, Jamaica, St. Lucia, St. Thomas, Antigua, Aruba-Curaçao, Trinidad, and British Guiana, and temporary access to bases in Bermuda and Newfoundland.
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Ostensibly the bases were for the defense of the western hemisphere against the Axis powers. Importantly, they were also used to preempt Germany and Italy from establishing their own bases in Latin America. Functionally, the military came to use the bases primarily to shuttle arms and aircraft to the battlefields of Europe and Africa, as well as for intelligence gathering, antisubmarine warfare, and hosting naval convoys. Ultimately, the bases created the foundation for a network of U.S. bases that would soon span the globe.

With the entrance of the United States into World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the question for the U.S. military was not
if
it should expand its collection of bases but
how
to expand the number as quickly as possible.
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The government followed lend-lease with deals to station U.S. forces in Iceland, Greenland (Denmark), Ascension (U.K.), Haiti, Cuba, Suriname (Netherlands), the Azores (Portugal), Acapulco (Mexico), the Galapagos Islands (Ecuador), Palmyia (south of Hawai‘i), and Recife and Fortaleza (Brazil).
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Major regional base networks emerged in the southwest Pacific, the central Pacific, North Africa, and from India through Burma and into China.

In addition to war-making interests, the multiplication of bases likely had other motivations, including a “strong element of imperial rivalry.”
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Roosevelt first became interested in obtaining island bases in the Caribbean in 1939, prior to lend-lease. Within a year of entering the war, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were already making plans for a network of postwar bases around the globe. In 1943, a paper for the Joint Chiefs declared that “adequate bases, owned or controlled by the United States, are essential and their acquisition and development must be considered as amongst our primary war aims.” Domestic planners likewise saw the advantage of maintaining the base structure after the war for the nation’s burgeoning airline industry, which needed access to airfields to service growing intercontinental air travel.
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During the war, base construction was particularly rapid in the Pacific, where the military built strings of small island bases to battle Japan. After the shock of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent loss of bases in
the Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island, the U.S. military remembered the strategic doctrine of Admiral Mahan: Island bases were a way to win the war and ultimately to control the peace—to ensure that there would never again be a Pearl Harbor (part of the Japanese attack came from an island base on tiny Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, west of Hawai‘i). The military fought its way slowly through the ocean in a series of deadly and costly battles, retaking its lost islands and fighting from island chain to island chain toward mainland Japan. A construction “frenzy” followed the battles for each island group, building bases to launch assaults on other islands and Japan itself;
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many of the affected islands and the local peoples living on them faced “devastation.”
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The battle for the Marshall Islands, one of Japan’s “mandates” (i.e., internationally legitimated colonies) from World War I, illustrates the deadly fighting that went on in the Pacific and the nature of the basing complexes that followed. In a span of eight days in 1944, the United States assaulted and captured all six square miles of Kwajalein Island with a force of 40,000 troops. The United States suffered 372 dead and 2,000 wounded in the fighting. Japan suffered 8,000 dead. No U.S. historians or military officials seem to have bothered to count the Marshallese dead.
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Within two months, the U.S. Army had turned Kwajalein into its main base in Micronesia, hosting 22,000 troops. (Later the island would become a major missile-testing base.) Within three months of taking what is now the Marshallese capital, Majuro, the Army and Navy had built a 5,800-foot airstrip and a naval anchorage. On Enewetak Atoll, another base hosted more than 11,000 troops.
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By the end of the war, the United States had built or occupied thousands of bases in the Pacific. Globally, the U.S. military was building base facilities at an average rate of 112 a month. In a matter of five years, the U.S. military developed a global network of bases that, according to some, became the world’s largest collection ever held by a single power.
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THE POSTWAR BASING NETWORK

With the end of the World War II, the United States, like previous empires, was reluctant to give up territories and bases acquired in wartime. Even if the military had little interest in using a base or a territory, military principles of “redundancy”—the more bases, the safer the nation—and “strategic denial”—preventing enemies from using a territory by denying them access—held that the United States should almost never cede its acquisitions.

Especially in the Pacific, because of the high human and financial costs of acquiring “its” bases, the military felt justified in retaining control of captured islands as the “spoils of war.”
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“Having defeated or subordinated its former imperial rivals in the Pacific,” several base experts explain, “the United States military was in no mood to hand back occupied real estate.”
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Congress agreed. It “shared the feeling that no one had the right to give away land which had been bought and paid for with American lives.” Louisiana Representative F. Edward Hébert explained the logic prevalent after the war: “We fought for them, we’ve got them, we should keep them. They are necessary to our safety. I see no other course.”
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The maintenance of such an extensive collection of military bases was driven by a widely held strategic belief that the security of the nation and the prevention of future wars depended on dominating the Pacific (and to a lesser extent the Atlantic) through a Mahanian combination of unparalleled naval forces and island bases. “Most importantly,” Hal Friedman writes, “this imperial solution to American anxieties about strategic security in the postwar Pacific exhibited itself in a bureaucratic consensus about turning the Pacific Basin into an ‘American lake.’”
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For General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Japan, and other Navy leaders, securing the Pacific meant creating what they called an “offshore island perimeter.” The perimeter was to be a line of island bases stretching from north to south across the western Pacific like a giant wall protecting the United States, yet with thousands of miles of moat before reaching U.S. shores. “Our line of defense,” MacArthur explained, “runs through the chain of islands fringing the coast of Asia. It starts from the Philippines and continues through the Ryukyu Archipelago, which includes its main bastion, Okinawa. Then it bends back through Japan and the Aleutian Island chain, to Alaska.”
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The island base plan found support from the architect of early Cold War strategic policy, George Kennan, who saw the island perimeter as equally beneficial for hosting air power to control East Asia without large ground forces. To carry out the plan, military leaders demanded complete sovereignty over Guam, the other islands in the Marianas and in Micronesia, and the retention of other captured Japanese islands. Some suggested full incorporation of Guam and other Pacific islands into the country as states or as part of a new Hawai‘ian state. In the process of breaking up the British and French empires and sensitive to being attacked as colonialists, State Department and other Truman administration officials opposed outright U.S. sovereignty.

Eventually the administration struck a compromise to turn most of Micronesia and some of the other Pacific islands into a “strategic trust territory.” Under the auspices of the United Nations, this Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTPI) would be administered by the United States until the islands could assume selfgovernment. Among other UN-granted powers, the United States had the right to establish military facilities in the TTPI and effectively governed the islands as part of the nation. (Until 1951, the Navy maintained direct administrative control of the islands.) As one observer put it, the trusteeship was “de facto annexation, papered over with the thinnest of disguises.”
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THE BASE SYSTEM EVOLVES

The grandest plans for postwar bases were initially trumped by concerns about costs and (partial) demilitarization after the war. In the Pacific, the military abandoned its plans for an extensive offshore island perimeter (which would have resembled something like an offensive, oceanic Magi-not Line), instead relying on key bases in Japan, Guam, and Hawai‘i, and continued control over the TTPI.

To the disappointment of military leaders, the nation returned about half its foreign bases with the close of the war.
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And yet, the United States still maintained what became a “permanent institution” of bases in peacetime.
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In Germany, Italy, Japan, and France, U.S. forces retained rights of occupation as a victor nation. The United States signed deals to maintain three of its most important bases in Greenland, Iceland, and the Azores. The nation retained facilities in most of the British territories occupied under lend-lease, continued occupying French bases in Morocco, and gained further access to British facilities in Ascension, Bahrain, Guadalcanal, and Tarawa. When Britain wanted to grant complete independence to India and Burma, the U.S. State Department asked its ally to maintain control of three airfields in the former and one in the latter. U.S. bases in Great Britain proper turned the British Isles into what one journalist called an “emergency parking lot for the Strategic Air Command.”
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And the U.S. military had access to an even wider array of British and French bases still held in their remaining colonies.

Among its own colonial possessions, the United States retained important bases in Guam, Puerto Rico, Wake Island, and Cuba. When the Philippines gained its independence in 1946, the United States pressured
its former colony into granting a 99-year rent-free lease on 23 bases and military installations.
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BEYOND COLONIALISM: THE POWER OF BASES

Alongside U.S. postwar economic and political power, the base network constituted a major mechanism of U.S. imperial control. While the total acreage of territory acquired may have been relatively slight (especially compared to prior European empires), in the ability to rapidly deploy the U.S. military nearly anywhere on the globe, the basing system represented a dramatic expansion of U.S. power and a significant way in which the United States came to maintain dominance over other nations.