How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  Like MacArthur in the Philippines, Gruening begged for help. He needed it badly. Though Alaska shared a continent with the mainland, no road connected them (the secretary of war had judged the value of such a road to be “negligible”).67 Alaska had an air force,68 but only six obsolescent medium bombers and twelve obsolete pursuit planes were able to fly—and there wasn’t much gasoline. The assistant secretary of war described the army in Alaska as existing “in little more than name only.”69 There was no navy.

  Gruening petitioned Congress for funding, as Alaskans had been doing for years, but with little luck. The New Deal’s massive infrastructural investments had passed Alaska by. It wasn’t a state, so it had no congressmen to lobby for it. And pleading military peril did nothing to change that. “‘We’re not going to waste any money on Alaska,’70 was the consensus,” Gruening remembered.

  It took the Japanese movement into French Indochina in mid-1941 to break the congressional stonewalling. With Japan on the march, Congress finally saw the wisdom of fortifying its Pacific-facing territory. The Japanese movement terrified the British even more. They feared losing Singapore and pleaded with Roosevelt to mount an Asian defense.

  Roosevelt agreed. MacArthur, who had threatened to quit the Philippines, was ordered to stay. He would be welcomed back into the U.S. Army, this time as the commander of all the U.S. forces in Asia, and his Philippine army would be absorbed into the U.S. Army. Although Washington held the line on modern rifles, it began shipping massive B-17 bombers (“flying fortresses,71” they were called) to the colony. The idea was that, with 128 bombers by February 1942, MacArthur should be able to defend not only the Philippines but the whole theater, including the British possessions. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall saw the B-17s as “the decisive element in deterring Japan.”72

  But the B-17s didn’t begin arriving until September 1941. There were other priorities that interfered: hauling as much rubber as feasible from Southeast Asia before a Pacific war closed the markets,73 shunting destroyers across the Atlantic to aid the British. The matériel intended for Pacific outposts piled up at the ports. “More speed! Congress!” the exasperated editors of a Hawaiian magazine demanded.74 “More and more speed!”

  *

  If you had made a flight around the Pacific in late 1941, here’s what you’d have seen. Hawai‘i’s defenses were substantial but incomplete,75 lacking especially long-range bombers (it had only twelve B-17s in commission). Guam had practically nothing: its one rudimentary base was too small for a bomber to land. Guam’s governor despaired that the colony was “absolutely indefensible,”76 and in the military it was common to refer to it in the past tense.77 Alaska, despite the last-minute reversal of congressional opinion, wasn’t much better off. “By no stretch of the imagination” concluded its air force chief,78 could Alaska’s planes “defend the territory against any attack in force.”

  MacArthur’s Philippines was mixed. There was a small regular U.S. Army contingent of 31,095 troops,79 more than a third of whom were Filipino, plus MacArthur’s half-finished reserve army of about 120,000 Filipinos. The reservists were barely trained and badly equipped: canvas shoes,80 coconut-bark helmets,81 outmoded rifles, artillery that dated from 1898,82 and little by way of ammunition. Many had never even fired their rifles.83 More promising was the growing air force,84 which, with its fighters and long-range bombers, represented the largest concentration of U.S. warplanes outside the mainland. Still, the planes trickled in slowly, and by the end of 1941 only 35 of the planned 128 flying fortresses had arrived.

  MacArthur remained sanguine, insisting loudly to all within earshot that “the Philippines could be defended,85 and by God, they would be defended.” But a confidential report by the high commissioner warned of “glaring deficiencies” in Philippine defenses.86 It also noted Quezon’s private admission that war would find the populace “unprepared and unprotected.”

  That report was sent on November 30, 1941. A week later, Filipinos noticed some unfamiliar planes in the sky.

  11

  WARFARE STATE

  “War,” the comedian Jon Stewart has observed, is “God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”1 Certainly the Japanese attacks on December 7/8, 1941, were an education. For those used to the Mercator projection maps that placed Japan on the right side (in the “Far East”) and Hawai‘i on the left, Pearl Harbor offered a textbook lesson in the perils of representing a round world on a flat surface. Even territories that weren’t struck, such as Alaska, popped out with unsettling clarity once Japan had shown the extent of its ambitions.

  War planners could finally see what Ernest Gruening had been trying to tell them for years: Alaska extended precipitously into the Pacific, its Aleutian Islands forming a bridge to northern Asia. A colony of some seventy-five thousand people, half Native, with an economy dedicated mainly to fishing, was suddenly at the forefront of military defense. But if Alaska now appeared close to Japan, it also looked remote from the mainland, since no overland route connected it.

  Nervous about a Japanese invasion and eager to put its massive Pacific territory to use, the Roosevelt administration set out to build a road.2 This would not only connect Alaska to the mainland, it would help the government ferry supplies to the allied Soviet Union.

  The road was a mind-bogglingly difficult undertaking. Its route, with the ambivalent acquiescence of Canada’s government, cut through Canada’s northern provinces, spanning a distance greater than that between New York and Dallas. The land it crossed was a virtual wilderness, with only a few small towns along the route, so workers would have to haul all their food, supplies, and shelter with them. The shelter was especially important, for temperatures were extremely cold (once during the first winter it dipped below –70ºF). And everything would have to be done at top speed.

  New wartime globe-style map, by the popular cartographer Richard Edes Harrison, highlighting the island bridge connecting Alaska (at bottom) to Japan, 1944

  The United States sent 11,150 troops up north.3 A third were African Americans—the first black units to serve beyond the mainland in the war. With the 11,150 men came 11,107 pieces of heavy equipment: tractors, 4bulldozers, dump trucks, crushers, scrapers, steam shovels, boilers, compressors, and generators.

  In the stretch between Dawson Creek, British Columbia, and Fairbanks, Alaska, it was as if the entire twentieth century had slammed down all at once. Men and women used to traveling by dogsled watched in astonishment as bulldozers crashed through the thick, trackless forest. Permafrost, buried under vegetation for centuries, saw sunlight for the first time and melted, turning hard ground swampy. People who’d had only limited contact with outsiders were suddenly making unheard-of amounts of money servicing the troops. But they also fell prone to disease. An anthropologist working among the First Nations of Canada in the Northwest Territories decades later found that any discussion of family histories inevitably gave rise to talk of relatives who had “died in ’42.”5

  The road was finished in November 1942 at a cost of $19.7 million. It was, Canada’s high commissioner judged, the “greatest piece of roadmaking yet undertaken by man.”6

  In all, it stretched 1,650 miles. That was hundreds of miles longer than it needed to be. But the army’s engineers, bent on speed above all else, had looped the road around difficult spots—a costly time-saving measure. They were the same way about equipment. When bulldozers broke down, the men abandoned them on the roadside rather than fixing them—it was quicker that way, and there was no shortage of bulldozers.7

  Because, for the first time in Alaska’s history, money was no object.

  *

  Across the empire, backwaters became battle stations. And with the military came federal money, washing indiscriminately over lands long parched by neglect. In Puerto Rico, workers moved from faltering sugar plantations to jobs building and operating military bases. By 1950, the federal government had spent $1.2 billion there.8

  The same thing happened to Hawai‘i,
the hub of the Pacific war. After Pearl Harbor, the military arrived en masse, bringing with it an insatiable demand. Unemployment vanished, the number of restaurants in Honolulu tripled,9 and bank deposits throughout the territory quintupled.10 The newly arrived men, their wallets bulging, turned the tourist drag of Hotel Street into a gold mine. Eight parlors supplied some four hundred to five hundred tattoos a day (“Remember Pearl Harbor” was a favorite).11 The overcrowded brothels, doling out services in three-minute increments, cleared $10 million a year—half the cost of the Alaska Highway, right there.

  This transformation wasn’t limited to the territories. On the mainland, too, the war brought jobs. It also brought new governmental intrusions into daily life—price restrictions,12 wage controls, rationing, income tax, war bonds, and conscription. But the difference is that in the territories, all that happened with the volume turned up. These were the parts of the Greater United States that faced foreign lands. So if you want to see governmental growth during World War II, forget Detroit and San Francisco. It was in the territories, particularly Alaska and Hawai‘i, where militarization truly took command.

  *

  The first bombs fell on Pearl Harbor at 7:55 a.m. Eight hours later—before the United States had even declared war—Hawai‘i governor Joseph Poindexter suspended the writ of habeas corpus and turned over all effective power in the territory to the army.13

  The people of Hawai‘i watched as a colony best known for its beaches, flowers, and guitars became an armed camp. Parks and schoolyards were gutted by trenches, barbed wire littered the beaches, guards took up posts at major intersections, and thousands of concrete machine-gun nests appeared, suggesting the discomfiting possibility of bullets whizzing through downtown Honolulu. The army and navy claimed hundreds of thousands of acres of land—sometimes bought, often simply taken. At its peak during the war, the army held a third of O‘ahu.14

  Tanks on Beretania Street in Honolulu during Hawai‘i’s nearly three years of martial law

  Life in a war zone was a life shaped by precaution. It meant carrying around a gas mask when out (the University of Hawaii graduates processed in cap and gown and gas mask).15 It meant obeying strict curfews. It meant “blackouts”: extinguishing all light by which Japanese planes might navigate at night.

  But the safeguards weren’t only against invaders. The military also insisted on extraordinary precautions against the people of Hawai‘i themselves. Hawai‘i was “enemy country,”16 as the secretary of the navy saw it, with a suspect population, more than one-third of which was of Japanese ancestry. Thus were the territory’s residents registered, fingerprinted, and vaccinated—the first mass fingerprinting and the largest compulsory vaccination campaign the United States had ever undertaken. They were required to carry identification cards at all times on pain of arrest. This led to an uncomfortable moment when Governor Poindexter himself was stopped and realized that he had left his ID card in the pocket of another suit.17

  The regulations emanated, without any legislative check or presidential oversight, from the Office of the Military Governor (OMG or, as some put it, “One Mighty God”).18 Like any deity, the military governor issued commandments that were onerous: the replacement of U.S. dollars with a Hawai‘ionly currency, travel restrictions, press censorship, mail censorship, wage freezes, and prohibitions on quitting jobs in key industries. He could also be a jealous god, as when he set a punishment of up to ten years’ hard labor for contempt toward the flag or when he forbade expressions of “hostility or disrespect” (in word, image, or “gesture”) toward himself or any member of the armed forces at places of amusement.19 In other respects, the General Orders read like the Talmud, going well beyond matters of obvious military significance and ruling on the painting of fenders,20 the preservation of meat, the hours kept by bowling alleys, the transportation of pigeons, and the slaughter of hogs (up to a month in prison for butchering an underweight pig).

  “My authority was substantially unlimited,”21 the military governor boasted in his diary.

  Behind his many orders stood the strength of the armed forces. The manager of one of Hawai‘i’s radio stations recalled his first live broadcast under martial law. A naval officer came into the studio, drew his service weapon, and announced, “I’ve got a .45 in my hand and I’ll shoot you if you deviate from the script.”22 The officer was laughing, the manager remembered, but he wasn’t joking.

  The military police were “known to be overzealous,”23 one Japanese Honolulan recorded in his diary. “They shoot first and ask questions later.”

  Beyond guns in the street, the army established a system of provost courts to enforce its laws. The justice they dispensed was hasty and harsh. Trials were often held on the day of arrest and lasted minutes. In the first four months in Honolulu, a single judge dispatched about a hundred cases per day.24 There were no juries, no journalists, no subpoenaing of witnesses, and, for the most part, no lawyers. Armed military officials, who rarely had legal training, interpreted the facts and the law with maximum discretion—defendants could be and were convicted of violating the “spirit of martial law.” Not surprisingly, convictions were the rule. Of the more than twenty thousand trials conducted in one of Honolulu’s provost courts in 1942, 98.4 percent resulted in guilty verdicts.25

  The tens of thousands of defendants who passed through Hawai‘i’s provost courts were not charged with the usual: robbery, assault, fraud, etc. They were tried for failing to show up to work,26 for breaking curfew, and for committing traffic violations, mainly. Perhaps a few, I like to imagine, were charged with making the aforementioned disrespectful gesture to a member of the armed forces at a place of amusement.

  Once tried and, in all likelihood, convicted, defendants in these juryless trials could be fined thousands of dollars or incarcerated for up to five years (more serious crimes meriting longer sentences were handled in a different class of military court). The General Orders specified punishments of up to thirty days’ imprisonment for leaving keys in the ignition of a parked car, and of up to a year at hard labor and a $1,000 fine for buying marked playing cards.27

  Living under this regime could be exasperating. One motorist was fined $50,28 on the charge of assault and battery, for kicking his own car. One of the most disturbing cases involved a black man who,29 running away from a bar where he’d been threatened by a bouncer, collided with two military policemen. He was arrested, charged with assaulting a police officer, and sentenced to five years in prison.

  As records were not uniformly kept and trials were closed to the public, it’s hard to know how common that sort of egregious miscarriage of justice was. But sentences of more than a year’s incarceration were rare,30 and there’s little reason to think that many languished in Hawai‘i’s prisons. Often, defendants were directed to donate blood in lieu of jail time or purchase war bonds instead of paying fines. In that way, the army compelled the people of Hawai‘i to engage in patriotic acts that, for mainlanders, were done by choice.

  A Honolulu children’s book from the martial law period showing a defendant trembling before a provost court judge

  Martial law in Hawai‘i lasted nearly three years, which was two and a half years longer than Japan posed any plausible threat to the islands. Yet Hawai‘i’s military commanders repeatedly refused to relinquish control. The secretary of the interior started calling it the “American ‘conquered territory’ of Hawaii.”31

  What ended martial law, ultimately, was a series of legal challenges that brought the issue to public view—a rare occasion when mainlanders paid attention to the territories. The military’s lawyers argued before the Supreme Court that Hawai‘i’s territorial status permitted martial law. Plus, they added, Hawai‘i had a “heterogeneous population,32 with all sorts of affinities and loyalties which are alien in many cases to the philosophy of life of the American Government.”

  The court, to its great credit, disagreed. Martial law in Hawai‘i was illegal, it concluded, and civilians there
deserved the same protections as mainland civilians. “Racism has no place whatever in our civilization,”33 one justice scolded. That ruling came, however, only in 1946—by which time not only martial law but the war itself had ended.

  *

  Not long after Japan seized the Philippines, it moved on Alaska. In June 1942 Japan bombed Dutch Harbor and conquered the Aleutian islands of Agattu, Attu, and Kiska (“Somebody ought to be impeached,”34 grumbled Manuel Quezon when he heard the news of yet another bit of barely defended territory falling into Japanese hands). The Japanese occupied the islands for more than a year and transported Attu’s tiny population (42) to Japan as prisoners of war. Half of them died there.35

  Conquering part of Alaska was a significant achievement, and propagandists brought relics from the Aleutians to the Japanese home islands for proud display.36 U.S mainlanders were far less aware of the event, and that is because of official censorship. Although Ernest Gruening, as governor, staved off martial law in Alaska, he did so by reluctantly agreeing to cooperate with the military in all governmental matters. Alaska became its own sort of military garrison, with blackouts, travel restrictions, and the rest.

  Most striking was the near-total lockdown on information. On the mainland, censorship was handled with a surprisingly light touch.37 The government merely requested that editors not publish details about sensitive matters. In Alaska, by contrast, censorship was mandatory and vigorous. Printed materials going into the territory were heavily censored, so that even Gruening—the governor—had his mail opened and articles scissored out of his copies of The Washington Post and Newsweek.38 Outgoing news was even more strictly controlled. After the Japanese attack, non-Alaskan journalists were expelled (a few eventually came back). Remaining journalists were prohibited from writing about strategic matters, which, in the military’s broad interpretation, meant nearly every aspect of Alaskan life.