How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  Operating this vast mechanism drew the United States abruptly into world affairs, giving it business in places it had formerly cared little about. Yet it also left the United States less interested in formal empire. Together with innovations in chemistry and industrial engineering, the U.S. mastery of logistics would diminish the value of colonies and inaugurate a new pattern of global power, based less on claiming large swaths of land and more on controlling small points.

  *

  It made a certain sense that the United States would fight the war by managing the back end of things, for it had the world’s largest industrial economy and its factories were far from the fighting. By 1940, nearly every independent nation outside Axis orbits had sought to acquire munitions from the United States.3

  The Roosevelt administration was only too happy to oblige, via an evolving set of schemes designed to circumvent neutrality laws and conserve the Allies’ dwindling dollar reserves. First, there were direct purchases. Then “cash and carry,” “destroyers for bases,” and finally “lend-lease.” Well before the United States declared war, it was sending planes, engines, tanks, and other war goods to the fronts.

  That stream of stuff mattered. By early 1941, Britain’s Asian empire hung by a thread. Axis forces had largely captured the Mediterranean, and Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps had knocked the British back on their heels in Egypt. If Britain lost the Middle East, it would lose everything: Iraq’s oil fields, stockpiles of war matériel in Egypt, and the Suez Canal, which connected the British Isles to India, Australia, New Zealand, Malaya, Burma, and Singapore. British officials warned Washington of the complete “disintegration of the British commonwealth.”4

  It was easy enough for the United States to supply tanks and planes. The hard part was getting them to the front lines—Detroit to Cairo was a long haul. The tanks could be disassembled and shipped by sea around the southern tip of Africa, but that meant unloading them at Cairo’s primitive ports, which had no warehouses, no assembly plants, few railways, light roads, and a dire shortage of mechanics.

  “The condition of Egyptian ports” isn’t a subject that would have interested many in Washington in 1935. But now it did. The United States launched a massive Middle Eastern infrastructure campaign. Up went new piers with cranes to unload tanks, assembly plants to put them together, railways and hard roads to carry them to the front, and repair shops to keep them running. By June 1942, the depot near Cairo had a large airport, housing for nearly ten thousand men, a thousand-bed hospital, warehouses, and enough spare parts, tools, and skilled mechanics to keep the whole operation functioning.

  That’s what it took to get tanks to the Middle East. To bring planes and smaller goods, the United States blazed a different trail: an aerial highway of bases dipping down from Miami to Brazil, cutting over to West Africa, and hopping across the Sahara to Cairo. This, too, required serious infrastructural investment. Swamps had to be drained, jungles cleared, rock blasted, and sandstorms fought.

  And they were. Buoyed by much-needed U.S. supplies, the British Eighth Army struck back at the Battle of El Alamein in October 1942, pouring fire into Rommel’s position. “I have seen many enemy barrages,”5 recorded one terrified driver behind German lines, “but the intensity of this one is beyond our experience.” Just as the British pushed Rommel out of Egypt into Tunisia, three mighty fleets collectively containing seven hundred ships landed on African shores with the necessaries to expel the Axis from Africa entirely within six months.

  Britain’s lifeline to its empire was saved. “It marked in fact the turning of the ‘Hinge of Fate,’” Churchill wrote.6 “It may almost be said, ‘Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a defeat.’”

  The campaign also transformed the Middle East, converting it into what the secretary of state called a “tremendous supply base” for the Allies.7 Factories in Palestine made batteries,8 those in Iran made antifreeze, and canning plants in Egypt produced rations for the troops. The northern half of Africa, which had been a virtual terra incognita for the United States, hummed with U.S. bases, ports, assembly plants, barracks, and ware houses.

  *

  What happened in North Africa and the Middle East happened all over the world. You can think of the U.S. mainland during the Second World War as a giant heart pumping out rich streams of matériel. Strings of bases functioned as arteries, carrying it to the battlefronts. The bases were where planes landed and ships docked, where spare parts, fuel, and food were stored, where wounded men and damaged things were repaired.

  Bases weren’t new to U.S. strategy. Captain Mahan, back in the 1890s, had championed acquiring bases so that U.S. ships could venture far into the world. But the basing system Mahan’s generation built was modest, limited to a few key points, such as Pearl Harbor and Guantánamo Bay, in the Pacific and the Caribbean.

  Now, however, the system grew explosively. This started in 1940, when the Roosevelt administration traded fifty destroyers to Britain for base sites in British territories in the Western Hemisphere—including in Newfoundland, the Bahamas, Bermuda, Jamaica, and Trinidad. The United States didn’t own these sites outright; it got them on ninety-nine-year leases. But its jurisdictional powers were startling, “probably more far-reaching than any the British Government has ever given anyone over British territory before,”9 the ambassador to Britain boasted. The United States could raise its flag, confiscate property, and build anything it wanted. Its workers were immune from British taxes and, when they were on base or on duty, from British laws.

  In the 1890s Mahan had supposed that bases would lead to colonization. Were the ninety-nine-year base leases a prelude to annexing Britain’s colonies in the Western Hemisphere? “Nothing is more certain than they could have become American possessions for the asking,”10 noted a high-ranking U.S. official. Many inhabitants of the British Caribbean—and some pundits in Washington—expected that they’d fall under the U.S. flag soon enough.11

  The longer the war went on, the more bases the United States took. For some, as in Latin America, it negotiated deals: building roads and extending aid in exchange for leases. Others it claimed from its allies as a matter of wartime exigency. The Soviet Union, alone among the major allies,12 locked the United States out. Joseph Stalin accepted billions in U.S. aid but refused the entry of U.S. troops. Soviet pilots picked up lend-lease planes in Fairbanks and flew them to the battlefront themselves.

  The U.S. basing system girdled the globe with four great highways: northern and southern routes across the Atlantic, and northern and southern routes across the Pacific. The transatlantic routes could make use of existing infrastructure—English roads, African rails, and Latin American ports. Leaping over the enormous Pacific, however, meant landing on small islands. The Seabees (CB: construction battalion) in the navy swelled to nearly two hundred thousand men and built hundreds of Pacific bases, from Aitape to Zamboanga. Construction workers from places like Boston and San Francisco found themselves hauling dirt on Nukufetau, Kwajalein, Sasavele, and Mios Woendi.13

  Solomon Islanders unloading crates of beer for U.S. servicemen on Guadalcanal, 1944

  In 1919, at the end of the First World War, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had doubted that the country’s safety hung on “what happens in Africa or in New Guinea and in the Marshall Islands and the Caroline Islands.”14 It’s hard to imagine a major politician saying anything like that at the end of the Second World War. By then, U.S. troops were in every one of those places.

  During the war, the United States possessed an astonishing thirty thousand installations on two thousand overseas base sites.15 The men marked their presence with a ubiquitous graffiti tag: a cartoon face peering over a wall, accompanied by the words kilroy was here.

  Kilroy, in fact, was everywhere.

  It was as if the oceans had been turned into puddles. Men who’d never left their home states zipped busily around the planet, with two thousand “little Americas” rolling out like a
red carpet underfoot. “Almost anywhere in the United States you are likely to run into uniformed young men who speak matter-of-factly of Cairo or Chungking or Reykjavik as though any point on the map of the world were just ‘up the road a piece,’” one writer noted.16 “And why not? Yesterday or the day before yesterday they were there.”

  Presidents, too, began to move as never before.17 Teddy Roosevelt had been the first sitting president to leave the continental United States—a seventeen-day trip to Panama and Puerto Rico. His successors also journeyed outward while in office but, like him, generally confined themselves to single trips within the Western Hemisphere. William Howard Taft spent a day in Mexico. Warren G. Harding visited Alaska and Vancouver in July 1923, but he became violently ill during the trip and died immediately upon returning. Calvin Coolidge, who succeeded him, went to Cuba for three days, and Herbert Hoover spent three days in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Only Woodrow Wilson, who visited Europe twice for the Paris Peace Conference, went abroad more than once or journeyed beyond the Americas.

  The stationary presidency ended abruptly with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As president he left the continental United States twenty-one times, and all but one of those times he journeyed beyond the borders of the Greater United States. He visited Canada, Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, Haiti, Colombia, Panama, Trinidad, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Newfoundland, Morocco, Gambia, Liberia, Mexico, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Iran, Malta, Italy, Senegal, and the Soviet Union—some of them multiple times. He was the first president to set foot in South America, Africa, or Asia while in office.

  He wasn’t the last, though. Every sitting president since has traveled widely. Every one has left the Western Hemisphere.

  Simply put, World War II made the United States a planetary presence. State Department officials furiously churned out wartime memos establishing U.S. policy—often for the first time—regarding every nation, colony, region, and sub-duchy on the map. One can almost see the cartoon sweat-bullets popping out from their faces as they wrestled with what position to take vis-à-vis Outer Mongolia, Northern Bukovina, Chinese Turkestan, British Borneo, French Somaliland, Jubaland, or Subcarpathian Ruthenia—all places that appeared on their agendas. “Because of the ethnic distribution in Transylvania,”18 they sternly advised, “it would not be possible to fix a boundary that would not give rise to Hungarian or Rumanian irredentism.” A lesson well worth heeding.

  Going global: Number of in-office trips taken abroad, by president, from Washington to Obama

  In 1898 imperial expansion had inspired new maps. The 1940s wartime expansion yielded a similar burst of cartographic innovation. Writers tapped surprisingly deep reservoirs of feeling as they touched on the subject of map projections. The long-familiar Mercator map, which showed North America protected on both sides by enormous oceans, became an object of scorn. It had worked well enough in an age of east-and-west sail, but the editors of Life deemed it “a mental hazard” in an age of aviation,19 when planes could reach Eurasia from North America by flying north over the Arctic Sea.

  There were other options, and the public was oddly willing to learn about them. Life devoted a fifteen-page spread to the “Dymaxion map” by the inventor Buckminster Fuller: fourteen detachable segments that could be folded into a tetradecahedron or assembled into various flat maps,20 as the user chose.

  More popular was the “polar azimuthal projection” perfected by the dean of wartime cartography, Richard Edes Harrison.21 It showed the continents huddled around the North Pole, a jarring angle of view that highlighted aviation routes and showed how dangerously close North America was to Germany’s European empire.

  Richard Edes Harrison’s polar azimuthal projection, first published by Fortune in July 1941 and copied widely thereafter (this is a 1942 version). The original accompanying text explained how “the entire conflict pivots around the U.S.” Arrows extending out from New York and San Francisco show the global flow of lend-lease aid.

  The map was an enormous hit, reprinted and copied frequently. Joseph Goebbels waved it in reporters’ faces as proof of the United States’ world-conquering ambitions.22 The U.S. Army ordered eighteen thousand copies, and the map became the basis for the United Nations logo,23 designed in 1945.

  “Never before have persons been so interested in the entire world,”24 gushed Popular Mechanics. Certainly the technicalities of representing a spherical planet on a map’s flat surface had never commanded such fascination. As public consciousness expanded, the details of cartographic projection mattered. The world must be seen anew, the poet Archibald MacLeish wrote, as a “round earth in which all the directions eventually meet.”25 “If we win this war,” he continued, “the image of the age which now is opening will be this image of a global earth, a completed sphere.”

  The original UN emblem, designed by Donal McLaughlin, a member of the Office of Strategic Service (the precursor to today’s Central Intelligence Agency). McLaughlin modified the emblem a year later, adding the bottom of South America and tilting the map in order to make North America less obviously the center of the world.

  That word MacLeish chose, global, was new. There are scattered instances of its use to refer to the world starting in the nineteenth century, but not many before the 1940s. It took the war to make it popular. With it came entirely new words: globalist, globalism, and the pejorative globaloney, coined by the writer Clare Boothe Luce in reference to the ideas of Vice President Henry Wallace.26

  If the last war was a world war, this one was, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it in September 1942, “a global war.”27 That was the first time a sitting president had publicly uttered the word global, though every president since has used it incessantly.

  For Christmas that year, George Marshall presented FDR with a five-hundred-pound globe for the Oval Office. Placed next to Roosevelt’s desk, it was comically large. It resembled the globe with which Charlie Chaplin had performed an amorous dance two years earlier in The Great Dictator, only bigger. Yet photographs show Roosevelt gazing at it with sobriety, curiosity, and respect—a new presence, though not an unwelcome one.

  *

  In the United States, the war opened horizons. It felt different for other countries. “Just as truly as Europe once invaded us,28 with wave after wave of immigrants, now we are invading Europe, with wave after wave of sons of immigrants,” wrote the journalist John Hersey in 1944. Except it wasn’t only Europe. The “invasion” landed in force on every continent save Antarctica.

  For the most part, it was friendly. The men arrived in Allied countries not as conquerors, but as builders of the vast logistical network that kept the war running. Still, there were an awful lot of them. “There is not a single square inch of London on which an American is not standing,”29 wrote one U.S. official in 1944.

  The 1.65 million U.S. servicemen swarming around Britain,30 building bases and running jeeps down English country roads, were preparing for the invasion of Normandy of 1944. Yet the British could be forgiven if the sight of so many foreign troops parking their heels on English soil called to mind the Norman invasion of 1066. There were only three things wrong with the GIs, the British quip went. They were “overpaid, over-sexed, and over here.”

  That was the complaint of an ally. In Axis lands, the U.S. invasion was not metaphorical, but actual. In Europe, U.S. troops briefly occupied parts of Italy and then, at the war’s end, gained jurisdiction over sectors of Germany and Austria. The United States also took over the southern half of Korea (the Soviet Union held the northern half).

  Most dramatically, the war placed the whole of Japan under occupation. Technically, the occupation was run jointly by the Allies, but in effect it was a U.S. operation (though a contingent of British troops was on hand). Japan was not divided into zones run by different authorities. There was a single supreme commander for the Allied Powers, appointed by President Harry Truman.

  Truman picked Douglas MacArthur.

 
Finally, MacArthur had a task that matched his sense of self. Simultaneously, he led the Japanese occupation, the U.S. military’s Far East Command, and the U.S. Army in the Far East. Later, while still holding all those positions, he would also take command of the United Nations forces in the Korean War. Though officially he answered to Washington and to the Allies’ Far Eastern Commission, in actuality MacArthur had, as he put it, “absolute control over almost 80-million people.”31

  The U.S. ambassador to Japan gasped. “Never before in the history of the United States had such enormous and absolute power been placed in the hands of a single individual.”32

  MacArthur looked for inspiration to his father’s work as governor of the Philippines.33 Of course Japan wasn’t a U.S. territory like the Philippines. But MacArthur nevertheless ran it as if it were. The Japanese flag was prohibited, and the Stars and Stripes rose in its place. Streets and places got new names: Washington Heights, Roosevelt Recreation Area, Doolittle Park (named, awkwardly, after the first man to bomb Tokyo). “Parts of Tokyo look as Oriental as Peoria,34 Illinois,” a journalist observed.

  The occupation radically remade Japan, turning it into “the world’s greatest laboratory for an experiment in the liberation of people from totalitarian military rule,”35 in MacArthur’s telling. The emperor was demoted from an infallible deity to an affable public figure who attended baseball games. A massive land reform campaign dispossessed many absentee landlords. Hundreds of millions of new textbooks were printed to train Japanese students in democratic ways. Public health authorities vaccinated the whole Japanese population—all eighty million—twice for smallpox (the largest vaccination campaign in history to that point) and dusted some fifty million with DDT.36

  When Japanese politicians failed to write a constitution to MacArthur’s satisfaction, he had one drafted, in English, in nine days. “We the Japanese people,”37 it starts, and it goes on to affirm individuals’ rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”