*
In 1969 the United States achieved what was probably its most technically difficult goal since the Second World War: the moon landing. The most powerful rocket engines in history had to blast the spacecraft into the sky, where the whole thing would progressively dismantle itself mid-flight, shooting a smaller module safely into the lunar gravity well. There is a reason that “rocket science” became the proverbial way to refer to the hardest intellectual challenges out there.
Yet it wasn’t all jets and orbits. The moon landing was a triumph of chemical engineering, too. NASA needed light materials that could endure extreme temperatures and micrometeoroid strikes, yet keep pressurized air in. This meant synthetics. The moon suits that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wore had twenty-one layers,73 and twenty either contained or were made entirely of materials manufactured by DuPont. There were familiar inventions—nylon, neoprene, Mylar, and Teflon—and new ones such as Kapton and Nomex. What was harder to find up in space was anything that might once have grown in a colony.
Raw materials just weren’t as important as they’d once been. The fifty-star flag that the astronauts planted, marking humankind’s highest ambition, was sewn of DuPont nylon.74
17
THIS IS WHAT GOD HATH WROUGHT
In August 1941 the army and navy set out on their first-ever large-scale joint exercise. With war very likely coming, they anticipated having to take foreign beaches under fire. And so, the thought was, they’d practice by invading North Carolina. The men would make an amphibious landing, leaping from ship to shore and carrying their gear and supplies with them.
It seemed straightforward, yet it proved to be anything but. The dis-embarking troops got tangled up with one another. Men with heavy packs struggled to stand in the water. Tanks hit the soft ground and sank. The ammunition got soaked, as did cardboard boxes of rations, which promptly disintegrated. Cans of vegetable hash and meat stew piled up chaotically on the beach, their boxes broken, their contents no longer identifiable. The equipment that made it ashore then began to rust, as the lubricant—stored deep in the holds of the ships—could not easily be found.
The army’s official history allowed that the exercise was “a depressing experience.”1 The men came up with their own way to refer to this sort of logistical face-plant, an acronym they would use frequently during the war: snafu. As in, Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.
And that was at midday, under no enemy fire, in calm waters not too far from Myrtle Beach.
What those waterlogged troops discovered that afternoon was an age-old truth, one that had governed history up to that point: moving things is hard.
It’s a point easily forgotten today, when people, objects, and ideas glide easily across the planet’s surface. Now markets scamper across borders, planes land anywhere, and communications satellites connect the most seemingly distant places.
But all that is relatively new, an artifact of post–World War II globalization. That globalization, in turn, depended on key technologies devised or perfected by the U.S. military during the Second World War. These were, like synthetics, empire-killing technologies, in that they helped render colonies unnecessary. They did so by making movement easier without direct territorial control.
To appreciate how transformative these technologies were, it’s necessary to go back a bit, to fifty years before the Second World War—a time marked not by effortless motion, but by abrasive friction. When Commodore Dewey attacked the Spanish at Manila Bay in 1898, he cut a crucial telegraph cable, and it took a full week for the mainland to learn of his triumph in battle (manila probably ours was the uncertain headline of one paper).2 Regular cable contact didn’t resume for three months.
After Dewey’s victory, Teddy Roosevelt eagerly assembled the Rough Riders to storm Cuba. But they got stuck in Tampa, a port clogged with what Roosevelt called a “swarming ant-heap of humanity,”3 as they waited for transport. The logjam was so great that the enlisted men had to leave their horses behind and take Cuba on foot.
The USS Oregon could have helped,4 and indeed it was dispatched from Seattle. But Seattle to Florida was a two-month journey, requiring the ship to go down the Pacific coast of South America, around Tierra del Fuego, and back up through the Gulf of Mexico.
Had they known what awaited them, Roosevelt’s troops might have been happy to wait. Once in Cuba, they suffered mightily from yellow fever, malaria, and diarrhea. Roosevelt wrote a frantic letter to his commander, warning that the fearless Rough Riders were “ripe for dying like rotten sheep”5 and must be sent home quickly to avoid an “appalling disaster” that might kill “over half the army.”
It was a known bug: humans didn’t travel well. Take them from one part of the planet to another and their typical response was to get sick and fall down.
Things didn’t travel well, either. In 1901, with Manila firmly under white control, General Arthur MacArthur staged a lavish reception in the Philippines for the upper crust of colonial society.6 The men decided to wear their best frock coats and silk hats. But clothing designed for temperate climates, they discovered, fares poorly in the tropics. The hats had warped, lost their sheen, become sticky, and started to emit a strange odor. Pests had chewed holes in the hat of the secretary of finance and justice. He wore it anyway, though, as he had no means of getting another.
And why not wear it? Many of the early U.S. colonial buildings,7 made with Oregon pine and California redwood, were also riddled with holes and falling apart. “Decay” was basically the house style.
*
What this rotting empire needed was faster transportation. And that required seizing land. Captain Mahan had suggested opening a canal through the Central American isthmus, which divided the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and Roosevelt agreed. He tried to buy territory from Colombia, without luck. He tried threatening and got no further. Finally, concluding that bargaining with Colombia’s leaders was liking trying to “nail currant jelly to a wall,”8 Roosevelt threw his support behind rebels, who declared Panama’s independence from Colombia. The newly established republic then leased to the United States a ten-mile-wide strip of land slicing through the middle of the country: the Panama Canal Zone.9
Still, more territory, more problems—problems of precisely the moving-things-and-people variety. The hot and rainy neck of land throbbed with disease-bearing mosquitoes. Panamanians who had lived with those mosquitoes their whole lives had acquired immunity to yellow fever and resistance to malaria.10 Outsiders, however, were fresh bait. Of the first batch of U.S. mainlanders to arrive in the Panama Canal Zone, nearly all were immediately laid low by malaria. Later officials came bringing their caskets with them.11
They weren’t being paranoid. Yellow fever, malaria, chronic diarrhea, dysentery, pneumonia, and bubonic plague tore through the zone. “I shall never forget the train loads of dead men being carted away daily as if they were just so much lumber,”12 remembered a carpenter. “There were days that we could only work a few hours because of the high fever racking our bodies—it was a living hell. Finally, typhoid fever got me.”
If not typhoid, malaria, or—Jesus—the plague, then perhaps a venereal disease? It was too much to hope that a construction project involving tens of thousands of workers wouldn’t also engender prostitution. The Panamanian cities bordering the zone were a “whirlpool of vice,”13 a New York editor declared. Still, canal workers seemed all too happy to visit them, passing syphilis and gonorrhea to one another in the process.
Those fit to work faced other challenges. The area to be dug out was a “dark and gloomy jungle,”14 one early arrival noted, “an apparently hopeless tangle of tropical vegetation, swamps whose bottoms the engineers had not discovered, black muddy soil, quicksands.” The ruins of a previous French effort to dig a canal—abandoned equipment rusted, sunken into the earth, and covered in vines—served as an ominous warning.
The canal’s managers understandably sought to escape from this morass by staying in Washington. But
communication between Washington and Panama was limited to an expensive telegraphic trickle, making management from afar extremely difficult. Delays, pileups, and breakdowns ultimately provoked Roosevelt to fire the canal commission and install a new one willing to work from Panama.15
The point here is that, to open a canal, the United States had to exert colonial control. In fact, it transformed the Panama Canal Zone into one of the most intensively governed spots on the planet. Brigades marched forth to cut brush, drain swamps, and put up screens. They fumigated buildings with pyrethrum,16 an insecticide made from the petals of chrysanthemums—at peak they imported more than 120 tons a month. To combat mosquitoes, which laid eggs in still water, the authorities made war on puddles. They filled or covered any indentation where water might accumulate. They even ordered the holy water in the font of the cathedral changed daily after finding mosquito larvae in it.
Venereal disease required a different treatment. Canal officials subsidized the arrival of mainland wives and,17 at great expense, established a smothering social milieu of clubhouses, associations, and organized leisure. Throw enough Bibles at the zone’s residents, the theory went, and they’d stay out of Panamanian brothels. But just in case, zone authorities also pressed Panama’s government to impose mandatory medical exams and,18 when necessary, forcibly hospitalize sex workers.
With disease at bay, canal workers turned to the canal with a fury. They blasted their way through mountain. They brought in powerful steam shovels able to haul out eight tons of earth in one scoop.19 Still, it was Sisyphean work, with the earth slipping regularly back into the cut (about one cubic yard slid back for every five dug).20 “Today you dig and tomorrow it slides” is how one worker put it.21 Indeed, a single landslide could reverse months of work, burying the expensive steam shovels in the process.
Altogether, opening the canal took ten years and cost nearly a third of a billion dollars—more if you count the cost of the landslides that perpetually closed the canal in its first years. As usual, records kept on the deaths of nonwhites were shoddy, but we think some fifteen thousand workers,22 mainly West Indian, died from accident or disease while on the job.
And all to tame a strip of land ten miles wide and not even fifty miles long.
*
The Panama Canal was a significant achievement. But next to the challenges posed by the Second World War, digging it was a gentle warm-up exercise. War planners faced what one dazed general called “ordnance requirements of a size beyond the bounds of imagination.”23 For every soldier overseas, the United States would ship sixty-seven pounds of matériel abroad per day.24 And unlike in the First World War, where the United States shipped to fourteen ports in one theater,25 now it serviced more than a hundred ports in eleven theaters.
It’s telling that before the war started, logistics had been a specialist’s term,26 not much heard in general speech. The military academies exalted courage, leadership, and tactical acuity, not procurement and transportation. Yet, fairly soon into the Second World War, commanders grew accustomed to speaking of tonnage, inventory levels, and supply lines with the knowing reverence previously reserved for accounts of battlefield heroics.
What is more, they got good at it. During the war, the military devised a suite of logistical innovations, all designed to move people, things, and information cleanly and quickly around the planet. Planes were the most obvious—the United States came to dominate aviation—but others were no less important. Radio, cryptography, dehydrated food, penicillin, and DDT: these technologies laid the foundations of today’s globalization.
The logistical innovations did more than speed everything up. They also enabled the United States to move through places without carefully preparing the ground first, as it had in Panama. No longer would seizing large areas or zones be necessary to run a long-distance transportation network. Mere dots on the map, sometimes little more than airfields in jungle clearings, would suffice. And so, just like plastic and other synthetics, these new technologies helped to make colonies obsolete.
*
For the United States, the war started quickly, with Japan’s strikes on December 7/8 and its three-month spree of conquest. Then things slowed. With the Japanese Empire draped plumply across Southeast Asia and Micronesia, the Pacific, once a universe of boundless possibilities, had become a giant oceanic blockade.
The closure of the Pacific alarmed Douglas MacArthur, who had to defend Australia with only the dribble of supplies he could get through the southern part of the ocean. China, fighting Japan on the other side, faced even greater danger. The Chinese were painfully short on the weapons of modern war and, with the Pacific closed, they couldn’t import what they needed.
For a while, some matériel could get to China from the other side, via the Burma Road, a twisting, 726-mile path through the mountains. It was largely unpaved and built almost wholly by hand (by half a million laborers), but FDR saw that modest road as a lifeline. He regarded it as “obviously of the utmost urgency” that “the pathway to China be kept open.”27 Soon enough, however, the Japanese seized Burma, closing the road.
It was a classic geopolitical move—the enclosure of an adversary’s territory. Japan was guarding China’s front and back doors, preventing the Allies from aiding it by land or sea. Yet this timeworn strategy didn’t account for aviation. The doors were locked, yes, but the Allies could still come in through the roof.
Planes weren’t new. They’d been around in the First World War, and the daring of aviators then was the stuff of legend. But planes hadn’t drastically affected that war’s outcome. They were small, and there hadn’t been that many of them.
The Second World War, it was clear from the start, would be different. When Hitler invaded Poland, his Luftwaffe had four thousand aircraft—a formidable threat that nearly broke Britain’s defenses.28 The United States, in response, began to build its own air fleet, putting its full industrial muscle behind the effort. At peak, U.S. plants churned out more than one plane every four minutes—a Luftwaffe every eleven days.29
Abundance in aircraft meant that the Allies could use them for more than combat. They could use them for nearly everything. Even long-distance supply lines, they realized, could be maintained by air.
A decade or two earlier, this would have been unthinkable. The planes, for one, had been too small. The biggest planes in operation in World War I had been the German Riesenflugzeug (“giant aircraft”), most notably the Siemens-Schuckert planes, the largest of which could hold two and a half tons—the Germans had built six during the war. But by the end of the Second World War, the United States had produced nearly four thousand B-29 Superfortresses, each of which could carry twenty tons.
As the planes got larger, their cargo shrank. Dehydration reduced eggs, milk, and even vegetables to small fractions of their weight and size. Engineers found ways to shrink vehicles, too. Bulky trucks were hard to haul by air. Truck parts were much easier, but that required having a factory at the destination to put the trucks together. The military developed the IKEA solution, “knocked-down shipping,”30 which broke the vehicle down enough so it took up only a third of the space but could still be assembled at the other end by inexperienced men with simple tools. Such innovations—and there were a lot of them—crammed more and more stuff into the waiting aircraft.
The planes to aid China, with their shrunken cargo and enlarged holds, started south from Miami, flying a route called the “Fireball Express.” They landed on the eastern edge of Puerto Rico, which, along with the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, had been turned into a giant military base. Then south to more bases on the eastern lobe of Brazil, from which they sped east toward Africa.
There is a small volcanic island called Ascension, situated in the mid-Atlantic between South America and West Africa. It is one of the most unappetizing landing spots on the map: jagged with rocks, waterless, and far from everything. “A crow would break his leg trying to land there,”31 joked one visitor. Yet in early 1942
the U.S. Army engineers had arrived, and within three months they had blasted off the island’s top and built a long landing strip, followed soon by barracks, a mess hall, and machine shops—everything needed to refresh the planes and send them onward.
From Ascension, the planes touched down on Africa’s west coast and sped across the Sahara. Yet again, bases were needed, and yet again they appeared. Jenifer Van Vleck,32 a curator at the National Air and Space Museum, has compiled a list of the types of buildings that went up on eighteen African air bases, which conveys the magnitude of the undertaking:
Acetylene generator buildings, administration buildings, barber shops, battery shops, butcher shops, carpenter shops, cafeteria buildings, chemical laboratories, churches, classrooms, commissary storehouses, dining halls, dormitories, engine overhaul buildings, electric shops, fire equipment buildings, garages, guard houses, hospital, kitchens, lumber storage, link trainer, laundries, mechanical shops, medical inspection buildings, native barracks (with kitchens, laundries, toilets, and showers), oil storage, office buildings, paint shops, pump houses, power houses, pantries, police post, plumbing shops, radio shops and transmission receiving buildings, stockrooms, slaughter houses, shower buildings, staff buildings and quarters, toilet and locker rooms, warehouses, water towers and tanks, wells.
Some of these bases were deep inland, far from rivers or railroads—this was possible now with aviation. Maintaining them meant hauling tons of supplies for miles along desert trails. To provision one of the more remote bases with fuel, its commander hired out what one of his subordinates estimated to be “probably all the camels in North Africa” to carry gasoline in tins—a four-legged pipeline.33
How to Hide an Empire Page 32