How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  The Fireball Express pushed on to Cairo. It crossed India. Then came the final and most formidable challenge: the 550-mile jump across the Himalayan mountain range. The Himalayas had some of the worst weather in the world, including monsoons, thunderstorms, ice, severe turbulence, and violent downdrafts capable of sucking planes suddenly into the mountainside. Maps were vague, and pilots had to maintain radio silence while flying over enemy territory. They could navigate somewhat by the “aluminum trail,”34 the hundreds of crashed planes that marked the route to China.

  Regular flights over “the Hump,” as the pilots called it, began in December 1942, landing in Kunming, China. This started as a cowboy operation—high-flying daredevils tempting fate. But as the traffic increased, it fell under the stern direction of General William H. Tunner.

  Tunner’s nickname, “Tonnage,” bespoke his coolly logistical inclinations. He made charts and graphs showing the status of each plane. Under his supervision the corridor between India and China turned into an aerial conveyor belt. The aircraft hauled tanks, trucks, and other heavy machinery along with food, fuel, and arms.

  A C-47 approaches Cairo.

  By the end of 1943, planes were touching down in Kunming once every eleven minutes.35 In a twenty-four-hour period in 1945, Tunner landed one every minute and twelve seconds.36

  “Roads, it would seem,37 are no longer essential to military operations” is how a writer summed up the lesson of the Hump. Certainly Japan’s control of Burma had been inconvenient, but Tunner had proved that it wasn’t fatal. After the Hump, he wrote, he “knew that we could fly anything anywhere anytime.”38

  *

  Anything anywhere anytime—this was a far cry from the world of just half a century earlier, when getting to Cuba from Florida was an ordeal. Planes not only added speed, they changed the laws of geopolitics. The surface of the earth, with its strongholds, impassable barriers, and fortified borders, looked different from a cockpit. Contiguous access no longer mattered so much. The old imperialist logic—men with white mustaches coloring in countries on the map—lost a great deal of its force.

  In Europe, the Axis was defeated in a familiar war of fronts and flanks. The Soviets overran Germany from the east, the Anglophone powers came from the west, and they collectively wore Greater Germany down to a thin sliver. In the island-strewn Pacific, however, this new territory-defying logic was on vivid display.

  It could be seen in the “island-hopping” strategy MacArthur and Nimitz used to storm the Pacific. Instead of fighting for contiguous areas, they overleapt Japanese strongholds and pressed onward. Aviation allowed this.

  It also allowed the Allies to do something extraordinary: defeat Japan without setting foot on its main islands. Instead, using bases at Guam, Tinian, Saipan, Okinawa, and Iwo Jima, they laid waste to nearly seventy Japanese cities by air.

  The planes delivered death rather than trucks, but otherwise it wasn’t too different from the Hump. From a small collection of islands, the United States beat Japan into submission without invading.

  The conquest of the Japanese main islands, accomplished entirely by aerial bombing

  The transcendence of surface-hugging technologies in transportation had a direct analogue in communication. Since 1844, when Samuel Morse had tapped out the question what hath god wrought in the world’s first telegram, wires had been a vital instrument of politics. Cables crossed the seas, acting as the nervous systems of large empires. The British, champions of the cable game, had by the early twentieth century gained control of more than half the world’s cables. They also, through Malaya, possessed the world’s sole supply of the natural latex guttapercha—the only material until plastic that could effectively insulate deep-sea submarine cables.

  Yet mere preponderance wasn’t enough. The British obsessed over acquiring an “all red” network, red being the color of the British Empire on the map. Such a network, passing only through British territory, would offer protection from foreign powers that might cut or tap Britain’s cables.

  Britain achieved its all-red network and, with it, invulnerability. Everyone else, meanwhile, learned the cost of not having a secure network. In the opening days of the First World War, Britain cut Germany’s transatlantic cables—something it could easily do,39 as Germany did not control the territory around them. The Germans were then forced to use unreliable intermediaries to carry their messages, which opened them up to espionage. In 1917 the German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann sent a proposal to Mexico promising to help Mexico “reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona” in exchange for an alliance. But the British intercepted the message and shared it with Washington. The “Zimmermann Telegram,” as it is now known, was crucial in drawing the United States into the war.

  “The All-Red Line Around the World”: The main routes of Britain’s cable system, connecting its colonies and passing only through British territory (minus a short jaunt through northern Maine), completed in 1902

  The United States had the fortune of fighting on the British side—i.e., the side with the cables. But it suffered the indignity of having to rely on its ally’s network, which meant both waiting in queue while the British privileged their own messages and leaving itself open to British espionage. In 1917 the only U.S. telegraphic connection between the mainland and the Philippines overloaded and then broke,40 so that for months Washington had no direct link to its largest colony, or to Asia in general.

  Such a feeble, incomplete network wouldn’t suffice in World War II, which was, among other things, an information war. Billions of words would eventually flow overseas from the U.S. mainland—somewhere on the order of eight words transmitted for every Allied bullet fired.41 By D-Day, U.S. teleprinter traffic would reach eight million words a week.

  The United States could have tried to handle this verbal barrage by building its own all-red network, but a truly secure planetary cable system required, as the British had shown, a globe-spanning colonial empire. Instead, the United States came to rely on another technology: radio.

  Radio, like aviation, was a space-hopping technology. Two transceivers were all that was required—there was no need to control the land in between. Radio not only put far-off locales in contact with one another, it allowed for communication with ships, planes, trucks, tanks, submarines, and men in the field (via the new geewhiz technology of the “walkie-talkie”). The thousands of disconnected bases the United States built all over the world couldn’t have operated without it.

  Of course, beaming messages through the air meant that anyone could hear. So the United States also invested heavily in encryption. Sixteen thousand cipher clerks worked encoding and decoding its communications during the war.42

  With encrypted radio, the United States could run a vast network with a small footprint. All it needed were a few spots, ideally in the equatorial zone, where high-frequency radio waves traveled most easily. Major stations at such places as Asmara,43 Karachi, New Delhi, Manila, and Honolulu sufficed to handle the greatest informational flood humanity had yet experienced.

  “We have got our net in,”44 boasted the chief of the Army Communications Service, “and it is the finest network in the world.”

  It was impressive. Though FDR traveled farther and more frequently than any of his predecessors, the Signal Corps kept him in unbroken contact with his Joint Chiefs of Staff and all field commanders, essentially running a mobile situation room at the president’s elbow. At the Yalta Conference in Crimea, he consulted instantaneously with China, France, and Washington. On his return, the stunned president told Congress of the “modern miracle of communications.”45

  Before the invasion of Normandy,46 George Marshall in Washington used a similar system to confer for more than an hour with Dwight Eisenhower in Europe, Douglas MacArthur in the Southwest Pacific, and John Deane in Moscow. The generals communicated by sending short typed messages, which appeared on a screen. In other words, they texted.

  Half a year into the
war, the United States figured out how to fax images wirelessly, a technology it used for maps, weather charts, and news photos. The famous Iwo Jima flag-raising photograph traveled by fax. Soon enough, the military was faxing images in color.47 A color photograph of Truman, Stalin, and Clement Attlee meeting at Potsdam traveled directly to Washington from Berlin.

  On the centennial of Samuel Morse’s 1844 what hath god wrought message,48 which had traveled between Washington and Baltimore, the Signal Corps sent the same message around the world in three and a half minutes. Less than a year later, it sent another message around the globe in nine and a half seconds. It used only five wireless stations, each able to transmit for thousands of miles by reflecting radio waves off the ionosphere.

  The message? this is what god hath wrought. It was signed army communications service.

  Half a year later, the Signal Corps started bouncing radio waves off the moon. It was the first use of outer space for communications—a portent of the satellite age to come.

  Planes and radio meant that cargo and information could move swiftly from spot to spot, leaping over enemy territory if necessary. Yet could the cargo survive the haul? Human cargo was notoriously tricky in this regard, given humans’ tendency to contract diseases whenever they moved long distances or en masse. Walt Whitman’s characterization of war as “nine hundred and ninety parts diarrhoea to one part glory” was apt well into the twentieth century.49 World War I had killed about eight million in the various belligerents’ militaries. But that was nothing compared with the pandemic of Spanish flu that the war unleashed, which killed somewhere between fifty million and one hundred million.

  World War II looked as if it might be even worse. Its global expanse and surfeit of airplanes threatened to carry diseases rapidly around the planet, touching off pandemic after pandemic.

  MacArthur’s troops in the South Pacific were in this respect the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. Technically they were fighting the Japanese, but their far more serious enemy was malaria, which initially caused eight to ten times as many casualties as combat did.50 The lucky ones who dodged malaria had tropical sores, dengue fever, dysentery, and typhus to look forward to. One observer judged MacArthur’s emaciated, sunken-eyed men in New Guinea to be “perhaps the most wretched-looking soldiers ever to wear the American uniform … There was hardly a soldier,51 among the thousands who went into the jungle, who did not come down with some kind of fever.”

  Malaria was especially nettlesome because the customary remedies were no longer available. More than 95 percent of the supply of quinine,52 the most effective antimalarial, had come from the cinchona plantations of the Dutch East Indies—now in Japanese hands. And the insecticide used to fumigate the Panama Canal Zone, pyrethrum, had come principally from Japan.

  It was the rubber problem all over again, and scientists raced to solve it. Dozens of university laboratories screened more than fourteen thousand compounds in search of a synthetic antimalarial.53 Prisoners and conscientious objectors were brought in as guinea pigs.54

  Two compounds worked well: atabrine and chloroquine. Atabrine turned the skin an alarming shade of yellow and disturbed the gastrointestinal tract, but it brought down malaria rates considerably. Chloroquine, which debuted at the end of the war, worked even better. Together, the synthetic drugs not only replaced quinine, they surpassed it.

  Sign at army hospital in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea

  The most impressive synthetic countermeasure wasn’t a drug, but an insecticide. Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, known by the mercifully short acronym DDT, had been developed shortly before the war in a Swiss lab, but it was the U.S. military that started mass-producing it. It seemed miraculous: cheap, easy to apply, easy to ship, and astonishingly persistent—a single application lasted months. Better still, it worked against all sorts of bugs, not only mosquitoes but lice, crop-munching beetles, and other pests.

  Insect control in the days of the Panama Canal had been an arduous, artisanal process, requiring workers to fumigate every house and interrogate every puddle. DDT, by contrast, could be sprayed by planes—Skeeter Beaters, they were called. Whole Pacific islands were blanketed by DDT in advance of landings, destroying the main vectors of disease before the first men hit the beaches.

  A naval medical officer who watched the Skeeter Beaters work their magic in the Pacific theater described the scene, noting with awe the “complete destruction of plant and animal life” DDT could cause.55 On Saipan, he wrote, “scarcely a living thing” remained after the planes had made their passes. “No birds, no mammals, no insects, except a few flies, and the plant life was decreasing.” It’s likely that some of the devastation he saw was caused by the solvent used with DDT rather than the insecticide itself, but the lesson was nonetheless clear.

  Combined, the antimalarials and DDT were transformative. By 1944, the malaria rate in MacArthur’s disease-ridden command had dropped 95 percent.56 Serving under MacArthur, by then, was only slightly more dangerous than serving on the mainland, from a disease perspective. After the war, the officer in charge of the antimalarial campaign proudly reported that “man has developed a mastery of malaria.”57

  And not only malaria. A group of new sulfonamide-based drugs could treat dozens of bacterial diseases and infections: gonorrhea, pneumonia, strep throat, burns, scarlet fever, dysentery, and so on. Penicillin, the most powerful bacteria killer, was honed during the war, too, turning battlefield injuries from likely killers to recoverable setbacks. The death rate for all disease in the army in World War II was just 4 percent of what it had been in the First World War.58

  The new drugs and sprays not only made war safer, they made movement safer. No longer were areas like Panama graveyards for mainlanders, the sorts of places to which they’d bring their coffins in their luggage. In fact, during the war the United States established 134 bases in Panama outside the carefully policed Canal Zone. Those bases were partly to protect the canal, but they also served as places to practice maneuvers and experiment with chemical weapons, such as the jungle tests Cornelius Rhoads oversaw.

  Using the Panamanian jungle for tests or training would have been insane a few decades earlier. But with Skeeter Beaters (which could kill 95 percent of the adult mosquitoes),59 insect repellents, antimalarials, mosquito netting, and ground spraying, a forbidding environment became hospitable. The soldiers plunged into the thick brush. And they were fine.

  *

  What of the other cargo the planes carried, the objects? How would they fare when transported across the world? We rarely contemplate this, but for most of history, objects hadn’t been built to travel. The predicament of the attendees of Arthur MacArthur’s 1901 party in the Philippines—their buildings rotting, their hats dripping down their faces—had been a perpetual hazard.

  The troubles with transport continued into the Second World War, which exposed vital matériel to rough handling, sandstorms, high altitudes, subzero temperatures, seawater, and sweltering jungles. An observer visiting New Caledonia in MacArthur’s command was shocked by what the climate had done to storage depots. Cans were “completely covered by rust.”60 Wooden crates, which worked perfectly well on the mainland, had rotted so badly that “the wood could be mashed between one’s fingers.” The center of large stacks of stored food “looked like a big mold culture.”

  Specialized equipment proved especially vulnerable.61 Gas masks and electrical equipment grew fungus in the tropics. Batteries were particularly finicky, giving perpetual trouble. In New Guinea, ants chewed through the insulation on telephone wires and radio equipment. An inspection on major Pacific bases found that 20 to 40 percent of the matériel in depots was unusable.62

  Yet again, the engineers went to work. Their task was a remarkable one: to world-proof the inventory of the military. To make sure that objects didn’t stop working whenever they moved.

  The quartermaster’s office devised what it called “amphibious” packaging,63 made from newly developed materials th
at could withstand long voyages and exposure to the elements. Plasticized paper, silica gel, sisal, and asphalt featured in these multilayer packages, which portended today’s foil-plastic-paper shelf-stable milk cartons. Burlap sacks were similarly replaced by multiwall sacks of paper, plastic, and asphalt. Tin cans, for their part, could be coated in lacquer or enamel to withstand rust.

  It went beyond the packaging. The military also learned to world-proof its equipment, rendering objects themselves suitable for any climate. Matériel was coated, sprayed, and sheathed in plastic to render it impervious to the elements. One of the most impressive achievements, because it was so complex, was the rugged, portable high-frequency radio unit developed for use in the field.

  In area after area, the military confronted the challenges of world shipping. It is in no small part due to its accomplishments that our world today is the way it is—a place where objects are not confined to climatic zones, but can move without malfunctioning.

  Medical breakthroughs enabled men to parachute into difficult environments and survive. Engineering innovations meant that the things they carried could, too.

  *

  Aviation, knocked-down shipping, wireless communication, cryptography, chloroquine, DDT, and world-proofing. These were disparate technologies, but what united them was their effect on movement. They allowed the United States to move easily through foreign lands it didn’t control, substituting technology for territory.

  The substitution was never complete. It’s not as if, even today, all transit is by plane or all information is sent wirelessly (underwater cables play a surprisingly large role in our internet-connected world). But the important thing was that objects, people, and messages could be moved this way. That possibility diminished the importance of strategically valuable areas.