One blindness that deprives the American of a political understanding of the world he fights in is this: he allows himself, being a workman of tools at heart, to be seduced into teenage questions of statistics, techniques, and personal ideals. These should have been settled in his mind when he entered manhood, subordinated to a general curiosity as to the duties of being an adult and an American. The defect may lie in the unreal manner in which history is taught to Americans, which seems to commit the making of foreign affairs to other responsibilities than their own.
Today the fighting man overseas is waiting for the statesman at home to do something. The statesman at home is waiting for the people to suggest for him to do something. The people are waiting for the press and radio to suggest what they should ask the statesman to do. The press and radio are waiting for their foreign correspondents and war reporters overseas to suggest to them what they should suggest to the public. And the reporters and correspondents are unable to analyze, much less suggest political action, because the fighting men (officers and censorship, that is) say that politics is the affair of the statesman back home.
The nation, too, feels a right to do what it revealingly calls “getting away from the war.” This attitude is natural. Lacking any pattern for being self-interested in gainful war, unsupplied with statesmen capable of building an enduring peace consonant with his own sacrifices, the American turns to an emotional apprehension of war. If you cannot think about the war, can you not at least feel about it? Besides the escapism away from the war there is in the United States a unique escapism into war, into atrocity stories, magic-weapon stories, hero stories, sex-and-war stories, that defeats the political teacher. Correspondents have observed the impossibility of inducing the American people to make a candid reappraisal of their allies and aims. The will to self-deceive, the determination to be emotional, is almost impenetrable.
The American, moreover, honestly hates war, not for moral reasons—for he can be brutal as well as sentimental—but because he “sees no sense in it.” He does not understand international politics nor wish to practice them. Without politics, of course, there is as little “sense” in war as painting on a canvas of air. Why interrupt a sweet life for this dangerous, unintelligible effort? In war he does not want to take political action; in peace he does not even want to think about it. Like a teenager in love he has a sense of moral superiority mixed with an inadequate sense of his interests. The result is alternating international crushes and renunciations.
Besides being held off from international politics by his distaste for war, unable to give war a productive purpose because of his distaste for international politics, and drawn elsewhere by the candied diversions of his amusing culture, the American sees that overseas bases, granting that they are necessary, can only be acquired in two ways: asking for them or taking them. Instantly, misgivings arise. Either method involves plain speaking and vigorous action. In international affairs he shrinks from both. He cuts down his political concept to fit his self-distrust. His allies help. In the end he is empty-headed, empty-handed, strategically and politically disarmed, and silent.
In their first history Americans were the subjects of empire. Eventually they shook off the hateful harness. Not to be part of an empire, to an American, means to be free and happy; therefore not to impose empire on anyone else means only the golden rule. Past empires all fell to pieces; if his nation is careful not to become an empire, it will not fall to pieces.
The temporary duration of empire is another defect, to an American eye, in what many happy imperial subjects consider its grandeur. Looking backward, he can recite the disintegration of empires. But because he looks forward too infrequently and perhaps pessimistically, he misses something more significant than their fall—the never-ending rise of new empires. He perceives the decline of the British raj in India, but may not notice that this is only the bugle of taps soon followed, as history goes, by the reveille of an independent Indian Empire vaster than the original raj.
While the American stands aside, in a sanctimony and virtue that are real only to himself, while he refuses to have anything to do with the control of empire—except subsidize it with his resources and his life—new empires are taking shape within the boundaries of the old. Some will be stillborn, some will reach puberty and die, some will survive. Only the European empires, those the United States has chosen to defend, are on the wane. Other empires are waking to succeed them.
Since France, Holland and Belgium (among empires) all fell, it has remained for Great Britain and the United States to sustain worldwide sea and air power. Britain cannot bear this burden alone. The United States therefore takes over the major responsibility, strengthening her ally by lease-lending 1400 naval vessels.
“Exploitation” is a term the American uses without painstaking search of its meaning applied to himself. It troubles him little that his corporations descend on the countries of Central America, alter their homestead economy into monocultural, industrial farming, modernize their life without getting them any more security, and finally make them completely banana-dependent or sugar-dependent, hence cash-dependent and America-dependent. The American thinks as little of this kind of imperialism, in which he has many willing Latin partners, as the Briton considers the tentacles of the Leverhulme group, which regulates native-collected copra from Funafuti to Stanleyville, buys at its own price, and finally holds under patent enough substitutes to keep all the coconut pickers, be they Bangalas or Maoris, completely at its mercy. To the Anglo-American this is not imperialism; this is business.
Are overseas bases imperialism? Of course. America became an imperial nation when she decided to send lend-lease to support the British Empire and the three other sub-empires of that political holding company. America did not become a possessing or an exploiting imperial power, but a protective imperial power.
To retain bases is to retain security. It is not to acquire an exploitable empire. The aim is not trade; bases are not for the advantage of our Merchant Marine, our world air passenger system, or our business corporations. Strategy and business are separate. Moreover, “retain” does not mean “seize” or “colonize.” It means to acquire by purchase, or under reverse lend-lease, sufficient acres to maintain the wharves, air fields, roads, magazines and fortifications already proven necessary to the United States by two world wars. We want bases, not colonies.
Willing to sustain the empires of Western Europe everywhere in the world, America neurotically shrinks from the naughty word imperial as though it were tainted. But in 19th-century Marxist dogma, a colony's resources were exploited to benefit a large industrial nation. The war has turned Marx upside down. Today, imperialism being reversed, it is the endangered colony, the appendage of empire, which exploits the protecting industrial nation.
THE ACQUISITION OF BASES
Acquiring bases should be segregated from the division of spoils of this war. Bases are not spoils. The United States has a claim to a share of the territorial divisions that may follow the war. This claim is proportionate to her war effort as compared to that of other powers (war effort here not to be confused with “war suffering” or “depth of defeat” or “devastation through invasion”). Spoils and bases are things apart—spoils being a matter of political prize, while bases are a matter of political stability. It is necessary to keep them distinguished from each other.
A system of permanent bases has a single purpose: to lift the political power in peacetime of the United States to equal the American wartime responsibilities on its allies' behalf—to apply in peace the security lessons of the revealed strategy of the war. Is it too demanding to suggest that political agreements be made with the subsidized powers in return for lend-lease, corresponding to the degree of help they needed? The suggestion is not made with the flinty idea of extorting advantage from a neighbor's difficulty, for statesmen have another obligation than driving hard bargains on behalf of their country. They have an obligation to lead their people in the ways
of reality. But a soft and indefinite agreement does as little service to the national political ethos as to the budget.
In this sense there is no doubt that lend-lease, politically unimplemented, set back American strategic internationalism possibly as much as a generation. More serious, it set back the thought of her allies, for it ratified the mischievous Wilsonian policy of “disinterested”—hence irrational—aid, and laid grounds for them to count on a permanent military subsidy to Europe, never anchored politically or strategically.
Suspended before the American constantly is a temptation to evade the hard planning he has to do. It is so easy for the American to allow himself to think that, because the enemies of the British, French, Belgian, and Dutch Empires are the same, “it is all one war.” Has it no significance that the air fields of Asia are being built with American labor, American materials, American engineering? Does the bloody sand by Paestum's old temples have no geographical significance? Have the hard coral graves of the Gilbert atolls no deeper meaning than that a force of Americans happened to die here, by gunfire, rather than at Key West of old age?
The sea has suffocated our submariners, sunk in the watery abysses of the western Pacific and the Indian Ocean, the China Sea and the Sea of Japan. Dark ocean fills the pure chamber of their minds. Their eye sockets are inlets. In the collapsed castle of their clean bones small fishes come and go with antennae for eyes. They died unnecessarily, to patch a political defeat in a diplomatic conference. How many more such riven chambers of drowned manhood must slide downward in slow zigzag—stricken, flooded, and silent—to the bottom of the great seas of the world before America controls permanent bases in the scattered waters beneath which her best young men are sleeping?
BASES LOADED
How does it happen that only in the third year of war the United States began to awaken to geographical commitments, and understand they must be permanently implemented? A letter from an army censor, addressed to a war correspondent [Weller—ed.] in the Southwest Pacific zone of General MacArthur, in support of his total suppression of a political dispatch with no military content, offers a clue as to why the American public is always politically uninformed, and its government spends its time diplomatically slamming the doors of empty barns. The letter reads:
We believe that a correspondent has a certain duty towards the Commander of the Forces whom he represents, and it is the Commander-in-Chief's desire that nothing of a political nature be released as coming from his staff of correspondents, and nothing that may be in any way criticizing the efforts of any Commander of any of the allied nations.
What the United States badly needs is a long cold bath of reality. There is no advantage in winning strong points overseas if the home public surrenders them. The American people have been politically bewildered about their foreign policy for fifty years. In war they are alternately drugged with the promise of bloodless and easy victory, then whipped up with official warnings that peace will be expensive and is far off. Needled with atrocity stories, flattered and exhorted with heroism, this people never leaves itself enough energy to think about its own political advantage.
One granite fact both Britain and America must keep before their eyes: This war was won not by their consummate brilliance or their close loyalty, but chiefly by the mistakes in military estimation made by a cunning but disoriented enemy leader. One cannot expect such good fortune every time. The Anglo-Saxon inventive genius in this war was never more than six months ahead of the enemy's, and at times more than a year behind. The narrowness of this technical lead should never be forgotten by the British or American peoples; it represents the margin of their victory.
The American forces, as the war goes on and they come to associate themselves with its scattered terrains, feel a sense of futility about the way they arrive, fight for, and leave (some of them by the quiet road) the raw places of the earth to which they have given so much. The development of New Guinea and the Solomons, for example, is the greatest piece of colonial expansion ever undertaken in the Pacific, nearly all of it done by American men, machinery, and money. One who has seen a skip-bombing pilot, a hero of the battle of the Bismarck Sea, take a Fortress with nine crew members off Seven Mile airdrome at Moresby amid the milky softness of the rainy tropical night, hit a hundred yards off the hard-bitten strip, and die in the space of a man's breath with all his comrades in the erupting flame of his own bombs is not likely to have leisure to reflect, even if he is aware of it, that in that splash of fire—no unusual occurrence on any war front—there was destroyed enough of value in machinery, not including men's lives, to have met the budget for the administration of Papua for ten years. Yet he senses something unbalanced, unreal, and untold in fighting for victory alone. Victory is not enough.
In a thousand years no power could get agriculturally enough from the Solomons or New Guinea what America has invested there in two years, from docks and air fields to roads and drainage systems. In New Guinea, Australia—under her mandate—will continue to exploit the gold and oil. In the South Seas the coconut plantations of the British soap cartel will resume operations, handsomely reimbursed at one to eight dollars per tree for each palm felled in their defense by U.S. forces.
Little though these considerations may mean to the American people, citizens would do well to remember that it is small satisfaction (besides being poor strategy) to spend your youth grubbing out a stake for someone else, to leave behind everything except malaria: the harbor you dug, the roads you built through the jungle, the air fields you hewed from the coral, the wrecks of your bombers in the impassable mountains, the disintegrating graves under the palms by the beach.
And does not the American home front, too, begin to need something more tangible to fight for than “it shall not happen again”? There is a sense of subtraction about the war in the United States. The young men and women are subtracted from daily life, the food is subtracted from the stores, the cars are subtracted from the streets, the money is subtracted from the paycheck, the husband is subtracted from the family, the marriage is subtracted from the maiden, the unborn are subtracted from the would-be mother, the truth is often subtracted from the news, and the politics of the war is subtracted from the fighting of it. This subtraction is due to the fact that the war is being fought, in the United States, without apparent gainful aims.
Peoples may declare war for ideals, or in self-defense. Soldiers, however, must fight and die to gain strong points. If these are renounced afterward, the war has been lost. Statesmen may convince the people it has been won, but actually it has been lost. The cost of obtaining bases overseas is the whole cost of the war. It is useless to pretend that any well-wishing structure of peace, or alliance of allies, can transcend the absolutes of possessive strategy. Wherever we fight is permanently valuable to us strategically. If not, we should not have been obliged to mobilize our industrial power and send our resources there to defend it. If the situation is dangerous for America at this spot now, it will probably be dangerous again.
In a war whose costs to the national heritage, the dowry of the American earth, are not yet measurable, political advantage can be salvaged. Only strategic bases overseas can be saved of the American expenditure. Congress was asked for a single war year to vote 100 billion dollars. It has been computed by a financial writer that the interest alone on this amount “would run the country in normal times for an entire year.” A measurement of war losses in billions of dollars is childish. Cost is a measure only of the nation's willingness to indebt itself. To find out the true expenditure, and its political worth, one should inquire: How long do citizens wish this nation to exist before it goes the way of Byzantium and Knossos?
We wrest our resources from the soil, never to return, and throw them into worldwide battle. More! More! More! is the American battle cry. Instead it should be Where? Where? Where? This pair of world wars are not the last for us. We shall fight again overseas; our men will die again. The world does not change.
Doe
s America wish to know what she has kept of victory that will protect the peace? Let her count her bases overseas.
XV
The Home Front
While in the United States, Weller recovered his health, lectured widely on the war, wrote some of the longer pieces that appear in this book (de Gaulle, New Guinea wrecks, etc.), and fretted about missing the big story: the Allied invasion of Europe. He was unable to return to the war until the autumn of 1944.
A frequent theme was trying to describe what the conflict was like for the average soldier fighting somewhere—or waiting to fight. As he wrote once: “War is a bore when you are not running it. Its mitigations are several: the discharge of the sense of duty, the sense of participation with others in a simple common cause, and (for a surprising number) the release from civilian responsibility. But it still adds up to boredom.”
THE HOME FRONT HAS THREE DUTIES
TO FIGHTERS
Asks Support, Affection and Political Vigilance
(George Weller, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, beyond question is one of the outstanding correspondents covering the war. He recently returned from a three-year journey around the world which gave him a first-hand view of the fighting in the Balkans, in Central Africa, Malaya, New Guinea, the Solomons, and the islands of the Pacific. Now home on leave, although suffering from the effects of malaria and burdened by a heavy schedule of writing and lecturing, he has written this article for Illinois Mobilizes as his contribution to the home front effort and thus to the fighting men with whom he has eaten, slept, marched and faced death.)
Weller's War Page 57