Back-Door Bases

Last week, as the U.S. sped work on its Caribbean rampart, from Bermuda to British Guiana, the U.S. Navy was busy on further defenses to the Panama Canal. While the first U.S. draft of soldiers for the Lend-Lease base in Bermuda shoved off from Brooklyn, Rear Admiral Frank H. Sadler, commanding the Fifteenth (Canal Zone) Naval District, told newsmen of growing dumps of supplies and equipment at Balboa, the great naval base on the Pacific side of the Panama Canal.

Protected by great stretches of blue water, Balboa is the heart of naval defense of the Canal, will need far-flung defenses if an enemy ever gets a foothold on the Pacific side of South America. It may need protection, even before that event, from harassing raids by enemy carriers or by long-range bombers, when factories begin producing raiders like Douglas Aircraft Co.'s B-19 (see p. 19).

Against these still remote possibilities, Admiral Sadler told what the Navy is doing to extend its Pacific defenses: four bases for patrol seaplanes, also usable for Navy light craft. Farthest flung will be Ecuador's Galapagos Islands, astride the Equator, 1,000 miles from the Big Ditch. There, in a twelve-island archipelago fantastically storied as a haven for pirates and more modern escapists, Navy airmen will set up patrol bases, scan the Pacific to south, west and north. Another base will be set up 550 miles north of the Galapagos, on deserted Cocos Island, a favorite picnic stop of President Roosevelt's, where treasure-hunting for buried pirate gold is the only industry. (Costa Rica, the owner, now limits treasure-seeking parties to one at a time to avoid trouble.) Third base will be in the Gulf of Fonseca on Honduras' coast. The fourth will be far south, in one of the bays on the coast of friendly Ecuador.

How far arrangements for using these bases and listening posts have gone, the State Department would not say last week. But with the Navy already piling up equipment and getting ready to move it, it was a safe bet that the U.S.'s good neighbors were getting ready to sign on the dotted line, if they had not already done so.

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