Bases To Be

A flight of U.S. Army bombers landed last week in Trinidad to take up station there. From Brooklyn an Army transport laden with infantry and coast artillery sailed for the same destination. The two events, as intrinsically insignificant as the appearance of the first robin in the spring, were nonetheless informative. They did not mean that now or even soon the U. S. would have a chain of well defended bases in the Atlantic and Caribbean. But they did mean that action was getting under way, and they implied that of all the chain of southern defense sites--not only those leased from Britain but those at Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and the Canal Zone (see map, p. 21)--Trinidad's development stood high on the list of priorities.

Most of the still undeveloped sites will rate as service stations for naval, air and land forces. Thus Bermuda and Jamaica are to be major service stations (naval and air); Antigua and St. Lucia are to be secondary ones (for air). Three of the links in the chain will be much more than service stations. Trinidad, Puerto Rico, the Canal Zone will be the key positions.

Trinidad is the southern spearhead, where defense is most urgent because it lies athwart the most practicable route for an enemy move from Dakar in western Africa, thence to some landing point on the eastern hump of South America, and northward to the Canal Zone, Central America, the U.S. itself. Geographically, Trinidad is also in a position to protect--or to dominate--the whole uncertain reach of northern South America. So far it is not a protection but only a position.

On the northwest point of Trinidad, just above Port-of-Spain, the Navy has leased one of the finest anchorages in the Western Hemisphere: a place of deep, clear water between low islands and the shore, where warships can ride at protected ease. The small but hilly islands are ideal for fortification. The Navy also has ample land for a huge shore establishment: Marines, maintenance facilities for ships in the anchorage, headquarters forces. For the present, and for a considerable time to come, the Navy will have only what God and the British had already put in Trinidad: the anchorage itself, the great docks and the harbor of Port-of-Spain.

Britons and native Trinidadians do not altogether welcome the Navy's coming. For the Navy site is where Port-of-Spain has done its weekending. Upper-class British can find other beaches and cruising grounds, but where the Negroes and Trinidad's proud Hindu and Moslem Indians can go for their fun, they do not know.

On the Army sites, inland from Port-of-Spain, contractors and thousands of Trinidad laborers were frantically at work last week. The defense project had reached a point where smoke clouded the hot sky over two great airfields to be--smoke from thousands of acres of timbered lands, where the jungle was being hacked and burned away. The War Department had clamped a rigid rule of secrecy upon its officers in all the bases outside the U.S., Trinidad included. But from the public, paved highways through the whole Army area, natives riding their stunted donkeys and any visiting motorist could see the outline of what is soon to be a tremendous outpost of the U.S. Army Air Corps.

The Army planes which arrived were only a token force. Until the jungle has been cut, burned, ploughed, rolled into smooth subjection, planes will have to berth on Port-of-Spain's Piarco airport, alongside the few British trainers already there. Not until fall will the Army be able to move to its own leased sites, stud them with security forces of infantry, artillery, antiaircraft. Neither the Army nor the Navy today has anything to fight a battle with in Trinidad. But they (and the civilian contractors who are doing the field work) have got a sense of urgency, a desperate haste, which promises that Trinidad will soon be a spearhead with a point.

Puerto Rico, not so new a site as Trinidad, has been called "The Gibraltar of the Caribbean" off and on since 1939. when the Army and Navy recognized the hot, unhappy island's great strategic importance, its key situation to the eastern approaches of the Panama Canal. But after two years, Puerto Rico is far from being a Gibraltar.

The Navy dawdled for months, finally got its great Isla Grande air base in San Juan Harbor under way. Once started, construction went apace. Isla Grande already harbors a small force of naval patrol planes, by autumn will be completed and ready for a much larger and more effective combat force. But it is not a fortress, merely a station which will never amount to more than the power of the planes stationed there. Planned, but still years from completion, is a great Navy anchorage off the eastern tip of Puerto Rico, between Vieques and Culebra Islands. Those sheltered waters can give anchorage to an enormous fleet (they did so in 1939, during maneuvers in the Caribbean). But the anchorage will not be a major naval base until it gets coastal fortifications, a great breakwater, shore repair facilities--which, at best, will be many years abuilding.

First assigned to command the Army's Puerto Rican Department when it was founded in 1939 was a stiff officer of Engineers, Major General Edmund L. Daley. An enormous construction job had to be done in Puerto Rico, but the Quartermaster Department had charge of that. When the War Department at last asked the Corps of Engineers to take over from the fumbling Quartermasters and get on with it, Engineer Daley was not chosen to boss the job. He had neither got results with his command nor won its affection. This year he was given command of the Fifth Corps--a command which requires the best talent available.

Successor to General Daley was a wiry little Field Artilleryman, Major General James L. Collins, who had done well in command of the Second (Infantry) Division in Texas, in many an Army job before that. General Collins took over at San Juan in mid-April. Before him is a terrific job of trying to retrieve wasted months of misdirected effort in Puerto Rico. If he can have more and better support from Washington than unfortunate General Daley got, he has a chance of succeeding and perhaps winning command of the whole Caribbean area.

War Department restrictions now forbid Army officers in Puerto Rico to disclose what they have and have not there, what they plan to have for defense on the island. Before these restrictions went into effect last month, Army announcements had already summarized the forces then on the island. At huge, slowly building Borinquen Field on Puerto Rico's northwestern tip, there was one group of about 15 obsolescent medium bombers; at Ponce air base, near the south-central coast, there was an equal number of equally outmoded P36 pursuit planes. Planned and announced but not yet at their stations were three more bombardment squadrons, a reconnaissance squadron (about 70 more planes, 1,400 more officers and men, according to the Array announcement).

Ground forces then on the island were hardly worth hiding: a few Regular Army battalions of engineers, artillerymen, coast artillerymen (antiaircraft) sent over from the continental U.S., plus some 14,000 Puerto Rican recruits who had been taken into expanded Regular Army units, or into two Puerto Rican National Guard regiments. All the Puerto Ricans were volunteers. To miserable, jobless and underpaid natives from San Juan's hellish slums, or from the poverty-ridden countryside, the Army's $21 a month looked like a fortune. These unfortunates, underfed, underbred, did the best they could in U.S. uniforms. They would have done a little better if they had had more U.S. equipment. Mixing them in with regulars from the mainland did nothing to improve the quality of the island's defense.

The Army, in brief, had no effective fighting strength in Puerto Rico. Nobody in San Juan knew this better than did Germany's alert, inquisitive Consul Henry Freese. All he had to do to find out, if he was in any doubt, was to glance at published pictures of the farewell review staged for General Daley in March. One shot showed a battalion at Fort Buchanan, having no rifles, parading with swagger sticks.

Puerto Rico was not the only place short of men and arms. General Collins will doubtless try to get arms and equipment for his men, but only the War Department and the General Staff in Washington can step up the quality and tempo of planning for Puerto Rico. Until that is done, the Army will have only an eggshell Gibraltar in Puerto Rico.

The Canal Zone is a place to be defended, as well as a base from which to direct air and naval operations over the Caribbean area. Commander of the Panama Canal Department is tall, resplendent Lieut. General Daniel Van Voorhis. He also heads the whole Caribbean Defense Command, which up to now has existed principally on paper. In December 1940, when the War Department was straining every nerve to put the Canal Zone on a war footing, General Van Voorhis had the following important order distributed: "New transportation is arriving in the Department covered with dull finish O.D. paint. In order to improve the appearance of these vehicles, they will be cleaned, waxed and polished to a smooth, bright finish."

Its present defenses are nothing to brag about. This condition does not worry Army people on the spot as much as might be expected. They know that the vulnerable Canal and the narrow Isthmus of Panama have inherent defense limitations which no amount of badly needed antiaircraft equipment or planes can wholly overcome. The only sure defense of the Canal is at a distance: by ship, by plane, by economic, political and diplomatic alliance with the countries of nearby Latin America and by occupation or neutralization of the bases from which an enemy might attack. The U.S. now lacks those outward defenses; to provide them is one purpose of the Caribbean ring.

What worries the Army and Navy more is the constantly widening radius of possible attack on the Canal. Whenever the range of bombers lengthens, that radius lengthens. Even the Coast Artillerymen who man the great, fixed guns at the Canal entrances place no great faith in such emplacements. No enemy fleet is likely to come within range while the Canal is still intact. Coast Artillery anti-aircraft men, although they could use more and better guns, have gone into the jungles, placed and manned what guns they have there, done a heroic job of soldiering. But they, too, have no illusions about last-ditch defense. If ever enemy bombers in sufficient force get over the Zone, and find the few small targets that mean anything, the Canal can be closed; the U.S. Fleet can be divided.

Theoretically outmoded U.S. planes (example: the Douglas B-18A bomber) now make ten-and twelve-hour flights, hop non-stop from Miami or Texas to the Zone. Pan American Clippers do it in six and a half hours. Existing bombers could, if pushed to the extreme, fly from French Dakar to the Canal Zone. Air power has thus completely revised all theories of the defense of the Canal. The only military solution: defensive air and naval power, based as far as possible from the Canal itself, as near as possible to the starting points of enemy attack.

That solution means absolute military superiority not only of the area within the Caribbean ring but of the Latin-American approaches beyond it, the approaches from Africa and Europe as well. That is why Army and Naval officers in the Canal Zone impatiently dismiss queries and quibbles about the Canal's local defenses. The Canal is still a focal point of the Caribbean defense system. But the Canal's defense today is just as good as and no better than the defenses of Trinidad, Puerto Rico and the other outlying U.S. bases to be.

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