It's the Upkeep

In chancelleries around the world, diplomats were conferring over green baize tables and mahogany desks about U.S. rights to postwar military bases. But to cold-eyed strategists in Washington, there was just as great danger from within as from without. Unless money were made available soon, defense lines and base symbols drawn on paper might prove to be no more durable than the paper itself.

The situation was most acute in the Pacific. Bases on former Jap-mandated islands, in the Philippines, Ryukyus and Aleutians, were the fruit of great and costly amphibious campaigns. The danger was that this fruit would be rotten before it was ripe.

For all these bases were far from finished when Japan surrendered. Except in Hawaii, there had been little permanent construction, in iron and concrete, during the war. Kwajalein and Saipan, Iwo and Okinawa had been filled first with tents, then with temporary buildings such as Quonset huts. The life expectancy of these structures, under tropic rains and salt spray, is scarcely more than two years. If the bases were to be any good a few years hence, the corrugated iron must be replaced with reinforced concrete. At Wake, Marcus and Truk, where U.S. forces did not land until after the surrender, the bases had to be built from the substructure up.

Drawing the Purse Strings. Once, during the war, there had been money for the work, but no time; now there was time, but virtually no money. The Navy had asked $400 million for upkeep and improvement of its bases in both the Atlantic and Pacific--most of it to be spent in the Pacific. President Truman, awaiting final disposition of the islands, cut this out of the budget bill. Whatever the Army might ask would be subject to the same policy of wait & see.

While politicians and diplomats twiddled their tongues, the bases bought with blood and fire continued to deteriorate. At Wake Island, undergoing its third build-up in five years (first by the U.S., then by the Japs, now by the U.S. again), there was not enough paint to protect the mushrooming Quonsets from the gnawing, salt-laden air.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.