8

REOPENING THE FRONTIER

I’m not exactly sure why for years I overlooked the importance of the Destroyers-for-Bases deal. This was President Franklin Roosevelt’s agreement with Prime Minister Winston Churchill to exchange fifty World War I–era U.S. naval destroyers for ninety-nine-year leases for U.S. military bases in eight British colonies in the Western Hemisphere. In my work I tended to mention the deal as part of the history of U.S. bases abroad, but I spent little time investigating it or the bases involved. I, like others, at times confused the agreement with Lend-Lease, another World War II program, under which the United States provided military aid to Britain and dozens of other allies. I probably didn’t pay the deal much attention because the United States would build and occupy thousands of other bases during World War II. A handful of bases in eight colonies were the first in the new collection, but they were just a handful. Plus, almost all of them were now closed. How important could these bases be?

As I looked more carefully, I began to realize that when President Roosevelt called the Destroyers-for-Bases deal “epochal,” he was not simply engaging in presidential hyperbole or self-aggrandizement.1 Even if most of these bases are now closed, one journalist proved prophetic in suggesting that “bases once established on a ninety-nine-year lease are . . . to all intents and purposes permanent affairs which will affect policy long after present policy makers have left the stage.”2 Or, as another journalist said of the agreement signed September 2, 1940, “A new chapter in world history was written last week—perhaps the most important chapter of our time.”³

At first, President Roosevelt said he actually didn’t have big news. But the smile on his face belied the secret he was about to share. Shortly before noon on September 3, 1940, riding along the rails outside Charleston, West Virginia, Roosevelt called the traveling press corps of reporters to join him in his private railcar on the Presidential Special. The train was the Air Force One presidential plane of the day. Around twenty journalists crammed around Roosevelt at the back of the train. Some sat at his feet. He was dressed in a lightweight blue suit and “flourishing” his iconic, long-stemmed ivory cigarette holder. A Time magazine reporter described Roosevelt as “professorial” and “relishing the historicity of the scene.” The reporters grew silent amid the sounds of the train’s wheels rolling on the tracks and the swaying of the cars.⁴

The president said that his news was nothing less than “the most important action in the reinforcement of our national security since the Louisiana Purchase.”⁵ At noon that day, he said, his government would inform Congress that the United States had acquired the right to lease air and naval bases for periods of ninety-nine years in eight British colonies in the Western Hemisphere. In exchange the United States would give Britain fifty aging Navy destroyers, built at the end of World War I.⁶ The “base colonies,” as they would soon be known, stretched from Newfoundland (the British colony became part of Canada in 1949) in the north to Bermuda in the mid-Atlantic to the Caribbean islands of the Bahamas, Jamaica, Antigua, Saint Lucia, and Trinidad to British Guiana (today’s Guyana) at the top of South America.⁷ Roosevelt compared himself to Thomas Jefferson, whose purchase of the Louisiana Territory had similarly come without congressional approval.

“What electrified the crowded roomful of correspondents,” wrote one reporter, “was the audacity with which the deal was consummated: it would not be presented to Congress for approval. A congressional veto was out of the question. Congress was being told about it as a fait accompli.”⁸ The New York Times said the deal marked “a new chapter of world history.”9 One journalist described the scene as worthy of a historical canvas capturing “the American story.”¹⁰

Map 13. Bases from Britain: The Destroyers-for-Bases Deal.

On September 2, 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt agreed to exchange fifty World War I–era naval destroyers for ninety-nine-year leases for military bases in eight U.K. colonies in the Western Hemisphere. These were the first of thousands of bases the U.S. military would occupy during World War II. See, for example, High, Base Colonies.

U.S. and U.K. officials signed the deal a day before Roosevelt’s announcement, which was exactly one year and one day after Nazi Germany invaded Poland, starting World War II. In May 1940 Adolf Hitler’s armies had blitzed their way through Western Europe. Since July the German Air Force had been raining bombs on Britain; an invasion appeared imminent. Although the United States would not officially enter the war for another fifteen months, President Roosevelt’s approval of the Destroyers-for-Bases deal marked the first major U.S. move toward formally joining the Allies’ war against the Axis powers. As important for the United States and the world, the deal marked the beginning of a transformation of the United States from one of the world’s most powerful empires into not just an empire of unparalleled military might but also a new kind of empire defined significantly by its global collection of military bases.

Compared to the other empires of the day—especially Britain and France—the United States had, in 1940, a sizable but still “rather insignificant overseas basing system.”¹¹ By the end of World War II, in less than five years’ time, the United States would build and occupy some thirty thousand installations at two thousand base sites worldwide.¹² While large numbers of bases would close at war’s end, what remained was a global base network larger than any in human history. The United States would become a global empire defined to a significant extent by its historically unprecedented collection of bases. These bases would represent a quantitative and qualitative shift in the nature of U.S. power, the U.S. military presence abroad, and the country’s relationship with the rest of the world. What would seem to some to be a prized source of power and stability deriving from World War II would lay the foundation for a long series of wars that have yet to end.

The day of Roosevelt’s announcement, a U.S. military survey team departed for the first of the eight British colonies to develop base-construction plans.¹³ In less than five months, one thousand soldiers (notably all white, in the still-segregated U.S. military) would deploy from Brooklyn’s Army Terminal to Saint John’s, Newfoundland. The Navy would follow with a base of its own in nearby Argentia. Soon a group of smiling sailors was posing on the seaside with a sign reading, “Navy property.”14 Other troops and construction teams rapidly began deploying to the other colonies. Throughout 1941 small ritual ceremonies marked the transfer of base sites to the United States. U.S. officials raised the U.S. flag over territory previously claimed by the British Empire for the first time since the Revolutionary and 1812–1814 wars. In Jamaica a local newspaper remarked, “The raising of the Stars and Stripes over any portion of British territory must have a solemn signification for the people of the country in which it takes place.” A colonial officer in British Guiana similarly understood that a U.S. base in British Guiana or another British colony “is in effect a [U.S.] colony, an off-shoot of its own country, run upon lines peculiar to and dictated by the Government of that country.”¹⁵

Acquiring new bases in the Atlantic was not a shocking development to many U.S. Americans. Buying entire European colonies in the Caribbean was a recurring public debate in the 1930s, largely because of the colonies’ military value. “Strategic key to the Western Hemisphere” is how Life magazine described the Caribbean on a 1938 map of naval bases and sea routes. “From the strategist[’s] viewpoint, America’s long soul-searchings over ‘imperialism’ in the Caribbean are sentimental twaddle. America must control the Caribbean or some other power may control America.”¹⁶ With a new world war seemingly imminent in 1939, the War Department developed plans to create a defensive perimeter that included new bases in the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Chile’s Easter Island, and Ecuador’s Galápagos. By 1940, 81 percent of U.S. respondents to a Gallup Poll supported buying British-, French-, and Dutch-controlled islands.¹⁷

Roosevelt was interested in obtaining new island bases in the Caribbean at least as early as 1939. Prior to the deal with Churchill’s government, U.S. and U.K. officials signed a secret 1939 agreement giving the U.S. military access to seaplane base sites in three of the eventual “base colonies”: Trinidad, Bermuda, and Saint Lucia. The military never needed to use the small sites. Soon it had much larger base-construction plans for these and the other colonies.¹⁸

Beyond the Caribbean Roosevelt had an early sense for the importance of island territories globally. Even the smallest and most isolated uninhabited islands were growing in significance as potential sites for landing strips, radio transmission, and cable and meteorological stations. As the 1930s unfolded, Roosevelt increasingly focused on the importance of air power and the need for bases to support a growing air force. Since the 1920s, Army Air Corps planners and other air war strategists had been arguing that “strategic air power would decide future conflicts.” “The airplane was not considered just another weapon,” writes historian Michael Sherry. For many strategists “it was the ultimate weapon” for preventing aggression and policing the world.19

Roosevelt’s commitment to air power grew in 1938, after he watched France and Britain capitulate to Hitler’s demand to annex Czechoslovakia in no small part because of their fear of the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force. Previously, most U.S. military planners had long thought of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans as “unbridgeable moats” protecting the country. Increasingly, Roosevelt and others worried that the oceans were becoming bridgeable, given the rapidly growing flight ranges of modern aircraft. In public speeches the commander in chief warned about the danger of “lightning strikes” by enemies against the United States; he illustrated the danger by listing with “almost monotonous repetition” flight times from possible enemy bases to targets in the Americas.²⁰

In November 1938 Roosevelt announced plans to build a dramatically expanded Army air force of ten thousand modern warplanes.²¹ Soon thereafter he met some of the Navy’s top admirals in Puerto Rico to discuss boosting naval defenses in the Caribbean. After Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the government accelerated a military buildup in Puerto Rico (which involved land expropriations to enable the expansion).²² The aim of adding U.S. air bases in the region would be, as the president said, to “render inviolate” the entire hemisphere from enemy attack. With an enlarged and expanded collection of bases farther from U.S. shores, Roosevelt believed that “this country and this hemisphere” would once more “lie behind the ‘moats’ of the oceans.”²³

Roosevelt’s interest in island bases extended beyond appreciating their military value. He and other officials saw that airfields scattered about the world’s major oceans were critical for the infrastructure of the rapidly growing international air travel industry.²⁴ The president realized that investing in bases also would be a way to support U.S. airlines and ensure access to the natural resources, international markets, and investment opportunities that air travel was opening. Commercial and military interests frequently went hand in hand. Before the war Pan American Airways secretly began acquiring basing rights for the military throughout Latin America under the cover of developing an infrastructure of commercial airfields in the region. Pan Am eventually built and improved forty-eight land and seaplane bases from the Dominican Republic to Paraguay.25 This gave the military the foundation for rapidly expandable military bases in the event of war. It also gave Pan Am and other U.S. air carriers a significant competitive advantage after the war.

Figure 2. America’s Outposts of Security and Defense . . . and Trade. Before World War II, Pan Am secretly began developing forty-eight airfields throughout Latin America for the U.S. military and commercial airlines. “Vital as is Pan American Airways’ role in furthering national defense,” this advertisement from 1941 says, “the Flying Clipper Ships are even more vital as Uncle Sam’s strong right arm in furthering U.S. trade and good will.” Maps depict flight routes connecting major bases, indicated by flag symbols. Courtesy of David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University.

France actually requested the destroyers first. Four days after Germany began its invasions of the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France, the French government asked to buy or lease U.S. destroyers. A day later, on May 15, with the German Army advancing rapidly toward the English Channel, Winston Churchill asked Roosevelt for “the loan of forty or fifty of your older destroyers.”²⁶

Roosevelt worried that a majority in Congress opposed entering the war and would reject such a deal; the next month members would pass a bill restricting the president’s ability to transfer military equipment to another country. Roosevelt was particularly worried about publicly aiding France or Britain in a year when he was seeking to become the first-ever three-term president. There were also concerns that the destroyers might end up in Nazi hands if the recipient military capitulated. Roosevelt refused both requests.

France fell within six weeks. British officials badly wanted the United States to enter the war and hoped for U.S. material support. Churchill returned to Roosevelt to offer leased base sites in the eight colonies in exchange for fifty destroyers.²⁷ Roosevelt deliberated. By the end of July, Britain faced near-continuous German bombing and the possibility of a land invasion. “Mr. President,” Churchill wrote Roosevelt, “with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world this is a thing to do NOW.”²⁸

Within days Roosevelt agreed to the deal. He and his cabinet decided “the survival of the British Isles under German attack might very possibly depend on their getting these destroyers.”²⁹ Still, Roosevelt feared Congress would reject the leasing of base sites or the outright purchase of colonies. For a range of reasons ranging from pacifism to isolationism, many politicians and members of the public alike did not want to get involved in another European war. As a result, many would see the agreement as another step toward the United States’ formally entering the conflict. Roosevelt realized he had to avoid seeking congressional approval. He got a legal brief from his attorney general providing some legal foundation for bypassing Congress and aimed to present a deal to the U.S. public that would look so good it would be safe from popular critique. He hoped that swapping decades-old destroyers for bases with ninety-nine-year leases in eight strategically located colonies would do the trick.30

The deal indeed proved widely popular with journalists, pundits, and the public. The New York Times editorialized that the base sites would “enormously strengthen our capacity for hemispheral and hence for national defense,” given added protection for the Panama Canal and the Atlantic coastline. The bases were also a way to prevent Germany or any other enemy from establishing their own bases in the Caribbean or North Atlantic. This was a real possibility, given that Nazi armies were occupying France and the Netherlands, which had Caribbean colonies, and Denmark, which controlled Iceland and Greenland. The Times even proposed adding a few more “desirable though not quite so important” bases, at the easternmost point of Brazil and in Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands.³¹

Some questioned the deal and the legality of Roosevelt’s signing the agreement without congressional approval. Republican presidential nominee Wendell Willkie was one critic, although he noted “the country will undoubtedly approve.” Three days later Willkie called the deal “the most arbitrary and dictatorial action ever taken by any president in the history of the United States.”³² While the heated rhetoric was clearly motivated by the looming election, Willkie’s and others’ concerns about unilateral executive action were prescient: a series of post–World War II presidents would repeatedly sidestep Congress to enable the expansion of the overseas bases network. Other critics of the Destroyers-for-Bases deal, especially in the colonies in question, felt that a de facto transfer of sovereignty was underway and that the islands had been traded without the consent of the islands’ inhabitants. Years later the first prime minister of independent Trinidad and Tobago, Eric Williams, said of the deal for the destroyers, “We never consented to be sold for scrap.”33 (Williams was speaking metaphorically; however, British officials indeed found that only nine destroyers were operational, and “they were in a sorry state.”)³⁴

Despite the concerns, Congress effectively blessed the deal by year’s end by appropriating tens of millions of dollars for new base construction.³⁵ Within months troops were operating from the bases. Within a year the bases were fully operational. Across the base colonies, the military built at least nineteen Army Air Forces, Army, and Navy installations, complete with all the trappings of U.S. suburbia (including segregation).³⁶ By October 1941 there were nearly forty-five thousand construction workers on the bases. Most were locals, who were often paid considerably less for their work compared to U.S. citizens (unsurprisingly, this created significant labor tensions). Total construction costs for Army and Army Air Forces bases alone reached almost $243 million. Most of the money went to the largest and most important of base locations: Trinidad ($82 million), Newfoundland ($62 million), and Bermuda ($41 million).³⁷

Trinidad was called the “southern keystone” of “hemispheric defense.” The naval base would soon play an especially important role in countering German submarine attacks in the Caribbean, which began to rise after the United States entered the war in December 1941. With the aid of more land expropriations, the military expanded the naval station from 7,940 to almost 12,000 acres. By 1943 there would be around twenty-one thousand soldiers and sailors on the island.³⁸

Beyond any defensive role, the main function of the new bases was as an “air funnel,” shipping desperately needed military materiel to allies. With airplanes transforming military strategy, tactics, and the course of empire, air bases would be “stepping stones” for planes hopping from the East Coast of the United States to Europe, Africa, and beyond. After the war, planners predicted, long-range bombers would be able to reach Europe directly from Bermuda.

The quantity and pace of U.S. supplies flowing to the war’s battlefields increased significantly after Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease program in March 1941. Lend-Lease allowed the United States to provide military aid to Britain in exchange for deferred payments and later economic “considerations.” Additional Lend-Lease pacts with other allies followed. Over the course of the war, the United States sent around $50 billion in aid to at least thirty countries, including the Soviet Union, China, Greece, and Norway.39 Bases in Newfoundland became a key part of the North Atlantic Air Bridge sending bombers, fighters, and other weapons and supplies through Greenland and Iceland to the British Isles. Bermuda similarly provided an air link to the Portuguese Azores, which was within range of bases in North and West Africa. Smaller seaplane bases appeared in Antigua, Saint Lucia, British Guiana, Jamaica, and the Bahamas. Each had only a few hundred marines and sailors, who primarily helped patrol sea lanes, monitor Vichy France’s naval presence in nearby Martinique, and engage in other intelligence gathering and antisubmarine warfare.⁴⁰ The military now had a chain of bases in the Atlantic, much like its chain of Pacific bases in Hawaiʻi, Alaska, Guam, Midway Atoll, Wake Island, American Samoa, and the Philippines.⁴¹

Even with the increased significance of air bases, President Roosevelt’s comparison of acquiring a handful of military bases to Jefferson acquiring 530 million acres in the Louisiana Purchase does seem to be pure political hyperbole. In terms of the land physically occupied, there’s no comparison. However, if we begin to think of territory not just as the surface of the Earth covered by land but also as the surface of the Earth covered by the oceans and the air above it, the picture changes. “The meaning of these new American bases is apparent from the most cursory glance at the map,” reporter Hanson Baldwin wrote the day after Roosevelt announced the deal. “The American frontier,” Baldwin continued, “will be extended to the Amazon River and the Grand Banks off Newfoundland; the United States will exercise virtually unchallengeable domination of the Caribbean area, and our outer bastions of defense will be emplaced in blue water 700 to 1,000 miles to the east of our coastlines.”⁴² In terms of the total acreage controlled by the United States, the Destroyers-for-Bases deal represented a dramatic expansion in territory under U.S. control: the newly added de facto territorial waters were roughly twice the size of the Louisiana Purchase.⁴³

The United States was not the first empire to control (oceanic) territory in this fashion. “In the past, the British empire, knit by sea power, was built upon the stepping stones of fueling stations and naval bases,” Baldwin observed. Given British naval dominance, other states needed at least Britain’s “tacit consent” to trade and operate on the seas, historian Paul Kennedy explains.44

The Destroyers-for-Bases deal was, then, a sign of an imperial shift from the dominance of naval power to air power. Because of the rapid development of aviation technology, the United States would be the first empire to dominate the skies as well as the oceans below. What coaling stations and naval bases had been to the British Empire, air force bases were to the transforming U.S. Empire.⁴⁵ (Sea power and naval bases also would remain important to U.S. imperialism.)

In 1893 historian Frederick Jackson Turner first shared his “frontier thesis” in a speech at the Chicago World’s Fair, which celebrated, tellingly, the four-hundredth anniversary of Cristóbal Colón’s arrival in the Americas. Turner’s thesis attempted to explain the significance of the declaration in 1890 by the superintendent of the U.S. Census Bureau—that the U.S. frontier had closed.⁴⁶

Half a century later Roosevelt and his advisers had discovered a way to reopen the frontier and extend it beyond U.S. shores, following years of advocacy by a cohort of elites in military, political, and journalistic circles. The ninety-nine-year leases for the bases reflected U.S. leaders’ grand ambitions: the intent was to cement U.S. global power for at least a century to come. During negotiations over the base colonies, U.S. officials aggressively pressed their desperate British counterparts to ensure the United States achieved not just the maximum military benefits but economic and political benefits as well.⁴⁷

The U.S. government’s control of new oceanic territory and airspace as a result of the Destroyer’s-for-Bases agreement was not the same as U.S. control over colonies in the North American west or European empires’ rule over large colonies in Africa and Asia. However, in military and geopolitical terms, the newly claimed oceanic and aerial territory was similarly significant. Observers at the time saw the deal in precisely these terms. At least one also saw the long-term imperial continuity: “Territorial expansion has been an American habit since the first settlers went ashore at Jamestown,” wrote reporter Francis Brown shortly after the president’s announcement. “The lure of land drew men into the forest valleys away from the sea, drew them across the Appalachians, drew them westward to the Pacific. In the nineteenth century, government policy and the voices of orators and editors urged on the movement. It was the nation’s ‘manifest destiny’ to expand, men said.”48

During the rest of World War II, government officials, as well as orators and editors, planned for and urged further expansion, although generally it was the kind characterized by the control of oceans, airspace, and bases rather than the direct control of large swaths of land and colonies. When it came to further expansion of this sort, U.S. officials largely got their wish. The British base colonies and the territory whose domination the bases enabled were just the start of this new expansion of U.S. frontiers and U.S. power during World War II. By war’s end Roosevelt would oversee the largest expansion of bases, territory, and imperial power in U.S. history—arguably far exceeding the power of Jefferson’s purchase.