9

EMPIRE OF BASES

The person who probably taught me most about seeing the world and bases geographically was, appropriately enough, a geographer.1 The late Neil Smith was one of my graduate school advisers. I knew Smith’s work years before I met him in person. He had made a name for himself explaining the process of gentrification in the 1970s and 1980s, when the term was still relatively new and unfamiliar to most. Smith showed how the investment of financial capital in cities could be traced on a map block by block and how real estate investment often moved like a wave through neighborhoods, extending the “frontier” of gentrification as it went.²

When I met Smith, he was applying his critical geography to understanding the development of the United States as an empire in the twentieth century. In his book American Empire, Smith showed me (and others) that the Roosevelt administration’s treatment of European allies’ colonies revealed much about postwar U.S. imperial strategies and the transformation of imperialism in the twentieth century. Smith pointed to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill signing the Atlantic Charter in August 1941 as emblematic.³ The United States was still not formally involved in the war. The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaiʻi, would not happen for almost four months. It was almost exactly a year after the signing of the Destroyers-for-Bases agreement. Surely aware of the symbolism involved, Roosevelt and Churchill met to hash out the Atlantic Charter aboard U.S. and British naval vessels off the coast of one of the “base colonies”: Newfoundland.

Together Roosevelt and Churchill made an explicit commitment to the right to self-determination at a time when around 40 percent of the world’s inhabited continents was still colonized. They declared the “right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” and their “wish to see sovereign rights and self government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.” This was a powerful anticolonial and democratic vision that colonial independence movements around the world would take as inspiration and support for their decolonization demands. Roosevelt and Churchill went further to affirm their countries’ “desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.” They agreed that “their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other,” from the war.4

There were obvious contradictions here for Britain, which then ruled more than 350 million people as colonial subjects in India alone. There were contradictions, too, for the United States with its conquered territories in North America and its colonies in the Philippines, Hawaiʻi, Alaska, Puerto Rico, Guam, and beyond. And what of the ninety-nine-year leases for the bases in the eight British colonies? Were these colonies to get independence? If they did, would the leases not violate the principle of self-determination? And what were the bases themselves, if not colonies? As a colonial officer in British Guiana said, a U.S. base “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.”⁵

Privately, the president also saw no contradiction between the Atlantic Charter’s principles and a belief that the “minor children among the peoples of the world” should be placed under the “trusteeship” of “adult nations.”⁶ The contradictions in Roosevelt’s stance on colonialism would only deepen when he later chided Churchill for his imperialist instincts. Churchill scoffed when Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek expressed no interest in controlling Indochina after the war; Churchill believed no one leaves territory on the table when it’s offered. “You have 400 years of acquisitive blood in your veins,” Roosevelt told Churchill. A “new period has opened in the world’s history. You have to adjust yourself to it.”7

As with the significance of the Destroyers-for-Bases deal, Roosevelt was right that the world was entering a new period in history, no longer marked by the acquisition and control of large swaths of territory. But the history of World War II would show that the president and other U.S. officials would be just as acquisitive as four hundred years of English officials when it came to bases, if not large formal colonies.

After the Japanese attack on the Pearl Harbor naval station and other U.S. colonies, and the U.S. declaration of war against Japan, Germany, Italy, and the other Axis powers, the bases in Britain’s eight colonies proved just a small start to the acquisition of bases abroad. The question for the U.S. military was how to add as many bases as possible as quickly as possible in as many places as possible around the world, while also accelerating U.S. weapons-production capacity and drafting men and women into the war effort. The government signed deals or otherwise stationed U.S. forces in one location after another: Northern Ireland in April 1941, Iceland in July, new bases in Alaska and Australia after Japan’s military defeated U.S. forces to occupy the Philippines and Guam. Elsewhere there were bases on Britain’s Ascension Island in the South Atlantic and in Haiti, the Portuguese Azores, Kenya, free Senegal, Palmyra Island near Hawaiʻi, the northern reaches of Canada, Mexico’s Acapulco, Recife and Fortaleza in Brazil, Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands, Dutch Suriname, and later French Guyana.⁸ In Panama, in 1941, the War Department tried to pressure the Panamanian government into giving it, not 99-year, but 999-year leases on seventy small plots of land to be used for air defense installations for the canal.⁹ There would eventually be thirteen Army bases and four Navy bases in Greenland. In the British Isles 1.65 million U.S. military personnel would occupy dozens of bases by 1943.¹⁰

Historian Daniel Immerwahr explains how “strings of bases functioned as arteries, carrying [cargo] to the battlefronts.” The forty-eight states functioned “as a giant heart pumping out materiel”—planes, bombs, weapons, supplies—to send to Britain, Russia, China, and other allies. “The bases were where planes landed and ships docked, where spare parts, fuel, and food were stored, where wounded men and damaged things were repaired.” In Egypt and elsewhere across the Middle East, the U.S. military carried out a “massive” campaign to build the piers, cranes, railways, roads, airfields, repair shops, factories, hospitals, and other infrastructure necessary to supply Allied forces battling German and Italian armies. While tanks and other heavy equipment arrived by ship around the southern tip of Africa, lighter cargo arrived by an air route stretching from Miami to Puerto Rico to Brazil to Ascension Island in the South Atlantic to West Africa, the Sahara Desert, and finally Cairo.11 Iran and other parts of the Persian Gulf saw as many as sixty-five thousand U.S. GIs and civilians, who primarily transported war materiel to the Soviet Union as it battled Germany on the eastern front.¹² Cargo traveling to China continued through a series of bases and airfields in India and over the Himalayas—known to pilots as “the Hump”—to a landing point in Kunming, China. In late 1943 planes were landing, on average, every eleven minutes. At one point in 1945, the pace reached a rate of one landing every seventy-two seconds.¹³

In the Pacific Ocean the military built hundreds upon hundreds of small island bases to battle Japan. The Navy alone built 195 bases in and around the Pacific (along with 288 in the Atlantic and 11 in the Indian Ocean).¹⁴ After the shock of the Pearl Harbor attack and the loss of bases in the Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island, U.S. military leaders breathed new life into Adm. Alfred Mahan’s doctrine: island bases would win the war and ultimately control the peace. The military subsequently fought its way across the Pacific in a series of deadly and costly battles. In this “island hopping” campaign, U.S. forces retook lost islands and fought from island chain to island chain toward mainland Japan. Most of the Pacific islands and the people living on them faced devastation as their homes became battlegrounds.¹⁵ Hundreds of thousands of Japanese and U.S. military personnel and local civilians died across the smaller islands of the Pacific alone. Between 100,000 and 140,000 Okinawans—up to one-third of the prewar population—died in the U.S. invasion; most were civilians.¹⁶ Rapid construction followed each battle as the military built yet more bases to launch assaults on other Japanese-controlled islands and on Japan itself. By war’s end the U.S. military was building base facilities around the world at an average rate of 112 a month.17 A single naval base on Manus, in the Admiralty Islands, for example, cost $156 million (about $2.3 billion in today’s dollars).¹⁸ “The number of bases” built in so little time “to mount the offensives against Germany and Japan defies the imagination,” wrote one international relations scholar shortly after the war.¹⁹ How’d the country do it? The wealth of the nation, its unmatched industrial capacity and war-making powers, its technical and logistical expertise, and the work of its people played a big role. So too did the labor of tens of thousands of mostly colonized peoples.

U.S. and other colonial bosses tended to call the people doing the labor “natives,” no matter where they came from (even in predominantly white Newfoundland).²⁰ Often they received wages of as little as fifty, thirty, or even ten cents a day. Some worked for food rations. Conditions were often brutal. In captured Japanese territories, U.S. troops forced some Okinawans and Koreans to work.²¹ “Native” laborers in the base colonies of the Western Hemisphere were paid better than most, even though wages were generally a fraction of those paid to U.S. laborers often working side by side. Historian Andrew Friedman provides examples of “this system of labour extraction”:

French colonial plantation labour sweated for US projects in New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, Dakar, Bizerte and Agadir. In Dutch Guiana, the Netherlands’ colonial labour and equipment did the work. . . . In Liberia, Guam, the Philippines, Panama and Hawaii, US colonial labour did the job, including a group of Metlakatla Indians in Alaska. British colonial labourers worked for Americans throughout the system, in Trinidad, Jamaica, Barbados and Bermuda, in Accra, Kano, Khartoum, Cairo, Aden, Karachi, Calcutta and Assam, and in the Solomon and Gilbert Islands. In Papua New Guinea, Australia’s colonial labourers did the work.²²

The often extraordinarily low pay allowed U.S. and other colonial bosses to apply armies of local workers to build airfields, docks, roads, barracks, and other immense installations that would have involved mechanization and other recent construction methods in the United States or Britain. In Maiduguri, Nigeria, for example, “natives” leveled and surfaced mile-long runways with metal pans and shovels. In Chabua, India, thousands of “Indian natives” used hammers to break large into small stones to fill and smooth runways. In Assam, India, long lines of women and men carried baskets on their heads to move wet cement from cement mixers to the airfields.23 Without this huge supply of cheap labor often working under coercive conditions, the U.S. base network could never have expanded as broadly and rapidly as it did.

Map 14. U.S. Bases, Wars, and Expansion Abroad, 1941–1945.

Significant bases, combat, and expansion outside U.S. states are shown. At World War II’s height, the United States controlled approximately thirty thousand installations at two thousand base sites abroad. The map reflects the relative number and positioning of bases around 1945. Oceans not to scale. Key sources: Blaker, United States Overseas Basing; United States Bureau of Yards and Docks, Building the Navy’s Bases in World War II: History of the Bureau of Yards and Docks and the Civil Engineer Corps, 1940–1946, vol. 2, pt. 3, The Advance Bases (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1947); Robert E. Harkavy, Strategic Basing and the Great Powers, 1200–2000 (London: Routledge, 2007); John W. McDonald and Diane Bendahmane, eds., U.S. Bases Overseas: Negotiations with Spain, Greece, and the Philippines (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990); Stacie L. Pettyjohn, U.S. Global Defense Posture, 1783–2011 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2012).

One year to the day after the Japanese military’s attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt asked his highest-ranking military officials, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to study what overseas military bases would be needed to ensure postwar security. Their conclusion was unambiguous about the importance of overseas bases: “adequate bases, owned or controlled by the United States, are essential and their acquisition and development must be considered as amongst our primary war aims.”²⁴

Roosevelt’s instructions to the Joint Chiefs of Staff asked them to study how to support a postwar multilateral defense system—an international police force—with U.S. overseas bases. In his instructions Roosevelt told the chiefs to identify desired base locations for such an international police force without regard to national sovereignty. The Joint Chiefs immediately expanded their inquiry beyond Roosevelt’s request. Beyond planning for a multilateral security system, they would include airfields they considered necessary for postwar “national defense.” They would consider the needs of the commercial aviation industry as well.

Some of the chiefs and other military and civilian leaders were skeptical that an international police force could succeed. Army Air Forces planners, for example, were generally ambivalent about such an idea. But they saw that planning for an international police force would be helpful in justifying a large and well-funded postwar Air Force (which they hoped would be an independent branch of the military). “There seems to be little doubt,” retired Air Force general Perry McCoy Smith explained, “that if the international organization was looked upon with any favor by the postwar planners, it was not out of any great faith in collective security but out of a desire to justify a large postwar United States Air Force with world-wide base facilities.”²⁵ Eventually, the Joint Chiefs concluded that any bases they considered necessary to defend the nation could also be used by an international military. “The requirements for national security and international peacekeeping appeared complementary to many military leaders because they equated the interests of the United States with those of the rest of the world,” writes Michael Sherry.26

Through the rest of the war, the Joint Chiefs produced an array of memos, plans, maps, charts, tables, and official reports as they studied and deliberated what they considered to be the country’s postwar basing needs. In a seminal paper that became known as the “Base Bible,” military leaders outlined the creation of a network of bases that would provide a protective ring around the United States.²⁷ Beyond defending in any traditional sense of the term, the Joint Chiefs embraced a policy that we would today know as preemption and that they generally called “active defense” and “defense in depth.” They, like some analysts outside the government, believed the U.S. military needed to be able to “strike the first blow.”²⁸ “The United States must be capable of applying armed force at a distance,” wrote one Joint Chiefs study. “This is turn requires a widespread system of bases beyond which lies a region which may be considered as constituting the United States strategic frontier.”²⁹

This hyperaggressive approach to defending the country aimed to use overseas air and naval bases to extend the frontiers of U.S. defenses as far from the East and West Coasts as possible. Bases would encircle most of the Western Hemisphere, reaching as far as the west coast of Africa, the borders of Asia, the Arctic Sea, and off the coasts of South America. “Overseas bases,” Melvyn Leffler says about the strategy, “would enable the United States to interdict an attack from any source far from American shores.” “If we are to keep America safe from the horror and destruction of war,” Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal said, “we must hit our enemies at great distances from our shores.” According to this strategy, the country would also need a newly expanded “intelligence apparatus” to warn of dangers (this became the CIA), as well as the world’s dominant air force, the ability to rapidly mobilize an enlarged military to fight at any time, and, soon, a U.S. nuclear arsenal.³⁰

The attack on Pearl Harbor, coupled with rapid developments in the lethality of weapons and the reach of strategic bombers, had created an “enormous sense of vulnerability” for U.S. officials. The idea that “there must never be another Pearl Harbor” became a guiding obsession for military and civilian leaders. After Pearl Harbor they tended to see threat as existing anywhere and everywhere on the planet. Most of the male policy makers concluded that the military weakness of the United States and its European allies had invited German and Japanese aggression. Rather than fearing any specific threat looming beyond Germany and Japan, officials feared the possibility of another future surprise attack against the contiguous forty-eight states by a future power. Military strength and aggression, they believed, were required to protect the country from all threats and to prepare for what almost all the men assumed would be a future war against a new and more dangerous military power.31

Map 15. U.S. Military and Commercial Air Rights Abroad: Postwar Planning Map.

Joint Chiefs of Staff, September 2, 1943. Stars indicate the territories where air rights were desired or secured. Parallel lines indicate the routes operated by U.S. commercial airlines. Black dots along routes indicate airfields, airports, and landing strips. Iceland, Greenland, and Saudi Arabia would be prominent base additions by the war’s end. Courtesy of NARA (A1 219/390/10/8/3–, box 199, Former TS Plans, Policies, and Agreements, RG 107).

“To insure against any part of the United States mainland being visited by a sudden devastation beyond any ‘Pearl Harbor’ experience or our present power of imagination to conceive,” wrote the Joint Chiefs, “we must meet such an attack as far from our own borders as possible.”³² Meeting an attack far from U.S. shores meant, in the minds of most military leaders, a large collection of distant bases. This meant the government had to take advantage of the opportunity provided by the war. The country had to snap up basing rights in wartime or else risk losing out on a chance to acquire bases in the future when a threat might emerge in peacetime. “The present is the most appropriate and most favorable time for obtaining the desired [base] rights,” declared a Joint Chiefs study.³³

In late 1943 and early 1944, President Roosevelt approved the Joint Chiefs’ “US Requirements for Post War Air Bases.” He called the “Base Bible” a “very clear and excellent” plan. Roosevelt requested minor changes: in the Pacific he ordered an expansion of the proposed U.S. “sphere of influence” to include the Marquesas—likely because of its importance for air travel rather than its military significance. In West Africa the president ordered the addition of basing rights in the Portuguese-controlled Cape Verde islands.³⁴ With Roosevelt’s changes the Joint Chiefs’ list of recommendations for the acquisition of “sole or joint” basing rights involved fifty-seven separate countries and territories.³⁵ A more comprehensive “List of Air Bases in Foreign Territory Required by the United States” included more than seventy base sites.³⁶

There were dozens of other studies, and many involved even more detailed lists including additional information about facilities and local specifications. In January 1944 Roosevelt instructed the Secretary of State “as a matter of high priority, [to] initiate negotiations with the governments concerned to acquire permanent or long-term benefit of the bases, facilities and rights required, at the earliest possible moment.” While air bases were the initial focus for the Joint Chiefs and Roosevelt, they soon expanded their plans to all types of military bases.37 Concerned in no small part about the rising power of the Army Air Forces, the Navy began its own detailed postwar bases planning. By war’s end the Navy sought bases, or at least the right to maintain bases, in at least forty-one foreign countries and colonies worldwide.³⁸

In addition to bases officials prioritized securing air transit and landing rights from other countries globally. They wanted the ability for U.S. aircraft to be able to fly over and land at airfields from the Americas to Africa and the Middle East to South and Southeast Asia. Particularly desirable was an air transit route from Casablanca through Algiers, Tripoli, Cairo, Dhahran (Saudi Arabia), Karachi, Delhi, Calcutta, Rangoon, Bangkok, Saigon, and Manila. Toward the end of the war, the Secretary of War ordered efforts to ensure permanent rights to use seven airfields in North Africa and the Middle East.³⁹ Air transit rights were important in addition to actual bases because they could, as a Joint Chiefs study stated, “provide access to and familiarity with bases from which offensive and defensive action might be conducted in the event of a major war.” Air flight rights were likewise helpful because they deepened military and diplomatic connections with the countries granting such rights. This, officials realized, could yield deeper relations, including the creation of permanent bases in the future.⁴⁰

Military preparedness was never the only consideration for the Joint Chiefs and other military and civilian planners interested in obtaining new bases. As with President Roosevelt, the economic implications of overseas bases were prominent. The chiefs, for example, saw that investments in overseas bases, as well as air transit and landing rights, would provide powerful bargaining chips to obtain postwar rights for U.S. commercial airlines. As Roosevelt had realized, air bases could double as airports and support U.S. airlines after the war.41 Military and civilian planners pursued bases and air rights given their ability to serve “international military and commercial purposes” simultaneously. In 1943, the president sent a survey team to French-controlled islands in Polynesia to make plans for both postwar bases and commercial airports connecting North America and Australia.⁴²

In addition to attending to the economic interests of U.S. corporations, Army Air Forces planners were also focused on their own interests. They understood that maintaining a large number of air bases in peacetime would require the maintenance of a large number of aircraft to station at the bases, which in turn would justify a large Air Forces budget: if you get the bases, you get the planes; if you get the planes, you get the budget. “Although the identity of the short-term enemy, Japan, and the long-term enemy, Russia, had a direct effect on the planning for bases, the principal concern of the postwar planners was their need to justify a large postwar air force,” explains retired Air Force general Perry McCoy Smith. “The Army Air Forces’ desire to obtain overseas bases had a direct relationship to its wish for a large portion of the defense budget. If a requirement for many overseas bases could be justified, then half the battle for funds would be won.”⁴³

A well-funded air force with a large number of aircraft would also “require continual replacement of aircraft” and thus “the ongoing operation of the aircraft industry, and the uninterrupted development of new weapons systems,” Smith writes. Planners feared the end of the war would debilitate the capacity of the aircraft industry. They worried that restarting the industry would be difficult in case of another war. According to Smith, “The maintenance of a modern aircraft industrial plant was probably the most important single factor” in justifying a large Air Force featuring plentiful bases and planes after the war. The overlapping economic, political, and military interests shaping the base-planning process meant that, for example, Latin American bases “had very little strategic value” even if Army Air Forces officials may have genuinely believed that they needed bases in Latin America to protect the Panama Canal and defend the country against attack from the south.⁴⁴

A partially completed base with little immediate strategic value in another part of the world illustrates how bases reflected an even more complicated intersection of economic and military interests. The base under construction was in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, which had become a regional headquarters for U.S. oil firms. The base had been planned for use against Germany, but by June 1945, Germany had surrendered. Military leaders determined there was no need to use Dhahran for the war against Japan. Although there was no military need for the installation, the Secretaries of War, State, and the Navy pushed to complete the base. In a memo to President Harry Truman, Secretary of State Joseph C. Grew wrote that the three secretaries agreed that building the base was “in the national interest.” Completion of an air base that would transition to civilian use (but retain military capabilities) after the war “would be a strong showing of American interest in Saudi Arabia and thus tend to strengthen the political integrity of that country whose vast oil reserves now are in American hands.” U.S. officials were particularly interested in maintaining a presence in Dhahran because the neighboring oil fields were controlled by a consortium of Standard Oil Company–descended U.S. oil firms operating in a partnership with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as the Arabian American Oil Company, or Aramco (now Saudi Aramco, possibly the world’s most profitable company). Commercial use of the airfield after the war would also be a “major asset to American civil aviation,” Grew added.45

During the war U.S. oil company officials feared Italian and German attacks on prolific and lucrative oil fields in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. They pleaded for U.S. antiaircraft defenses and other military protection. Initially, U.S. leaders were hesitant to boost U.S. forces in the region because military control over the oil-rich Middle East had been a British responsibility since before World War I.⁴⁶ State Department officials, however, realized that Saudi Arabian oil was, as they would later tell President Truman, “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”⁴⁷

Completing the base at Dhahran was an early sign of growing, direct U.S. military involvement in the Middle East, foreshadowing decades of intervention to come. It also reflected the “tacit alliance” between the United States and Saudi Arabia, forged by Roosevelt and Saudi King Ibn Saud. When it came to oil (among other industries), the U.S. government became “deeply involved in maintaining an international environment in which private companies could operate with security and profit,” writes David S. Painter.48 The decision to build the base in Dhahran indicates how important overseas bases were to postwar imperial strategies. Bases would help safeguard alliances, profit-making opportunities for U.S. corporations, and access to natural resources, such as the petroleum supplies that were critical to the daily functioning of capitalism and the military itself.

U.S. bases and well-armed troops had long provided a protection service to businesses and entrepreneurs since forts helped protect trappers, miners, land speculators, and other settler emigrants. After World War II, overseas bases and troops would play an even more substantial role as bodyguards and insurance policies for U.S. corporations and investors. In Saudi Arabia and around the world, overseas bases would become an important source of political power in support of U.S. business interests. Bases would allow U.S. military and diplomatic officials to deepen political, economic, and military ties with local leaders and elites to the benefit of U.S. corporations, including by providing a source of leverage over host nations’ political, economic, and military decision making. Even during the Destroyers-for-Bases negotiations, when a Nazi invasion of Britain looked like a real possibility, “the US Government sought to extract political—even economic—as well as military advantages from its ally in what was an hour of most desperate need,” writes historian Charlie Whitham.⁴⁹

The decision to continue construction of the base in Dhahran reflects the importance of overseas bases to the new version of the U.S. Empire that was born during World War II, as well as a larger shift in the history of imperialism. Earlier territorial empires generally would have tried to claim any available territory, as suggested by Churchill’s rejoinder to Chiang Kai-shek that no one turns down territory. Most earlier empires would have been especially interested in claiming any territory bearing a natural resource that was as profitable and significant as oil.

By World War II anticolonial movements made any thought of traditional large-scale colonial occupation a nonstarter. Beginning with the Atlantic Charter, President Roosevelt had framed the war as an anticolonial struggle and pledged to assist with decolonization at the war’s end. The creation of the United Nations would further enshrine the decolonization process and the right of nations and peoples to self-determination and self-government. Whether or not they may have believed in the rights of colonized peoples, many U.S. leaders believed colonies to be financially unprofitable and the source of what Roosevelt described as a “million headaches,” much as European and U.S. predecessors had found. Roosevelt’s administration’s reaction to questions about buying all the base colonies from Britain was typical. “Trinidad? No thanks. What a problem you have there—what a scrambled population,” Roosevelt was quoted as saying in racially loaded terms. “What an ethnic potpourri you have there! No thank you.” The president didn’t want overwhelmingly white Newfoundland either. He called it a “bankrupt colony.” Nor did he want Bermuda, “because it was already an American resort whose wealthy visitors enjoyed vacationing under a different flag.”50

Senator William H. King’s assessment of the World War I–era purchase of the U.S. Virgin Islands applied well to most U.S. leaders’ attitudes about the possibility of acquiring new colonies: “It is only the military base which gives this territory any value to us.”⁵¹ To take over more colonies would have meant acquiring unwanted problems. The Destroyers-for-Bases deal was a model in providing the military benefits of acquiring colonies—that is, the bases—without most of the financial and other costs of colonial rule.⁵²

“Shaking loose the colonies” by pressing allies to decolonize was central to U.S. officials’ postwar economic strategy, explains Neil Smith. Roosevelt administration officials aimed to ensure that the postwar world would feature a kind of “global open door.” The strategy was to use economic tools rather than colonial occupation to gain access to natural resources and markets.⁵³ As Roosevelt and Churchill declared in the Atlantic Charter, all nations should have “access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity.” Using state power to help open up markets was the basis for the new imperialism.⁵⁴ In this light newly independent postcolonial states could provide critical new markets for U.S. businesses without the protectionist trade restrictions that colonial rulers had imposed previously. Decolonization would help create the global Open Door for U.S. corporations and investors in large parts of the world where colonial powers had previously restricted economic competition.

While bases rather than colonies symbolized the new version of empire, U.S. imperialism still remained rooted in colonialism and deeply reliant on colonies in important ways. The U.S. Empire was still one founded in the era of territorial empires. It still occupied huge territories seized during its conquests in North America, as well as a smaller collection of colonies outside the continental mainland. The power the United States amassed prior to World War II and that it collectively exercised during the war derived from the control of tremendous natural resources in North America, from the wealth generated by that land and the enslaved and free labor that worked it, and from the industrial economy and military might built with that wealth.

After the war the U.S. government would grant independence to the Philippines in 1946 but maintained its former colony as a neocolonial client state. Other “territories” remained colonies without democratic incorporation into the United States. They included Hawaiʻi, Alaska, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, Guantánamo Bay, and the Panama Canal Zone. Hawaiʻi and Alaska would win statehood only in 1959. Puerto Rico and Guam received marginally improved rights, but their residents remain third-class U.S. citizens to this day. As postwar developments made clear, U.S. officials were generally determined to hold on to the colonies as colonies rather than grant them independence or statehood because of their base-hosting roles.

When it came to other countries’ colonies, the Roosevelt administration’s commitment to decolonization began to wane toward the end of the war. The desire for overseas bases and global military control played a critical role in this waning of support. The president’s instructions to a State Department negotiating team headed to London in early 1944 were telling: military desires were more important than pushing Britain and France too hard on decolonization. With bases secured in the Caribbean thanks to the Destroyers-for-Bases deal, Roosevelt said, the United States still needed installations in colonial West Africa and in the French-controlled Polynesian islands of New Caledonia. The president instructed his team to “press the colonial question persistently” during meetings in London. But, he said, there was room for “ultimate sovereignty” in the colonies to remain unchanged provided some form of international inspection was in place.55 Early in the war Roosevelt chided Churchill for his imperialist attitude about no one leaving territory on the table. By the end of the war, U.S. military and diplomatic officials were determined not to leave foreign bases on the table. Military officials in particular wanted to maintain control over as many bases as possible, in as many places as possible, with as much unilateral freedom to operate as possible.

After Roosevelt’s death President Truman was even clearer that base access trumped commitments to decolonization and the right to self-determination, refuting Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter pledge to “seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other,” from the war. “Though the United States wants no profit or selfish advantage out of this war,” Truman said during the “Big Three” meeting in Potsdam, Germany, in July 1945, “we are going to maintain the military bases necessary for the complete protection of our interests and of world peace.” In a grammatically tortured and marginally disguised declaration of imperial intent, Truman added, “Bases which our military experts deem to be essential for our protection we will acquire.”56

And so they did. By the end of World War II, the United States commanded unparalleled military power and an unparalleled global military presence, with a collection of bases unmatched by any prior people, nation, or empire in history. The war resulted in a quantitative and qualitative shift in the nature of U.S. power—when it came to bases, broader military might, and intertwined economic and political forms of power—transforming forever the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world, as well as life in the United States, in the process.

Never before had so many U.S. troops been permanently stationed overseas. Never before had U.S. leaders thought about “national defense” as requiring the permanent deployment of military force so far from U.S. borders. While a significant number of the thousands of bases would close and while millions of troops would demobilize and come home after the war, U.S. officials had developed a new form of imperial power, revolving to a significant degree around foreign bases rather than foreign colonies, working in tandem with economic, political, and other military forms of power. “After the war,” writes Sherry, “the United States possessed the power to destroy entire nations, positioned its forces throughout the globe, used them repeatedly . . . and allowed [the military] a commanding position in American government and economy.”⁵⁷

To say that World War II marked the transformation of U.S. imperialism or the invention of a new kind of U.S. Empire is not to suggest that this was a single, coherent, or smooth process. Roosevelt and his administration did not have a single vision for controlling the world or advancing what they perceived as “U.S. interests.” They did not consciously orchestrate the creation of a new U.S. imperialism, and they did not see themselves as imperialists. Instead, the development of a new U.S. imperialism came about as the result of the actions of competing actors within and beyond government struggling to shape U.S. policy amid a war and the other constraints and forces of history and their time.

The outcome of the war could have been different in many ways. Some, for example, had other ideas about the role foreign bases would play in the postwar world. There were other options than the false choice often presented in foreign policy debates between isolationism or the hypermilitarized garrisoning of the globe that emerged from the war. Perhaps if the Joint Chiefs had more seriously supported the creation of an International Police Force, or if Roosevelt had pushed them to do so, multilateral overseas bases might have had more of a chance at success. Roosevelt’s initial instructions to the chiefs were, after all, to plan for such an international force—not for a largely nationalist, unilateral base structure.

The man who nearly followed Roosevelt as president, Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, offers another example of a different vision for bases and the postwar world. Wallace was by far the most popular choice among Democrats to serve as Roosevelt’s vice presidential candidate in 1944 and as the Democratic presidential nominee if Roosevelt had chosen not to run for a fourth term. Democratic Party bosses and other elites, however, were adamantly opposed to Wallace, given his support for the “emancipation” of “colonial subjects,” as well as for unions, women, and African Americans. The party bosses blocked Wallace’s nomination for vice president, instead manufacturing the selection of little-known and little-supported Harry Truman.58 As early as 1942, Wallace wrote in his diary that the future of air bases “is one of the most important of all the peace problems.”⁵⁹ In a September 12, 1946, speech at New York’s Madison Square Garden, Wallace elaborated a different vision than Truman’s unilateral declaration that “bases which our military experts deem to be essential for our protection we will acquire.” Wallace insisted that “the United Nations should have . . . control of the strategically located air bases with which the United States and Britain have encircled the globe.”60

By war’s end, turning foreign bases over to the United Nations or another multilateral force was inconceivable to most high-ranking U.S. officials. Many resisted returning bases to host nation governments. During the war the Allied powers agreed to remove their bases and troops from most foreign nations soon after the fighting stopped. After the war U.S. officials resisted doing precisely that, especially in Iceland, Greenland, and the Azores. Soviet leaders likewise resisted withdrawing their bases and troops from Iran.⁶¹

Neil Smith described the general postwar strategy as “global economic access without colonies,” with “necessary bases around the globe both to protect global economic interests and to restrain any future military belligerence.”⁶² In this new version of the Open Door, decolonization would be used to destroy European powers’ economic monopolies in their colonies, opening new markets to U.S. corporations. A large collection of bases around the globe and the world’s most powerful military would provide a powerful protection service for U.S. businesses to ensure that the Open Door stayed open worldwide.

U.S. officials further used the nation’s unchallenged military superiority at the end of World War II to dictate much of the postwar international economic system, on which U.S. geoeconomic power would be based.⁶³ New global institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations became important economic and political tools to open and dominate markets and maintain other countries in subordinate relationships. In this context U.S. officials would deploy bases, other forms of military intervention, and periodic displays of military might to help enforce general compliance with the rules of an economic and political system shaped by U.S. policy makers.⁶⁴ Overseas bases and other military tools of empire would increasingly work in tandem with and undergird political-economic tools of imperial power.

The hundreds of U.S. bases abroad were thus a critical part of the invention of a new form of empire. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the U.S. Empire followed the example of Britain, France, and other European empires by tying its expansionist success to the direct control of foreign lands. World War II and the decolonization process that followed the war made this no longer an option for U.S. officials—at least on a large scale. At the end of World War II, the United States controlled large new territories and populations. In Germany, Japan, Italy, and Austria, the United States ruled more than 150 million acres of land and tens of millions of people. In addition to its colonies, there were more people living in territories occupied by the United States overseas—135 million—than the 132 million inhabiting the forty-eight contiguous states.65 Many empires of the past would have maintained direct colonial occupation of conquered territories. Given the overwhelming power of the United States after the war, U.S. officials likely could have continued the occupation of Germany, Japan, Italy, Austria, and other countries. As we will see, in the case of some smaller territories, U.S. officials indeed made occupation permanent. In other cases, some military leaders wanted to continue formal occupation but failed due to opposition by locals (as well as by others in the U.S. government). For the most part, U.S. leaders pursued this new kind of empire symbolized by bases, not colonies.

The Philippines and Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, further illustrate the shift in the history of empire. The Philippines, then with more than eighteen million people, was too large for U.S. officials not to grant its independence after the war. But U.S. leaders found a way to ensure neocolonial control with the help of a ninety-nine-year rent-free lease on twenty-three bases and military installations. Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base became two of the largest U.S. bases outside the United States, playing critical roles in waging U.S.-led wars in Korea and Southeast Asia. Building a base in Dhahran after it was no longer needed militarily reflected the growing use of bases to support U.S. oil companies and to establish dominance over the Middle East and its natural resources.

With a “chain of military bases and staging areas around the globe,” the editors of the Monthly Review explain, the U.S. government developed the ability to deploy air and naval forces nearly anywhere worldwide “on a moment’s notice—all in the interest of maintaining its political and economic hegemony.”⁶⁶ A large collection of overseas bases thus became a major mechanism of U.S. imperial control, allowing the control of territory vastly disproportionate to the land actually occupied. While the total acreage occupied by bases has been relatively slight, in the ability to rapidly deploy the U.S. military nearly anywhere on the globe, the basing system represented a dramatic expansion of U.S. power and a significant way in which the United States came to maintain its postwar dominance. “The United States,” Daniel Immerwahr writes in his book How to Hide an Empire, “did not abandon empire after the Second World War. Rather, it reshuffled its imperial portfolio, . . . investing in military bases, tiny specks of semi-sovereignty strewn around the globe.”67

At war’s end the United States was in a much stronger position economically, politically, and militarily compared to any of its allies or the vanquished powers. Germany, Japan, and Italy were in ruins. Respectively, they lost an estimated 6.6–8.8 million, 2.6–3.1 million, and 457,000 people to combat and other wartime violence. Britain and France were badly weakened, although they had not yet relinquished their colonies. They counted 451,000 and 567,000 dead at home, plus 1.5–2.5 million deaths in India and 1.0–1.5 million in French-controlled Indochina. The Soviet Union bore the brunt of the war’s fighting against Germany: an estimated 24 million civilians and soldiers perished. Approximately 6 million Jews and another 5 to 6 million Roma, Poles, Soviet civilians, prisoners of war, sexual minorities, the disabled, and others were murdered in Nazi concentration camps and other parts of its Holocaust killing machine. Worldwide, an estimated 60 million died.⁶⁸

Among U.S. forces from the then forty-eight states, around 407,000 died. By far the worst U.S. casualties were in the Philippines, where more than 1 million Filipino soldiers and civilians perished. On Guam CHamorus experienced a brutal Japanese occupation and thousands of deaths. Hawaiʻi and a small part of Alaska also experienced Japanese attacks.⁶⁹ Stateside civilians never saw combat reach their shores. The country’s military and economy were by far the world’s most powerful, and the nation’s leaders held unmatched diplomatic sway to shape the postwar world system.

Even if the United States experienced a relatively small number of deaths in the war, suffering is relative. The military saw terrible losses and brutal fighting. This made U.S. leaders especially reluctant to give up the overseas bases for which U.S. troops had fought and died. Bases have also long been considered war trophies of a kind—a monument to a military’s victory. Given the growing significance of bases in the world, U.S. political and military leaders, like the leaders of empires past, wanted to hang on to what most considered the “spoils of war.”