11

NORMALIZING OCCUPATION

In 1950 the United States was again at war, this time in Korea. Planes flying from air bases in Japan, Okinawa, Guam, and the Philippines were transporting material to U.S. and allied forces and carrying out bombing raids on North Korean troops, industrial centers, and supply lines. Under the auspices of the United Nations and with a coalition of around twenty other nations, the U.S. military led an effort to come to the aid of South Korea after North Korea’s 1950 invasion. The conflict would see U.S. forces march into North Korea and toward the Chinese border, bringing the world to the brink of an even larger conflict and a possible nuclear exchange involving the United States and its allies facing China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea. Three to four million are estimated to have died in a war that left the peninsula devastated.1

During the conflict an Air Force–led U.S. negotiating team traveled to Lisbon, Portugal, in the fall of 1951. They were authorized to bring with them a silver cigarette box, a double-pedestal Parker 51 fountain pen desk set, and a Winchester Model 70 rifle with a Lyman Alaskan Sight and two hundred rounds of .30-06-caliber ammunition. Each was a gift, engraved for the Portuguese Minister of National Defense and the chiefs of the Portuguese Armed Forces and Portuguese Air Force. The gifts were intended as “tokens of appreciation” from Secretary of Defense George Marshall to thank the Portuguese government for signing an agreement giving U.S. forces expanded rights to operate from and build bases in the Azores.2

President Harry Truman, with the support of Congress, was in the process of sending hundreds of thousands of troops back to Asia and Western Europe, including Portugal, to contain “communist aggression” and pursue the war in Korea. After a period of significant base closures during post–World War II demobilization, the Korean War led to a 40 percent increase in the number of overseas bases.³ For military and civilian leaders, the war cemented the importance of maintaining large bases in the eastern Pacific Ocean, including on Okinawa and elsewhere in Japan, on Guam, and in South Korea itself.⁴ By 1952 U.S. negotiators had secured long-term postoccupation access to bases in Japan, as well as continued U.S. rule in Okinawa. U.S. officials soon signed mutual security pacts with the Philippines, New Zealand, and Australia. Chinese nationalist Taiwan, countries in Southeast Asia, and South Korea would follow. U.S. bases would appear in most of these allied nations.⁵

Across the globe U.S. forces occupied and built bases in Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. The government of Iceland allowed the Air Force to officially return, although with a strict ban on dating or marrying local women. U.K. officials provided access to twenty-six new air bases. In Morocco the Air Force built a base nearly as large as almost anything that had existed during World War II. By 1952 the Air Force alone was supervising the construction of almost one hundred bases abroad.⁶

“The sun never sets on American bases—army, navy and air—around the world,” stated the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1955. “American military installations now girdle the globe with more outposts than ever known to any nation in history. . . . The American overseas commitment ranges from a handful of men at lonely outposts in arctic wilds to huge bases in Africa, Europe, and the Pacific. The American flag flies in every continent and over every sea.”⁷ By decade’s end the United States had entered into eight mutual defense pacts with forty-two nations and executive security agreements with more than thirty others, most of which provided various kinds of basing access.⁸

“In geopolitical terms,” writes historian Alfred McCoy, the United States “became history’s most powerful empire because it was the first, after a millennium of incessant struggle, to control ‘both ends of Eurasia,’ ” with bases from the British Isles through Southeast Asia to Japan. To guard the empire, the U.S. military had 2.6 million active duty troops; 2,650 ships and 7,195 Navy combat aircraft; 15,000 Air Force fighters, bombers, and transport aircraft; and nuclear weapons ready for launch from the air, the land, and the sea.9 The growing nuclear weapons arsenal of the Soviet Union played some role in the base proliferation: more U.S. bases meant more targets and dispersed forces. The growing fear of a nuclear-armed Soviet Union likewise played an important role in governments agreeing to a U.S. presence. “Viewed from one perspective, this was an act of [U.S.] benevolence,” writes foreign bases expert Amy Holmes. The United States was providing protection. On the other hand, other nations were ceding a significant degree of sovereignty to the United States (while also turning themselves into targets for Soviet missiles).¹⁰

In Portugal “the supersensitive question of Portuguese sovereignty was constantly being raised before our negotiators,” reported Col. Lawrence C. Coddington, Air Force Deputy Assistant for Air Bases. “Every point of issue revolved around the question of sovereignty and were [sic] resolved only after lengthy discussions on many proposed drafts.” Coddington acknowledged that “the agreement as written does not meet the ultimate in Air Force desires.” But, he continued, “it must be kept in mind that the Air Force cannot hope to achieve its desired ultimate in operating rights in small foreign countries purely because of that country’s jealousy over its sovereignty.”¹¹

The sensitivity of the Portuguese government about its loss of sovereignty was common among countries hosting U.S. bases. The rapid requests for the Yankees to leave after World War II revealed this. Even with growing fears of a clash between East and West, base negotiations were often difficult. Generally, they revolved around the degree to which U.S. forces would enjoy “extraterritoriality”—that is, the extent to which U.S. forces would be free from local laws, free from local prosecution for committing any crimes, and free to conduct military operations without restraint or consultation with the host nation. In other words, negotiations focused on how much effective sovereignty the U.S. military would have on foreign soil and thus how much sovereignty a host country would give up. Even with the United States’ closest allies, such as Great Britain, sovereignty would long remain a “focus of tension,” especially when it came to crimes committed by troops.12

The perceived “supersensitivity” of the Portuguese government and other countries about allowing U.S. bases on their soil was understandable. For centuries foreign bases were generally the product of empires’ imposing bases in occupied foreign lands. Portugal had plenty of its own experience imposing its bases in Brazil, during the colonization of the Americas, and those still occupying colonial Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, and East Timor during the 1951 negotiations. Foreign bases and foreign troops on another country’s soil likewise runs counter to the modern Westphalian nation-state system that enshrined sovereignty and self-determination as major international norms since the seventeenth century.

A cigarette box, a couple of pens, and a rifle were obviously not what convinced Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar and his top military aides to cede some of Portugal’s sovereignty to the United States. The real gifts offered by U.S. officials in exchange for Azores basing agreements in 1946, 1948, and 1951 were U.S. support for (1) ongoing Portuguese colonialism, (2) Portugal’s wars to suppress independence movements in Africa, and (3) its entry as a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (the only fully undemocratic member country).¹³

The Portuguese government’s agreement to allow U.S. forces to operate from bases in the Azores reflects a significant transformation in the history of empire generally and U.S. Empire in particular. While U.S. officials entrenched an unprecedented collection of foreign bases globally after World War II, U.S. leaders had to negotiate for extraterritorial rights to a greater extent than most prior empires during their colonization of foreign lands. Imperial negotiation was nothing new. The image of empires as all-powerful forces imposing their will completely on conquered territories has always been misleading. Most empires through history have dealt with varying degrees of local acquiescence and complicity, incomplete imperial sovereignty, and negotiation to maintain rule and avoid local rebellions.¹⁴

Changing international political norms related to the decolonization movement, resistance to Nazi and Japanese imperialism, and the creation of the United Nations forced U.S. officials to negotiate with host nations more than most prior empires had needed to.15 After World War II U.S. officials had to work harder to establish and ensure extraterritorial, undemocratic sovereignty on foreign soil—an encouraging development from the perspective of efforts to build greater democracy. This meant that while some countries hosting U.S. bases remained in a fundamentally imperial relation with the United States, some maintained relatively greater sovereignty than imperial dependencies of the past. It also meant that, unlike in many previous imperial relationships, the national governments of many—but far from all—countries hosting U.S. bases were consenting, to varying degrees, to the foreign U.S. presence. The term consent is misleading, however, given both the significant power imbalances between the U.S. Empire and base hosts and the pressure U.S officials inflicted on potential hosts amid fearmongering about the Soviet threat. Agreeing to the presence of U.S. bases and troops was never a matter of simple free choice. (Even the word host is inaccurate, given the degree of coercion involved in a government’s—let alone an entire citizenry’s—agreeing to allow this unusual type of “guest” on its territory.)

There were significant exceptions to the bases secured by some degree of consent, including bases in the territories of World War II’s vanquished powers (Germany, Japan, Italy, and Austria), Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay, U.S. colonies, UN-sanctioned Trust Territory colonies, and European-controlled colonies hosting U.S. bases. Still, across Western Europe and beyond, governments were agreeing to forfeit what sociologist Max Weber called a state’s “monopoly on the legitimate use of force” by allowing U.S. bases and troops on their territory.¹⁶ When U.S. bases remained in Germany, Japan, and Italy following the end of formal occupation, these governments also forfeited the monopoly on the use of violence. Of course, this forfeiture came in a context of gaping power disparities, in which U.S. officials used U.S. dominance, political-economic coercion, and fears about the Soviet Union to ensure national governments agreed to a base presence.

During the “Cold War” U.S. officials developed a range of tools to ensure other countries acquiesced to U.S. basing demands. Just as when they supported Portuguese colonialism and NATO membership, U.S. officials often struck political and diplomatic deals in exchange for basing access. Locating bases in dictatorships and other undemocratic countries, such as Portugal, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and soon fascist Spain, greatly eased the challenges of gaining and maintaining popular support for a U.S. presence. Undemocratic rulers simplified the maintenance of an imperial basing relationship by preventing or severely limiting the possibility of protest or opposition of any kind.

Elsewhere economic assistance, in the form of preferential trade deals, development funds, and military aid, provided sweeteners to secure the consent of local officials. “Unlike Portugal,” writes António José Telo, “Spain wanted direct, clear and extensive compensation from the United States” in exchange for a 1953 agreement that allowed the U.S. military to create bases anywhere on Spanish territory. “Spain accepted everything demanded of it, even the establishment of nuclear bomber bases close to Madrid.” The Spanish economy grew with the help of U.S. capital and technical assistance, “while the Portuguese economy grew much more modestly.”17

Spain and Portugal show how the imperial relationship was rarely one-way. Given the desires of U.S. leaders for foreign installations, potential or existing base hosts were in a position to negotiate benefits from the U.S. government. Publicly, U.S. officials “denied a direct relationship between” base rights and any form of payment or “rent.” However, Gretchen Heefner explains, “nearly everyone understood that bases equaled money. And the money flowed.” It flowed in the form of loans and grants to purchase U.S. weapons and equipment; as education, training, and infrastructure projects; as new highways, air defense systems, and runways; and as disaster relief, food aid, M60 machine guns, and tens of thousands of pairs of military-grade boots. Technically, all allies were eligible for this sort of assistance. In practice “countries [that had] U.S. installations received far more generous terms and goods than those that did not.”¹⁸

By 1963, after the Kennedy administration reversed its anticolonial policy in Africa to support Portugal at the United Nations and in other international forums, the CIA noted that Portuguese dictator Salazar considered the Azores bases to be his “bargaining chip”: “The threat of expulsion from the Azores base [w]as a valuable instrument for muting United States criticism of Portuguese colonial policies.”¹⁹

The two-way nature of imperial relationships was again nothing new. Empires have depended for centuries on buying off, bribing, and otherwise assisting local elites as part of the maintenance of rule in conquered lands. As the “Cold War” progressed, and the economic strength of allies increased and the strength of the U.S. dollar declined, the balance of these relationships changed. In many countries—notably Germany and Japan—U.S. officials pressured host governments to make cash and in-kind payments and purchases of various types to support a U.S. military presence.20 The West German government, for example, agreed to buy large quantities of U.S.-made arms and supplies to “offset” U.S. military spending. Between 1961 and 1967 these purchases totaled $4.71 billion. The West German Army soon had more U.S. weaponry than it could use. The offsets led to the fall of Chancellor Ludwig Erhard’s government. By the mid-1970s the government and many citizens had had enough of what they saw as “occupation costs” similar to those paid immediately after the war. Both governments agreed to end the offset agreement in exchange for a one-time payment of about half the total costs for a new U.S. base in northern Germany.²¹

In 1948, national elections in Italy had U.S. political, military, economic, and even Catholic religious leaders fearful that Italy’s favored communist and socialist parties would come to power. Military and diplomatic officials were particularly concerned, because of left-wing opposition to any foreign military presence and Euro-American military cooperation more broadly. In the lead-up to the election, the CIA, the State Department, the military, and other parts of the U.S. government used propaganda, smear campaigns, and threats to withdraw economic aid, among other tactics, to help the right-wing Christian Democratic Party secure victory. Shortly before the election the military stationed warships off Italy’s coasts to demonstrate its concern about and opposition to a left-wing victory.²²

The electoral meddling is a reminder that bases were always an imperial tool used in tandem with other tools, including covert CIA efforts to influence elections and to encourage and support coups in Iran, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic in the 1950s alone. Underlining the paramilitary nature of the CIA and the military base–intelligence nexus, the CIA used a Honduran banana plantation belonging to United Fruit (today Chiquita Brands International) as a military base to help train and finance the rebel army that overthrew the democratically elected government in Guatemala in 1954. The Guatemalan government became a U.S. target after President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán dared to threaten the near-monopoly powers of United Fruit in Guatemala.23

In some ways this was a continuation of U.S. imperial patterns of gunboat-style intervention found mostly in Latin America, dating to the nineteenth century. The difference was that in the post–World War II era, in the era of decolonization, the interventions and meddling were generally covert and less brazen. “In the 1950s era of decolonization,” writes anthropologist Carole McGranahan, “empires did not go away, but went underground.” Indeed, the U.S. and Soviet Empires “fiercely guarded themselves against any accusations of empire or imperialism.”²⁴

U.S. and Soviet officials were always in a high-profile competition for the loyalties of publics and governments around the world, in places like Guatemala and Italy. Votes in democratic elections were at stake, as were the political, economic, and military loyalties of whole nations. U.S. leaders decided that too much was at stake to leave the outcome of this competition to chance, especially when, for example, democratic elections didn’t go their way. Covert methods became a favored imperial tool. They ranged from coups and assassinations to the recruitment of paid local agents and informers to secret funding for political parties and for U.S. artists, novelists, musicians, and academics.²⁵

Between 1949 and 1952, CIA “stations” overseas—bases of a kind—expanded from seven to forty-two. The CIA’s budget increased from $4.7 million to $82 million. Personnel jumped from 302 to over 6,000. Between 1951 and 1953 alone, CIA covert operations increased by a factor of sixteen. These included propaganda campaigns, psychological warfare, support for insurgent groups, and paramilitary operations against communist China and North Korea and communist-aligned groups in Southeast Asia.²⁶ In a single year, 1958, the CIA led the government’s efforts to train more than five hundred thousand police officers in twenty-five nations, creating secret police units in nearly half and “strengthening the repressive capacity” of undemocratic governments in particular. The CIA supported a string of right-wing military juntas in South America with military assistance, covert infusions of cash, and intelligence. Other forms of military aid strengthened the armed forces of friendly, often undemocratic, nations worldwide. U.S. advisers would train more than three hundred thousand soldiers in seventy countries between 1945 and 1970.27

“In effect,” writes McCoy, “clandestine manipulation became Washington’s preferred mode of exercising old-fashioned imperial hegemony in a new world of nominally sovereign nations.” During his eight years in office, President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized 170 major covert operations in forty-eight nations.²⁸ “Intervention, even in the domestic affairs of other nations, became an accepted governmental and military practice,” writes John Lukacs. To the limited extent that citizens knew anything about such covert actions, most “largely approved of and seldom opposed” them.²⁹ “The sum of these policies,” McCoy says, was a “ ‘reverse wave’ away from democracy, as military coups succeeded in more than three dozen nations, a full quarter of the world’s sovereign states.”³⁰ Today, when many in the United States have decried Russian interference in U.S. elections, few note that between just 1946 and 2000, the CIA intervened in an estimated eighty-one national elections, using cash and media disinformation campaigns, as well as paramilitary action in some cases. In this period the CIA intervened in at least five elections in Japan and eight in Italy, beginning in the latter country’s fateful 1948 election.³¹

In 1948 Italy’s Christian Democratic Party won a surprise victory. Although historians debate how much the U.S. government influenced the outcome, the election became the foundation for a stable U.S. base presence in Italy during the “Cold War” and to this day. In other words, the Christian Democrats repaid the favor. U.S. troops had departed Italy in 1947, following the signing of a formal peace treaty with the Allies. In 1949 the new Italian government allowed U.S. troops to return. Like Portugal, Italy joined NATO.

Italian and U.S. officials agreed to call U.S. bases in the country “NATO bases.” They hoped to avoid the perception of foreign military occupation and deflect left-wing critiques of the U.S. presence. Officials used the terminology thanks to a NATO-wide agreement that calls the bases occupied by U.S. troops “NATO bases.” Ever since, many locals have referred to the bases this way. In practice, U.S. facilities, weaponry, and personnel dominate almost every “NATO base” in Italy.

Beyond linguistic creativity, U.S. and Christian Democratic officials used secret negotiations to pen the 1954 Italian-American Bilateral Infrastructure Agreement. The agreement secured the foundation for a larger U.S. military presence by allowing more U.S. troops to move to Italy after withdrawing from Austria in 1955. (Austria’s declaration of neutrality in the confrontation between East and West included a constitutional ban on foreign bases and meant the removal of U.S., Soviet, and other foreign forces.) The conditions governing U.S. bases and forces in the Italian-American agreement remain classified to this day. A former Italian Ministry of Defense official has suggested that the secrecy is because parts of the agreement violate the Italian Constitution.32

Following the 1954 agreement, ten thousand U.S. Army troops deployed to bases in the north of Italy alone. Elsewhere Army, Air Force, and Navy bases grew in places including Naples, Sicily, Aviano, and Sardinia.³³ For most of the “Cold War,” the United States maintained well over one hundred military installations on thousands of acres of Italian territory.³⁴ There have been (and there still are) more U.S. bases in Italy than in any other country in the world, outside an active war zone, except Germany, Japan, South Korea, and the United States itself.^a After the 1948 elections the Christian Democrats maintained a client relationship with the U.S. government. This gave U.S. officials a stable partner agreeable to most requests about bases and other military matters. Thanks to this relationship and the 1954 Bilateral Infrastructure Agreement, the U.S. military has enjoyed what one Italian analyst has called a “permissive environment” in Italy, offering significant freedom of operation.³⁵

The ability of U.S. government officials to do what they want with the U.S. military in Italy and elsewhere has depended on a legal architecture in the post–World War II era.³⁶ Most countries hosting U.S. bases have had a status of forces agreement, like Italy’s Bilateral Infrastructure Agreement, allowing U.S. forces to occupy their territory and governing the rights and freedom of the U.S. military. These agreements have given U.S. forces extraterritorial privileges in many countries—meaning that they are governed by U.S. military law rather than local laws. SOFAs, as status of forces agreements are called, determine everything from taxation to driving permits to what happens if a GI breaks a host country’s laws. Each SOFA is different. Each is subject to negotiation. SOFAs often allow U.S. troops to escape host nation prosecution entirely.37 Base expert Joseph Gerson has noted that the length of a SOFA usually bears an inverse relationship to the power differential between the United States and the host country: the greater the power of the United States relative to the host, the shorter the SOFA, meaning fewer restrictions on the military.³⁸

Regardless of length, most SOFAs (or significant parts of SOFAs) and related basing agreements are almost always highly secretive. Many of a string of agreements signed during the renewed buildup of U.S. bases and forces abroad between 1950 and 1955 remain classified today. As in Italy, U.S. officials have frequently employed secret basing agreements, often struck between executive branches, to avoid the involvement and oversight of legislatures, media, and the public. Secrecy has helped protect host governments from critique by obscuring the extraterritoriality inherent in a foreign military presence.

One surprising thing that helped legitimize the U.S. military’s presence across much of the globe wasn’t hidden: for the first time the U.S. government allowed families to accompany deployed military personnel in many countries, including Italy, Japan, and Germany. This was the moment when the military began transforming bases into “Little Americas” to support the lives of family members and troops abroad with schools, housing, entertainment, and much more. The presence of families and Little Americas helped normalize the peacetime deployment of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops abroad and the long-term occupation of sovereign countries. In Germany, for example, “the success of the domesticating reforms,” writes economist John Willoughby, “permitted President Truman to double the troop presence during the Korean War crisis with few complaints from the German state [or its people].”³⁹

Reform was necessary in Germany and elsewhere because of growing complaints about U.S. troops in the years following World War II. In the nations conquered during the war, relations between occupiers and occupied were mixed. Tensions emerged particularly in Germany and Japan. Although some Germans have fond memories of smiling GIs, Hershey’s bars, jazz, and big U.S. cars from the early years of occupation, local complaints quickly multiplied.40 After years of deadly fighting, the first year of postwar U.S. occupation in particular was characterized by an aggressive campaign to seize homes, automobiles, bicycles, wine, and other property. GIs called this “liberating.” This led to an ugly euphemism for rape: “liberating a blond.”⁴¹ Tensions grew between occupiers and occupied amid rampant survival prostitution and sexually transmitted infections, GI theft and violence, and racial tensions within a still-segregated military and among Germans who feared relationships between black GIs and German women. One of the few things to help the U.S. image was the comparison to Soviet occupation in East Germany.

News of the Army’s “disarray” in West Germany began filtering back to the United States. Life magazine and other news outlets published articles with titles such as “Failure in Germany” and “Heels among the Heroes.” Writer John Dos Passos reported in Life, “Never has American prestige in Europe been lower. People never tire of telling you of the ignorance and rowdyism of American troops.”⁴² Army and civilian leadership decided something had to be done. To reassert control and ease the tensions of the occupation, the Army employed a combination of harsh discipline and “wholesome” educational and recreational activities. In the words of Willoughby, a lifestyle emerged somewhere “between boot camp and summer camp.”⁴³

At the heart of this lifestyle was the Army’s decision, in 1945, to allow small numbers of family members to join GIs on bases in West Germany and elsewhere overseas. It now seems natural for spouses and children to join members of the military at bases worldwide. At the time this was a radical decision. Traditionally, men in the U.S. military—as in most other militaries—deployed overseas alone. Until 1913 the Army actively discouraged its soldiers from marrying. This helped popularize the line that if the Army wanted you to have a wife, it would have issued you one.⁴⁴ Allowing family members to join troops abroad only became more radical as families found themselves literally near the front lines of the “Cold War” and the growing nuclear standoff between East and West.

U.S. officials hoped the family decision would help improve morale and alleviate “problems involved in fraternization” between U.S. troops and German women. The hope was that the presence of wives would shame or otherwise encourage GIs to improve their behavior. Beyond improving conditions in West Germany, the family decision was a response to growing demands in the United States to reunite families by bringing troops home.45 Military leaders hoped that allowing family members to join GIs would quiet these protests and keep personnel in the military. As an added benefit, officials believed, family members could serve as “unofficial ambassadors,” modeling democratic values in occupied countries.⁴⁶

The number of wives and children in West Germany jumped from around 4,000 in 1946 to around 30,000 in 1950; globally there were 90,000. When President Truman and Congress sent massive army reinforcements to both Asia and Western Europe in late 1950 and early 1951, U.S. troops in West Germany soon numbered 176,000. By 1955 there were more than 260,000. The number of family members climbed accordingly in West Germany and worldwide. By 1960 there were almost half a million family members outside the United States. For the first time family members outnumbered GIs overseas.⁴⁷ Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops and family members would remain for almost four decades across West Germany’s south, where military planners thought any Soviet invasion was most likely.⁴⁸

As the family population quickly grew, a massive building campaign followed in Germany and worldwide. The aim was to create replicas of U.S. towns so GIs and their families would feel at home overseas. The military built housing, commissaries and shopping centers, recreational facilities, and hospitals on a global basis. It created an entire overseas school system and established a Family Services Program and other family support systems. The result was the creation of the suburban-style Little Americas that are still sprinkled around the world today.

In West Germany’s poor, rural state of Rheinland-Pfalz, more than 100,000 GIs and family members arrived between 1950 and 1951. Rapid construction followed. Millions of dollars in local base construction and other spending flowed into the economy, improving relations with locals in the process. Thousands of new jobs were created. Unemployment, which had been over 10 percent in the region and over 22 percent in the major base town of Baumholder, “simply vanished” amid a gold rush atmosphere, writes Maria Höhn.⁴⁹ With a strong dollar U.S. Americans splashed money around the West German economy. Baumholder’s roughly 2,500 residents came to live with an average of 30,000 U.S. troops and family members. As in other parts of the world, an underground economy flourished. Bases became a source for cheap and desirable consumption items like cigarettes and, later, blue jeans, further normalizing the U.S. presence.50

People in Rheinland-Pfalz now recall the 1950s as the “Golden Years” and the “Fabulous Fifties.” The decade is “fondly remembered,” Höhn writes, “as a time when Americans drove large, shiny cars and Germans marveled at the extraordinary wealth that the dollar’s favorable exchange rate created for the American GIs.” Exposed to a world of jazz, rock and roll, and consumer goods, people mostly overlooked problems like airplane noise and damage caused by frequent military exercises that took place on local streets and in farmers’ fields. The damage was so much a part of ordinary operations that in Baumholder, for example, a permanent office paid compensation.⁵¹

Amid growing fears about the possibility of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe and broader U.S.-Soviet conflict, most in West Germany saw the U.S. presence as protection. Relatively few described it as an “occupation,” even as U.S. troops continued to enjoy many of the same extraterritorial privileges after the end of formal occupation in 1955. To many the presence of wives and children living on the front lines of the “Cold War” in West Germany, Italy, Japan, and elsewhere was a powerful sign of the U.S. commitment to defending its allies. (Although officials did not publicize the fact, the military had detailed plans to evacuate families—but not locals—from bases abroad during any threat of war.)⁵² GIs’ wives also helped improve relations when they began forming volunteer organizations to help civilians trying to recover from the war’s devastation. This oft-overlooked unpaid labor eased tensions and increased the military’s freedom of operation in West Germany.⁵³ Five years into Truman’s buildup in Europe, a government survey indicated that a majority of Germans felt troop conduct and German-American rapport had improved.⁵⁴

The construction of Little Americas in Western Europe, in Japan, and later in South Korea and other parts of the world was critical to making the U.S. occupation of other lands a permanent and seemingly normal feature of “Cold War” life. Despite the popular reputation of the United States as the liberator in World War II and, for some, the protector in the confrontation between East and West, “opposition to the US military presence arose both when and where it was least expected,” writes Amy Holmes.55 Crimes and accidents, racism, and geopolitical tensions at times undermined the goodwill bought by U.S. spending and the military’s efforts to improve the image of the GI. In West Germany growing crime, drug use, and general chaos in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War era led to rising tensions in the years that followed.

Map 17. U.S. Bases, Wars, and Expansion Abroad, 1950–1978.

Significant bases, combat, and expansion outside U.S. states are shown. By the 1960s the total number of bases exceeded one thousand, roughly doubling since 1949, after expansion during U.S. wars in Korea and Southeast Asia. Oceans not to scale. Key sources: Blaker, United States Overseas Basing; Robert E. Harkavy, Strategic Basing and the Great Powers, 1200–2000 (London: Routledge, 2007); Stacie L. Pettyjohn, U.S. Global Defense Posture, 1783–2011 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2012); Barbara Salazar Torreon and Sofia Plagakis, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2018 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2018).

The relationship between a U.S. base and locals “is inherently contradictory.” Holmes explains. Even when “the host population may be fully enfranchised citizens” in democracies such as Germany, locals “are at the same time disenfranchised by the US presence. They have virtually no say in what the United States does on their territory, US officials are not elected, and only rarely are US personnel tried in local courts for any crimes they may commit.” In other words, Holmes explains, locals were “being subjected to a foreign military presence that operated outside the realm of democra[cy].”⁵⁶

There’s good reason to believe that nearly everywhere where foreign bases have existed across history they have generated anger, opposition, and protest of some kind. Foreign bases, by definition, “involve the presence of one nation’s military on another nation’s soil,” writes bases expert Kent Calder. They “are almost invariably unpopular for that reason.”⁵⁷ Other sources of anger and opposition are similarly unsurprising around the globe and across time: the displacement of locals from their lands; crimes committed by military personnel; traffic and training accidents causing death, injury, and property damage; sex work and red-light-district bars aimed at military personnel outside bases’ gates; the support bases provide for dictators and undemocratic regimes; and environmental damage caused by everyday military operations.⁵⁸

The stationing of foreign troops in Britain’s thirteen American colonies was, after all, one of the abuses listed in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. The lists of Redcoats’ crimes that locals kept in Boston resemble those of Okinawan activists today. It’s little surprise, then, that U.S. bases abroad have generated anger and opposition since U.S. forts occupying Native Americans’ lands provoked anger and violent resistance across the continent. In the Philippines after 1898, the U.S. military faced opposition and an insurgency seeking independence. Cuban leaders protested the terms of the 1903 lease for Guantánamo Bay from the moment U.S. officials imposed it.59 Latin American governments and peoples developed lasting antagonisms toward the United States as a result of decades of U.S. occupation in countries including Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Guatemala, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic.

Protests broke out in Okinawa against land seizures and U.S. occupation within months of the end of World War II.⁶⁰ Tensions burst into public consciousness across the whole of Japan in 1956 at Tachikawa Air Base in the Tokyo suburb of Sunagawa. The Japanese government’s announcement that it would be expropriating local land to expand Tachikawa on behalf of the U.S. Air Force led to years of large protests featuring “pitched battles” between protestors and Japanese police in “bloody Sunagawa.” The protests “very nearly upended the US-Japan military relationship” and “threatened the heart of American military policy in East Asia,” writes a scholar of base protests.⁶¹

By 1958 even Britain, probably the most accommodating of hosts, saw growing protests against the presence of bases and nuclear weapons on British soil. In London’s Trafalgar Square, five thousand demonstrators gathered for a four-day march to the Aldermaston base. The protest doubled in size along the way. “NO MISSILE BASES HERE” and “NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT,” their banners proclaimed. Another sign depicted for the first time the soon-to-be internationally recognized symbol for peace: ☮.⁶²

Over time U.S. officials became concerned about such opposition. They shaped basing policy accordingly. The “thank you” gifts that Air Force leaders brought to their Portuguese counterparts in 1951 were small symbols of the degree to which U.S. military and diplomatic officials would shape policy to hold on to bases abroad, in Portugal and around the world. Bases trumped commitments to decolonization, to democracy, to peace. Backing Portugal’s dictatorship and its colonial wars in Africa was one example of the many gifts U.S. leaders handed out to help smooth and normalize the occupation of foreign lands and foreign bases in the post–World War II era.⁶³

Opposition to the U.S. military presence was nowhere greater than in South Vietnam. The presence of what came to be more than half a million U.S. troops in the country and in neighboring Laos and Cambodia represented another significant shift in imperial strategy. Overseas bases played a key role in the shift. By the end of World War II, U.S. support for the decolonization of European colonies had waned. U.S. officials looked to Britain and France to ensure Western control over large parts of the world still under their colonial control. In places such as French Indochina (Vietnam), this policy meant providing tens of millions of dollars’ worth of cash and weapons to support European efforts to quash communist-linked or communist-influenced independence movements. By the time of France’s final defeat in Vietnam, at the 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu, the U.S. government was providing 75 percent of the funding for France’s war.64 The French military’s defeat coupled with Britain’s disastrous handling of the 1956 Suez Canal crisis led to a change in strategy, from supporting the crumbling colonial powers to a growing reliance on direct military action and colonial occupation.

In Vietnam, after 1954, U.S. funding and U.S. military advisers replaced the French rulers. The U.S. government would soon dominate South Vietnam as a de facto colony, just as France had, but with far more destructive power. In another part of the former French Empire, Lebanon, thousands of U.S. troops invaded in 1958 to support a pro-Western government. U.S. forces saw almost no combat and stayed in and around Beirut for only a matter of months. The invasion, however, marked the first significant U.S. incursion into the Middle East, setting a precedent in the region and globally.

President John F. Kennedy followed President Eisenhower in office, determined to expand the U.S. military’s presence and its intervention capabilities globally.⁶⁵ Politically, he wanted to stave off accusations that he was “soft” or “weak” on communism and military matters more broadly. Such highly gendered political attacks became a regular part of “Cold War” politics in the United States. Male leaders were susceptible to such rhetoric and frequently resorted to the use of military force as a policy solution in no small part to prove their manhood.

These dynamics played out in Vietnam and Southeast Asia—first with Kennedy and then with President Lyndon B. Johnson building up the U.S. military presence in South Vietnam. By late 1964 and early 1965, the U.S. military had bases in South Vietnam and some 20,000 military advisers and support personnel. After U.S. bases came under attack by communist forces in South Vietnam, President Johnson ordered the start of what would become a massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam and the deployment of 3,500 marines—no longer “advisers”—to South Vietnam. This was just the start of a gradual buildup of troops and dozens of bases to support their operations throughout South Vietnam. By 1969 U.S. troops in Vietnam would number almost 550,000.66

When the U.S. military, backed by the CIA, the State Department, and other government agencies, went to war in Vietnam and neighboring Laos and Cambodia, it “had the infrastructure for large-scale overseas combat in place.” The U.S. Pacific Fleet was on its own the largest navy in the world. Hundreds of bases in Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines, and Guam, among other locations, enabled the deployment and regular resupply of U.S. forces in Southeast Asia and continual attacks by sea and air. Thanks to a military buildup by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the United States had military alliances with 43 nations, as well as 375 “major” foreign military bases and 3,000 “minor” military facilities worldwide by the mid-1960s.⁶⁷ “Two decades of militarism and imperial planning made the path to war in Vietnam an easy one to take,” writes historian Joshua Freeman. “Explaining it was harder”—as was explaining the numbers of dead and wounded: the death toll of civilians and military forces on all sides is estimated at 3.8 million.⁶⁸ Amid the destruction, U.S. officials were increasingly fearful about decolonization. As colonized peoples were rapidly winning their independence, U.S. leaders started worrying increasingly that they would get booted from bases abroad.