17 THIS IS WHAT GOD HATH WROUGHT

In August 1941 the army and navy set out on their first-ever large-scale joint exercise. With war very likely coming, they anticipated having to take foreign beaches under fire. And so, the thought was, they’d practice by invading North Carolina. The men would make an amphibious landing, leaping from ship to shore and carrying their gear and supplies with them.

It seemed straightforward, yet it proved to be anything but. The disembarking troops got tangled up with one another. Men with heavy packs struggled to stand in the water. Tanks hit the soft ground and sank. The ammunition got soaked, as did cardboard boxes of rations, which promptly disintegrated. Cans of vegetable hash and meat stew piled up chaotically on the beach, their boxes broken, their contents no longer identifiable. The equipment that made it ashore then began to rust, as the lubricant—stored deep in the holds of the ships—could not easily be found.

The army’s official history allowed that the exercise was “a depressing experience.” The men came up with their own way to refer to this sort of logistical face-plant, an acronym they would use frequently during the war: snafu. As in, Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.

And that was at midday, under no enemy fire, in calm waters not too far from Myrtle Beach.

What those waterlogged troops discovered that afternoon was an age-old truth, one that had governed history up to that point: moving things is hard.

It’s a point easily forgotten today, when people, objects, and ideas glide easily across the planet’s surface. Now markets scamper across borders, planes land anywhere, and communications satellites connect the most seemingly distant places.

But all that is relatively new, an artifact of post–World War II globalization. That globalization, in turn, depended on key technologies devised or perfected by the U.S. military during the Second World War. These were, like synthetics, empire-killing technologies, in that they helped render colonies unnecessary. They did so by making movement easier without direct territorial control.

To appreciate how transformative these technologies were, it’s necessary to go back a bit, to fifty years before the Second World War—a time marked not by effortless motion, but by abrasive friction. When Commodore Dewey attacked the Spanish at Manila Bay in 1898, he cut a crucial telegraph cable, and it took a full week for the mainland to learn of his triumph in battle (MANILA PROBABLY OURS was the uncertain headline of one paper). Regular cable contact didn’t resume for three months.

After Dewey’s victory, Teddy Roosevelt eagerly assembled the Rough Riders to storm Cuba. But they got stuck in Tampa, a port clogged with what Roosevelt called a “swarming ant-heap of humanity,” as they waited for transport. The logjam was so great that the enlisted men had to leave their horses behind and take Cuba on foot.

The USS Oregon could have helped, and indeed it was dispatched from Seattle. But Seattle to Florida was a two-month journey, requiring the ship to go down the Pacific coast of South America, around Tierra del Fuego, and back up through the Gulf of Mexico.

Had they known what awaited them, Roosevelt’s troops might have been happy to wait. Once in Cuba, they suffered mightily from yellow fever, malaria, and diarrhea. Roosevelt wrote a frantic letter to his commander, warning that the fearless Rough Riders were “ripe for dying like rotten sheep” and must be sent home quickly to avoid an “appalling disaster” that might kill “over half the army.”

It was a known bug: humans didn’t travel well. Take them from one part of the planet to another and their typical response was to get sick and fall down.

Things didn’t travel well, either. In 1901, with Manila firmly under white control, General Arthur MacArthur staged a lavish reception in the Philippines for the upper crust of colonial society. The men decided to wear their best frock coats and silk hats. But clothing designed for temperate climates, they discovered, fares poorly in the tropics. The hats had warped, lost their sheen, become sticky, and started to emit a strange odor. Pests had chewed holes in the hat of the secretary of finance and justice. He wore it anyway, though, as he had no means of getting another.

And why not wear it? Many of the early U.S. colonial buildings, made with Oregon pine and California redwood, were also riddled with holes and falling apart. “Decay” was basically the house style.

What this rotting empire needed was faster transportation. And that required seizing land. Captain Mahan had suggested opening a canal through the Central American isthmus, which divided the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and Roosevelt agreed. He tried to buy territory from Colombia, without luck. He tried threatening and got no further. Finally, concluding that bargaining with Colombia’s leaders was liking trying to “nail currant jelly to a wall,” Roosevelt threw his support behind rebels, who declared Panama’s independence from Colombia. The newly established republic then leased to the United States a ten-mile-wide strip of land slicing through the middle of the country: the Panama Canal Zone.

Still, more territory, more problems—problems of precisely the moving-things-and-people variety. The hot and rainy neck of land throbbed with disease-bearing mosquitoes. Panamanians who had lived with those mosquitoes their whole lives had acquired immunity to yellow fever and resistance to malaria. Outsiders, however, were fresh bait. Of the first batch of U.S. mainlanders to arrive in the Panama Canal Zone, nearly all were immediately laid low by malaria. Later officials came bringing their caskets with them.

They weren’t being paranoid. Yellow fever, malaria, chronic diarrhea, dysentery, pneumonia, and bubonic plague tore through the zone. “I shall never forget the train loads of dead men being carted away daily as if they were just so much lumber,” remembered a carpenter. “There were days that we could only work a few hours because of the high fever racking our bodies—it was a living hell. Finally, typhoid fever got me.”

If not typhoid, malaria, or—Jesus—the plague, then perhaps a venereal disease? It was too much to hope that a construction project involving tens of thousands of workers wouldn’t also engender prostitution. The Panamanian cities bordering the zone were a “whirlpool of vice,” a New York editor declared. Still, canal workers seemed all too happy to visit them, passing syphilis and gonorrhea to one another in the process.

Those fit to work faced other challenges. The area to be dug out was a “dark and gloomy jungle,” one early arrival noted, “an apparently hopeless tangle of tropical vegetation, swamps whose bottoms the engineers had not discovered, black muddy soil, quicksands.” The ruins of a previous French effort to dig a canal—abandoned equipment rusted, sunken into the earth, and covered in vines—served as an ominous warning.

The canal’s managers understandably sought to escape from this morass by staying in Washington. But communication between Washington and Panama was limited to an expensive telegraphic trickle, making management from afar extremely difficult. Delays, pileups, and breakdowns ultimately provoked Roosevelt to fire the canal commission and install a new one willing to work from Panama.

The point here is that, to open a canal, the United States had to exert colonial control. In fact, it transformed the Panama Canal Zone into one of the most intensively governed spots on the planet. Brigades marched forth to cut brush, drain swamps, and put up screens. They fumigated buildings with pyrethrum, an insecticide made from the petals of chrysanthemums—at peak they imported more than 120 tons a month. To combat mosquitoes, which laid eggs in still water, the authorities made war on puddles. They filled or covered any indentation where water might accumulate. They even ordered the holy water in the font of the cathedral changed daily after finding mosquito larvae in it.

Venereal disease required a different treatment. Canal officials subsidized the arrival of mainland wives and, at great expense, established a smothering social milieu of clubhouses, associations, and organized leisure. Throw enough Bibles at the zone’s residents, the theory went, and they’d stay out of Panamanian brothels. But just in case, zone authorities also pressed Panama’s government to impose mandatory medical exams and, when necessary, forcibly hospitalize sex workers.

With disease at bay, canal workers turned to the canal with a fury. They blasted their way through mountain. They brought in powerful steam shovels able to haul out eight tons of earth in one scoop. Still, it was Sisyphean work, with the earth slipping regularly back into the cut (about one cubic yard slid back for every five dug). “Today you dig and tomorrow it slides” is how one worker put it. Indeed, a single landslide could reverse months of work, burying the expensive steam shovels in the process.

Altogether, opening the canal took ten years and cost nearly a third of a billion dollars—more if you count the cost of the landslides that perpetually closed the canal in its first years. As usual, records kept on the deaths of nonwhites were shoddy, but we think some fifteen thousand workers, mainly West Indian, died from accident or disease while on the job.

And all to tame a strip of land ten miles wide and not even fifty miles long.

The Panama Canal was a significant achievement. But next to the challenges posed by the Second World War, digging it was a gentle warm-up exercise. War planners faced what one dazed general called “ordnance requirements of a size beyond the bounds of imagination.” For every soldier overseas, the United States would ship sixty-seven pounds of matériel abroad per day. And unlike in the First World War, where the United States shipped to fourteen ports in one theater, now it serviced more than a hundred ports in eleven theaters.

It’s telling that before the war started, logistics had been a specialist’s term, not much heard in general speech. The military academies exalted courage, leadership, and tactical acuity, not procurement and transportation. Yet, fairly soon into the Second World War, commanders grew accustomed to speaking of tonnage, inventory levels, and supply lines with the knowing reverence previously reserved for accounts of battlefield heroics.

What is more, they got good at it. During the war, the military devised a suite of logistical innovations, all designed to move people, things, and information cleanly and quickly around the planet. Planes were the most obvious—the United States came to dominate aviation—but others were no less important. Radio, cryptography, dehydrated food, penicillin, and DDT: these technologies laid the foundations of today’s globalization.

The logistical innovations did more than speed everything up. They also enabled the United States to move through places without carefully preparing the ground first, as it had in Panama. No longer would seizing large areas or zones be necessary to run a long-distance transportation network. Mere dots on the map, sometimes little more than airfields in jungle clearings, would suffice. And so, just like plastic and other synthetics, these new technologies helped to make colonies obsolete.

For the United States, the war started quickly, with Japan’s strikes on December 7/8 and its three-month spree of conquest. Then things slowed. With the Japanese Empire draped plumply across Southeast Asia and Micronesia, the Pacific, once a universe of boundless possibilities, had become a giant oceanic blockade.

The closure of the Pacific alarmed Douglas MacArthur, who had to defend Australia with only the dribble of supplies he could get through the southern part of the ocean. China, fighting Japan on the other side, faced even greater danger. The Chinese were painfully short on the weapons of modern war and, with the Pacific closed, they couldn’t import what they needed.

For a while, some matériel could get to China from the other side, via the Burma Road, a twisting, 726-mile path through the mountains. It was largely unpaved and built almost wholly by hand (by half a million laborers), but FDR saw that modest road as a lifeline. He regarded it as “obviously of the utmost urgency” that “the pathway to China be kept open.” Soon enough, however, the Japanese seized Burma, closing the road.

It was a classic geopolitical move—the enclosure of an adversary’s territory. Japan was guarding China’s front and back doors, preventing the Allies from aiding it by land or sea. Yet this timeworn strategy didn’t account for aviation. The doors were locked, yes, but the Allies could still come in through the roof.

Planes weren’t new. They’d been around in the First World War, and the daring of aviators then was the stuff of legend. But planes hadn’t drastically affected that war’s outcome. They were small, and there hadn’t been that many of them.

The Second World War, it was clear from the start, would be different. When Hitler invaded Poland, his Luftwaffe had four thousand aircraft—a formidable threat that nearly broke Britain’s defenses. The United States, in response, began to build its own air fleet, putting its full industrial muscle behind the effort. At peak, U.S. plants churned out more than one plane every four minutes—a Luftwaffe every eleven days.

Abundance in aircraft meant that the Allies could use them for more than combat. They could use them for nearly everything. Even long-distance supply lines, they realized, could be maintained by air.

A decade or two earlier, this would have been unthinkable. The planes, for one, had been too small. The biggest planes in operation in World War I had been the German Riesenflugzeug (“giant aircraft”), most notably the Siemens-Schuckert planes, the largest of which could hold two and a half tons—the Germans had built six during the war. But by the end of the Second World War, the United States had produced nearly four thousand B-29 Superfortresses, each of which could carry twenty tons.

As the planes got larger, their cargo shrank. Dehydration reduced eggs, milk, and even vegetables to small fractions of their weight and size. Engineers found ways to shrink vehicles, too. Bulky trucks were hard to haul by air. Truck parts were much easier, but that required having a factory at the destination to put the trucks together. The military developed the IKEA solution, “knocked-down shipping,” which broke the vehicle down enough so it took up only a third of the space but could still be assembled at the other end by inexperienced men with simple tools. Such innovations—and there were a lot of them—crammed more and more stuff into the waiting aircraft.

The planes to aid China, with their shrunken cargo and enlarged holds, started south from Miami, flying a route called the “Fireball Express.” They landed on the eastern edge of Puerto Rico, which, along with the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, had been turned into a giant military base. Then south to more bases on the eastern lobe of Brazil, from which they sped east toward Africa.

There is a small volcanic island called Ascension, situated in the mid-Atlantic between South America and West Africa. It is one of the most unappetizing landing spots on the map: jagged with rocks, waterless, and far from everything. “A crow would break his leg trying to land there,” joked one visitor. Yet in early 1942 the U.S. Army engineers had arrived, and within three months they had blasted off the island’s top and built a long landing strip, followed soon by barracks, a mess hall, and machine shops—everything needed to refresh the planes and send them onward.

From Ascension, the planes touched down on Africa’s west coast and sped across the Sahara. Yet again, bases were needed, and yet again they appeared. Jenifer Van Vleck, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum, has compiled a list of the types of buildings that went up on eighteen African air bases, which conveys the magnitude of the undertaking:

Acetylene generator buildings, administration buildings, barber shops, battery shops, butcher shops, carpenter shops, cafeteria buildings, chemical laboratories, churches, classrooms, commissary storehouses, dining halls, dormitories, engine overhaul buildings, electric shops, fire equipment buildings, garages, guard houses, hospital, kitchens, lumber storage, link trainer, laundries, mechanical shops, medical inspection buildings, native barracks (with kitchens, laundries, toilets, and showers), oil storage, office buildings, paint shops, pump houses, power houses, pantries, police post, plumbing shops, radio shops and transmission receiving buildings, stockrooms, slaughter houses, shower buildings, staff buildings and quarters, toilet and locker rooms, warehouses, water towers and tanks, wells.

Some of these bases were deep inland, far from rivers or railroads—this was possible now with aviation. Maintaining them meant hauling tons of supplies for miles along desert trails. To provision one of the more remote bases with fuel, its commander hired out what one of his subordinates estimated to be “probably all the camels in North Africa” to carry gasoline in tins—a four-legged pipeline.

The Fireball Express pushed on to Cairo. It crossed India. Then came the final and most formidable challenge: the 550-mile jump across the Himalayan mountain range. The Himalayas had some of the worst weather in the world, including monsoons, thunderstorms, ice, severe turbulence, and violent downdrafts capable of sucking planes suddenly into the mountainside. Maps were vague, and pilots had to maintain radio silence while flying over enemy territory. They could navigate somewhat by the “aluminum trail,” the hundreds of crashed planes that marked the route to China.

Regular flights over “the Hump,” as the pilots called it, began in December 1942, landing in Kunming, China. This started as a cowboy operation—high-flying daredevils tempting fate. But as the traffic increased, it fell under the stern direction of General William H. Tunner.

Tunner’s nickname, “Tonnage,” bespoke his coolly logistical inclinations. He made charts and graphs showing the status of each plane. Under his supervision the corridor between India and China turned into an aerial conveyor belt. The aircraft hauled tanks, trucks, and other heavy machinery along with food, fuel, and arms.

By the end of 1943, planes were touching down in Kunming once every eleven minutes. In a twenty-four-hour period in 1945, Tunner landed one every minute and twelve seconds.

“Roads, it would seem, are no longer essential to military operations” is how a writer summed up the lesson of the Hump. Certainly Japan’s control of Burma had been inconvenient, but Tunner had proved that it wasn’t fatal. After the Hump, he wrote, he “knew that we could fly anything anywhere anytime.”

Anything anywhere anytime—this was a far cry from the world of just half a century earlier, when getting to Cuba from Florida was an ordeal. Planes not only added speed, they changed the laws of geopolitics. The surface of the earth, with its strongholds, impassable barriers, and fortified borders, looked different from a cockpit. Contiguous access no longer mattered so much. The old imperialist logic—men with white mustaches coloring in countries on the map—lost a great deal of its force.

In Europe, the Axis was defeated in a familiar war of fronts and flanks. The Soviets overran Germany from the east, the Anglophone powers came from the west, and they collectively wore Greater Germany down to a thin sliver. In the island-strewn Pacific, however, this new territory-defying logic was on vivid display.

It could be seen in the “island-hopping” strategy MacArthur and Nimitz used to storm the Pacific. Instead of fighting for contiguous areas, they overleapt Japanese strongholds and pressed onward. Aviation allowed this.

It also allowed the Allies to do something extraordinary: defeat Japan without setting foot on its main islands. Instead, using bases at Guam, Tinian, Saipan, Okinawa, and Iwo Jima, they laid waste to nearly seventy Japanese cities by air.

**The conquest of the Japanese main islands, accomplished entirely by aerial bombing**

The planes delivered death rather than trucks, but otherwise it wasn’t too different from the Hump. From a small collection of islands, the United States beat Japan into submission without invading.

The transcendence of surface-hugging technologies in transportation had a direct analogue in communication. Since 1844, when Samuel Morse had tapped out the question WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT in the world’s first telegram, wires had been a vital instrument of politics. Cables crossed the seas, acting as the nervous systems of large empires. The British, champions of the cable game, had by the early twentieth century gained control of more than half the world’s cables. They also, through Malaya, possessed the world’s sole supply of the natural latex gutta-percha—the only material until plastic that could effectively insulate deep-sea submarine cables.

Yet mere preponderance wasn’t enough. The British obsessed over acquiring an “all red” network, red being the color of the British Empire on the map. Such a network, passing only through British territory, would offer protection from foreign powers that might cut or tap Britain’s cables.

Britain achieved its all-red network and, with it, invulnerability. Everyone else, meanwhile, learned the cost of not having a secure network. In the opening days of the First World War, Britain cut Germany’s transatlantic cables—something it could easily do, as Germany did not control the territory around them. The Germans were then forced to use unreliable intermediaries to carry their messages, which opened them up to espionage. In 1917 the German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann sent a proposal to Mexico promising to help Mexico “reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona” in exchange for an alliance. But the British intercepted the message and shared it with Washington. The “Zimmermann Telegram,” as it is now known, was crucial in drawing the United States into the war.

“The All-Red Line Around the World”: The main routes of Britain’s cable system, connecting its colonies and passing only through British territory (minus a short jaunt through northern Maine), completed in 1902

The United States had the fortune of fighting on the British side—i.e., the side with the cables. But it suffered the indignity of having to rely on its ally’s network, which meant both waiting in queue while the British privileged their own messages and leaving itself open to British espionage. In 1917 the only U.S. telegraphic connection between the mainland and the Philippines overloaded and then broke, so that for months Washington had no direct link to its largest colony, or to Asia in general.

Such a feeble, incomplete network wouldn’t suffice in World War II, which was, among other things, an information war. Billions of words would eventually flow overseas from the U.S. mainland—somewhere on the order of eight words transmitted for every Allied bullet fired. By D-Day, U.S. teleprinter traffic would reach eight million words a week.

The United States could have tried to handle this verbal barrage by building its own all-red network, but a truly secure planetary cable system required, as the British had shown, a globe-spanning colonial empire. Instead, the United States came to rely on another technology: radio.

Radio, like aviation, was a space-hopping technology. Two transceivers were all that was required—there was no need to control the land in between. Radio not only put far-off locales in contact with one another, it allowed for communication with ships, planes, trucks, tanks, submarines, and men in the field (via the new gee-whiz technology of the “walkie-talkie”). The thousands of disconnected bases the United States built all over the world couldn’t have operated without it.

Of course, beaming messages through the air meant that anyone could hear. So the United States also invested heavily in encryption. Sixteen thousand cipher clerks worked encoding and decoding its communications during the war.

With encrypted radio, the United States could run a vast network with a small footprint. All it needed were a few spots, ideally in the equatorial zone, where high-frequency radio waves traveled most easily. Major stations at such places as Asmara, Karachi, New Delhi, Manila, and Honolulu sufficed to handle the greatest informational flood humanity had yet experienced.

“We have got our net in,” boasted the chief of the Army Communications Service, “and it is the finest network in the world.”

It was impressive. Though FDR traveled farther and more frequently than any of his predecessors, the Signal Corps kept him in unbroken contact with his Joint Chiefs of Staff and all field commanders, essentially running a mobile situation room at the president’s elbow. At the Yalta Conference in Crimea, he consulted instantaneously with China, France, and Washington. On his return, the stunned president told Congress of the “modern miracle of communications.”

Before the invasion of Normandy, George Marshall in Washington used a similar system to confer for more than an hour with Dwight Eisenhower in Europe, Douglas MacArthur in the Southwest Pacific, and John Deane in Moscow. The generals communicated by sending short typed messages, which appeared on a screen. In other words, they texted.

Half a year into the war, the United States figured out how to fax images wirelessly, a technology it used for maps, weather charts, and news photos. The famous Iwo Jima flag-raising photograph traveled by fax. Soon enough, the military was faxing images in color. A color photograph of Truman, Stalin, and Clement Attlee meeting at Potsdam traveled directly to Washington from Berlin.

On the centennial of Samuel Morse’s 1844 WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT message, which had traveled between Washington and Baltimore, the Signal Corps sent the same message around the world in three and a half minutes. Less than a year later, it sent another message around the globe in nine and a half seconds. It used only five wireless stations, each able to transmit for thousands of miles by reflecting radio waves off the ionosphere.

The message? THIS IS WHAT GOD HATH WROUGHT. It was signed ARMY COMMUNICATIONS SERVICE.

Half a year later, the Signal Corps started bouncing radio waves off the moon. It was the first use of outer space for communications—a portent of the satellite age to come.

Planes and radio meant that cargo and information could move swiftly from spot to spot, leaping over enemy territory if necessary. Yet could the cargo survive the haul? Human cargo was notoriously tricky in this regard, given humans’ tendency to contract diseases whenever they moved long distances or en masse. Walt Whitman’s characterization of war as “nine hundred and ninety parts diarrhoea to one part glory” was apt well into the twentieth century. World War I had killed about eight million in the various belligerents’ militaries. But that was nothing compared with the pandemic of Spanish flu that the war unleashed, which killed somewhere between fifty million and one hundred million.

World War II looked as if it might be even worse. Its global expanse and surfeit of airplanes threatened to carry diseases rapidly around the planet, touching off pandemic after pandemic.

MacArthur’s troops in the South Pacific were in this respect the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. Technically they were fighting the Japanese, but their far more serious enemy was malaria, which initially caused eight to ten times as many casualties as combat did. The lucky ones who dodged malaria had tropical sores, dengue fever, dysentery, and typhus to look forward to. One observer judged MacArthur’s emaciated, sunken-eyed men in New Guinea to be “perhaps the most wretched-looking soldiers ever to wear the American uniform … There was hardly a soldier, among the thousands who went into the jungle, who did not come down with some kind of fever.”

Malaria was especially nettlesome because the customary remedies were no longer available. More than 95 percent of the supply of quinine, the most effective antimalarial, had come from the cinchona plantations of the Dutch East Indies—now in Japanese hands. And the insecticide used to fumigate the Panama Canal Zone, pyrethrum, had come principally from Japan.

It was the rubber problem all over again, and scientists raced to solve it. Dozens of university laboratories screened more than fourteen thousand compounds in search of a synthetic antimalarial. Prisoners and conscientious objectors were brought in as guinea pigs.

Two compounds worked well: atabrine and chloroquine. Atabrine turned the skin an alarming shade of yellow and disturbed the gastrointestinal tract, but it brought down malaria rates considerably. Chloroquine, which debuted at the end of the war, worked even better. Together, the synthetic drugs not only replaced quinine, they surpassed it.

**Sign at army hospital in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea**

The most impressive synthetic countermeasure wasn’t a drug, but an insecticide. Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, known by the mercifully short acronym DDT, had been developed shortly before the war in a Swiss lab, but it was the U.S. military that started mass-producing it. It seemed miraculous: cheap, easy to apply, easy to ship, and astonishingly persistent—a single application lasted months. Better still, it worked against all sorts of bugs, not only mosquitoes but lice, crop-munching beetles, and other pests.

Insect control in the days of the Panama Canal had been an arduous, artisanal process, requiring workers to fumigate every house and interrogate every puddle. DDT, by contrast, could be sprayed by planes—Skeeter Beaters, they were called. Whole Pacific islands were blanketed by DDT in advance of landings, destroying the main vectors of disease before the first men hit the beaches.

A naval medical officer who watched the Skeeter Beaters work their magic in the Pacific theater described the scene, noting with awe the “complete destruction of plant and animal life” DDT could cause. On Saipan, he wrote, “scarcely a living thing” remained after the planes had made their passes. “No birds, no mammals, no insects, except a few flies, and the plant life was decreasing.” It’s likely that some of the devastation he saw was caused by the solvent used with DDT rather than the insecticide itself, but the lesson was nonetheless clear.

Combined, the antimalarials and DDT were transformative. By 1944, the malaria rate in MacArthur’s disease-ridden command had dropped 95 percent. Serving under MacArthur, by then, was only slightly more dangerous than serving on the mainland, from a disease perspective. After the war, the officer in charge of the antimalarial campaign proudly reported that “man has developed a mastery of malaria.”

And not only malaria. A group of new sulfonamide-based drugs could treat dozens of bacterial diseases and infections: gonorrhea, pneumonia, strep throat, burns, scarlet fever, dysentery, and so on. Penicillin, the most powerful bacteria killer, was honed during the war, too, turning battlefield injuries from likely killers to recoverable setbacks. The death rate for all disease in the army in World War II was just 4 percent of what it had been in the First World War.

The new drugs and sprays not only made war safer, they made movement safer. No longer were areas like Panama graveyards for mainlanders, the sorts of places to which they’d bring their coffins in their luggage. In fact, during the war the United States established 134 bases in Panama outside the carefully policed Canal Zone. Those bases were partly to protect the canal, but they also served as places to practice maneuvers and experiment with chemical weapons, such as the jungle tests Cornelius Rhoads oversaw.

Using the Panamanian jungle for tests or training would have been insane a few decades earlier. But with Skeeter Beaters (which could kill 95 percent of the adult mosquitoes), insect repellents, antimalarials, mosquito netting, and ground spraying, a forbidding environment became hospitable. The soldiers plunged into the thick brush. And they were fine.

What of the other cargo the planes carried, the objects? How would they fare when transported across the world? We rarely contemplate this, but for most of history, objects hadn’t been built to travel. The predicament of the attendees of Arthur MacArthur’s 1901 party in the Philippines—their buildings rotting, their hats dripping down their faces—had been a perpetual hazard.

The troubles with transport continued into the Second World War, which exposed vital matériel to rough handling, sandstorms, high altitudes, subzero temperatures, seawater, and sweltering jungles. An observer visiting New Caledonia in MacArthur’s command was shocked by what the climate had done to storage depots. Cans were “completely covered by rust.” Wooden crates, which worked perfectly well on the mainland, had rotted so badly that “the wood could be mashed between one’s fingers.” The center of large stacks of stored food “looked like a big mold culture.”

Specialized equipment proved especially vulnerable. Gas masks and electrical equipment grew fungus in the tropics. Batteries were particularly finicky, giving perpetual trouble. In New Guinea, ants chewed through the insulation on telephone wires and radio equipment. An inspection on major Pacific bases found that 20 to 40 percent of the matériel in depots was unusable.

Yet again, the engineers went to work. Their task was a remarkable one: to world-proof the inventory of the military. To make sure that objects didn’t stop working whenever they moved.

The quartermaster’s office devised what it called “amphibious” packaging, made from newly developed materials that could withstand long voyages and exposure to the elements. Plasticized paper, silica gel, sisal, and asphalt featured in these multilayer packages, which portended today’s foil-plastic-paper shelf-stable milk cartons. Burlap sacks were similarly replaced by multiwall sacks of paper, plastic, and asphalt. Tin cans, for their part, could be coated in lacquer or enamel to withstand rust.

It went beyond the packaging. The military also learned to world-proof its equipment, rendering objects themselves suitable for any climate. Matériel was coated, sprayed, and sheathed in plastic to render it impervious to the elements. One of the most impressive achievements, because it was so complex, was the rugged, portable high-frequency radio unit developed for use in the field.

In area after area, the military confronted the challenges of world shipping. It is in no small part due to its accomplishments that our world today is the way it is—a place where objects are not confined to climatic zones, but can move without malfunctioning.

Medical breakthroughs enabled men to parachute into difficult environments and survive. Engineering innovations meant that the things they carried could, too.

Aviation, knocked-down shipping, wireless communication, cryptography, chloroquine, DDT, and world-proofing. These were disparate technologies, but what united them was their effect on movement. They allowed the United States to move easily through foreign lands it didn’t control, substituting technology for territory.

The substitution was never complete. It’s not as if, even today, all transit is by plane or all information is sent wirelessly (underwater cables play a surprisingly large role in our internet-connected world). But the important thing was that objects, people, and messages could be moved this way. That possibility diminished the importance of strategically valuable areas.

The Panama Canal Zone is a telling example. At the start of the Second World War, the United States had been so nervous about losing access to the canal that it established 134 bases in Panama. But at the end of that war, the military had gotten so comfortable moving around the planet without colonies that Harry Truman relinquished all those bases and proposed turning the canal over to the United Nations. Every president after Truman sought to extricate the United States from the increasingly irrelevant Canal Zone in various ways, though it wasn’t until Jimmy Carter’s presidency in the 1970s that a treaty ending U.S. jurisdiction over the zone was finally signed.

It wasn’t the canal that was obsolete—traffic through it continued to grow steadily in the postwar years. It was the Canal Zone, which guaranteed access to the canal and granted control over it. That was the part that no longer seemed essential to national security.

Space-annihilating technologies helped set the terms of the burgeoning Cold War, a war that featured very little annexation by its principals. In 1945 the Allies had divided Germany into zones of occupation, and they did the same to the city of Berlin, lodged within the Soviet zone. Yet in their haste, the occupiers had failed to sign any agreement granting the Western powers access to their zones in Berlin. Since all the ground approaches passed through Soviet-occupied Germany, this meant that Joseph Stalin could entirely blockade the Western sectors of Berlin. Which, in 1948, he did.

It was a bold move. Berlin was importing fifteen thousand tons of goods per day. Stalin apparently hoped that by sealing it off, he could force the West to abandon it and perhaps retreat from Germany altogether.

That probably would have worked in the past. Indeed, after the First World War cut Belgium off from its markets, Herbert Hoover, tasked with relieving the Belgians, had been compelled to negotiate the right of free passage from Britain, France, and Germany to get supplies in. If he hadn’t gotten ground access, he wouldn’t have been able to aid Belgium.

Berlin was Belgium without the permission slips. Yet the experience of the Second World War raised a question. Was permission even necessary?

“I may be the craziest man in the world,” said the U.S. military governor of occupied Germany, Lucius Clay, to the mayor-elect of Berlin, “but I am going to try the experiment of feeding this city by air.”

General William “Tonnage” Tunner, hero of the Hump, was placed in charge of the operation. It was a fitting hire, “like appointing John Ringling to get the circus on the road,” noted the commander of the air force in Europe. Tunner brought his familiar bureaucratic style. “The real excitement from running a successful airlift comes from seeing a dozen lines climbing steadily on a dozen charts,” he wrote.

The lines did climb. Tunner set the planes in a brisk three-takeoffs-per-minute cadence. Flights were synchronized to the second and kept on an exact path by ground-to-air radio. To celebrate Easter, Tunner tapped the accelerator and landed a plane in Berlin every 61.8 seconds.

The aircraft, departing from bases in western Germany, flew necessities: coal, oil, flour, dehydrated food, and salt. But they also flew grand pianos and, in one case, a power plant. Berlin’s economy ran by air. Stalin, ultimately, could not hold out—the blockade hurt him more than it hurt his adversaries. In the eleventh month, after more than a quarter of a million flights, he lifted the barriers.

The lesson was clear: Stalin had territorial control, but that didn’t mean what it used to.

It was a lesson Moscow would be taught repeatedly. Starting in the late forties, the United States started beaming radio broadcasts into the USSR and its satellites—the communications equivalent of the Berlin Airlift. A few high-powered broadcasting stations in Western Europe were all it took to shred the informational sovereignty of the Eastern Bloc. The Voice of America and two CIA-backed operations, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation (later renamed Radio Liberty), egged on dissenters, incited uprisings, and aired governmental secrets.

The Soviets tried to jam the broadcasts; by 1958, they were spending more on jamming than on their own transmissions. But they never managed to shut off the stream of information. Multiple times it appears that the Soviets assassinated or tried to assassinate Western journalists. In 1981 the headquarters of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in Munich was bombed. Yet not even that stopped the broadcasts.

“When it came to radio waves, the iron curtain was helpless,” remembered Lech Walesa, the leader of Poland’s dissident Solidarity movement. Solidarity had relied heavily on Western radio, which Walesa credited with the collapse of communism in Europe.

“The frontiers could be closed,” he wrote. “Words could not.”