America’s Pacific Bases

Press, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23263, 25 February 1941, Page 8

America’s Pacific Bases

Few events better illustrate the recent change in American opinion on the problems of the Pacific than the authorisation by the House of Representatives of a scheme for establishing naval and air bases at Guam and Samoa. Guam has been a bone of contention between the Navy Department and Congress ever since it was acquired from Spain in 1898. Shortly after the Great War, a joint Army and' Navy Board recommended that the island be made into a first-class naval base, but Congress was apathetic and the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 ended for the time being any development of naval bases west of Hawaii. In 1936 the Japanese Government, strangely unappreciative of an arrangement which virtually guaranteed Japan naval supremacy in the Western Pacific, denounced the Washington Treaty. Two years later a special Navy Board reported to Congress that a strong advanced base at Guam was desirable because it would make the Philippines immune against attack, simplify the defence of Hawaii, and enable the fleet to “ operate with greater freedom in meeting “ emergency conditions that might arise in the “ Atlantic.” The only result of this appeal was to emphasise the stfength of isolationist sentiment in Congress, which preferred to regard Guam, not as an outpost of the American defence system in the Pacific, but as an American possession so close to Japan that its development as a naval base would unnecessarily exacerbate relations between Japan and the United States. Few laymen could then believe that a small island as far from their Pacific coast as New York is .from the Suez Canal was an essential part of their defence system. The question of the Philippines seemed to be disposed of by the Tydings-McDuffie Act, which provided for the full independence of the Philippines by 1946. The events of the last year or so have compelled Congress to realise that there is no definite defensive line, in the Pacific or in the Atlantic, behind which the United States can remain secure from attack. What happens in the Mediterranean or in the Far East bears as directly on her defence problem as events within the Western Hemisphere. Guam is not being fortified because the American people want a settling of accounts with

Japan; it is being fortified because they know that, in the interests of their own safety, they must play an active part in the power politics of the Far East. The case of Samoa is very different but not less significant. The United States acquired Eastern Samoa almost by accident, in the course of the somewhat pointless scramble for Pacific possessions which marked the closing years of last century. For nearly half a century the island of Tutuila, with its superb natural harbour of Pago Pago, has been a minor and remote naval station. Its strategic significance lies in its proximity to Australia and New Zealand, to the British Colony of Fiji, and to New Zealand’s mandated territory of Western Samoa. The decision to make Pago Pago a naval and air base can only mean that the Navy Department, with the approval of Congress, is interesting itself in the future of the British Dominions and possessions in the south-western Pacific. For New Zealand in particular the development is a welcome one. The problem of providing adequately for the defence of Western Samoa is, or should be, causing the New Zealand Government some anxiety. Apart from certain complications introduced by the terms of the mandate, it is beyond New Zealand’s resources to garrison and fortify Western Samoa adequately. Moreover, Apia harbour is almost useless for naval purposes. The conversion of Pago Pago into a naval and air base would do much to strengthen a sector of the Pacific where British and American defences are at present dangerously weak.