Guarding the United States and its outposts

616 Pages·1961·15.766 MB·English

by  Stetson Conn

UNITED STATES ARMY IN WORLD WAR II
The Western Hemisphere
GUARDING
THE UNITED STATES
AND ITS OUTPOSTS
by
Stetson Conn
Rose C. Engelman
Byron Fairchild
C£NT£R OF MILITARY HISTORY
UNIT£D STATES ARMY
WASHINGTON D.C., 2000

Foreword
This is the second and final volume in The Western Hemisphere subseries
of UNITED STATES ARMY IN WORLD WAR II. The area covered is
vast, and so are the topics. The reader will embark upon a long journey and
become involved in a complex series of events, ranging from guarding inland
waterways to fighting the Japanese, from rounding up one forlorn German
on the coast of Greenland to battling German submarines, from conducting
staff conferences with the Navy to negotiating with His Britannic Majesty's
ministers, from withstanding the cold of the arctic or the heat of the tropics
to overcoming the ever-present ennui of soldiers who wait for the stress of
battle that never comes.
Guarding the United States and Its Outposts is instructive. Dealing often
with the twilight between peace and war, it focuses upon problems of im-
mediate relevance to the Army and the nation today. Then as now the nation
found itself in a revolution in doctrine, weapons, and methods of defense.
The way in which men caught in this revolution faced the situation can be
a guide to those meeting similar circumstances today and in the future. This
book highlights problems in unified command and contains excellent exam-
ples of military diplomacy, of how to get along, or fail to get along, with
other armed forces of the United States and with our Allies. It contains
authoritative accounts of several highly controversial events, especially the
Pearl Harbor attack and the evacuation of the United States citizens of
Japanese descent from the west coast of continental United States.
Washington, D.C. WILLIAM H. HARRIS
25 May 1961 Brig. Gen., U.S.A.
Chief of Military History
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The Authors
Stetson Conn, Chief Historian of the Department of the Army since 1958,
holds the Ph.D. degree in history from Yale University and has taught history
at Yale, Amherst College, and The George Washington University. After
joining the Office of the Chief of Military History in 1946, he served as
senior editor, as Acting Chief Historian, as Chief of the Western Hemisphere
Section, and as Deputy Chief Historian before taking over his present post.
He is coauthor of The Framework of Hemisphere Defense, the first volume
of this subseries, and his previous publications include Gibraltar in British
Diplomacy in the Eighteenth Century, a volume in the Yale Historical
Series, and a chapter in Command Decisions, published in 1959.
Rose C. Engelman received her Ph.D. degree in history from Cornell
University and taught at Hunter College before joining the Office of the
Chief of Military History in 1949. Until 1953 she was a member of the
Western Hemisphere Section, OCMH. She is now the historian of the
U.S. Army Mobility Command in Detroit.
Byron Fairchild, a member of the OCMH staff from 1949 to 1960, re-
ceived his Ph.D. degree in history from Princeton University and has taught
at the University of Maine, Amherst College, and the Munson Institute of
Maritime History. He is the author of Messrs. William Pepperrell, which
in 1954 received the Carnegie Revolving Fund Award of the American His-
torical Association for the outstanding manuscript in any field of history.
Dr. Fairchild is coauthor of The Framework of Hemisphere Defense, and
The Army and Industrial Manpower in this series, and wrote a chapter in
the official version of Command Decisions. He is at present a historian in
the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
viii
Preface
This is the second of two volumes on the plans made and measures
taken by the Army to protect the United States and the rest of the Western
Hemisphere against military attack by the Axis Powers during World War
II. The global character of American participation in the war, described in
the many volumes of this series, tends to obscure the primary and basic
concern of the United States Government, and consequently of the Army,
for the safety of the continental United States. The security of the Panama
Canal and of the island of Oahu as the principal outposts of continental
defense was of almost equal concern in the decades between World Wars
I and II. When in the late 1930's the action of aggressor nations in the
Eastern Hemisphere foreshadowed a new world war that would inevitably
involve the security of the United States, Army and Navy planning officers
concluded that the continental United States could not be threatened se-
riously by either air or surface attack unless a hostile power first obtained
a lodgment elsewhere within the Western Hemisphere. To prevent that
from happening, the United States adopted a new national policy of hemi-
sphere defense.
In the opening chapters of the first volume of this subseries, The Frame-
work of Hemisphere Defense, the authors have described the evolution of
the policy of hemisphere defense from 1938 to December 1941, in relation
to contemporary American military means and the sequence of world events.
These chapters were designed to introduce the story told in the present
volume as well as the description of the new military relationships of the
United States with the other American nations that completes the first vol-
ume. Consequently, the authors have chosen to use a shortened version of
the concluding chapter of the first volume as an introductory chapter to
this one.
After the introductory chapter this volume describes first the organiza-
tion of Army forces for the protection of the continental United States before
and during the war, the steps toward improving continental harbor and air
defenses, the Army's role in civilian defense and in guarding nonmilitary
installations, and the measures for continental security and threats to it
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