Windy Guam

The nation's urge to rearm, so suddenly felt last autumn, so boldly cultivated by Franklin Roosevelt with warnings about the Dictators, was last week driving his national defense program steadily through Congress--when something happened to the urge. All went well as:

> Making ready to pass the House's $376,000,000 Army expansion bill, Senate committeemen raised from 5,500 planes to 6,000 the Army Air Corps' authorized maximum.

> Another group of Senators went even beyond the Administration's defense plans by presenting a bill to buy, beginning now, $100,000,000 worth of 37 strategic materials (antimony, chromium, manganese, nickel, tin, tungsten, quinine and the like) which the U. S. would need in war but must import.

And then, up in the House came a bill to authorize the building or expansion of twelve naval bases, ten in the Pacific, two in the Atlantic. The lot would cost only $51,500,000 (to be appropriated later), but the forward sweep of the national defense program was momentarily halted by one little phrase: "And Guam, $5,000,000." Chairman Carl Vinson of the Naval Affairs Committee was rudely surprised to find that this was a fighting phrase. Debate over it raged hot and angrily for three days. During the fight, the Congress and the country clarified some of their ideas on national defense.

The tiny (210 sq. mi.), windy, rocky island called Guam was acquired by the U. S. in 1898 as part of its Spanish conquest. With the liberation of the Philippine Commonwealth, it will become the easternmost U. S. possession, 3,300 mi. beyond Hawaii, only 1,500 mi. from Manila. Regardless of the Philippines' status as a trade protectorate (which Franklin Roosevelt has recommended extending beyond 1946 to 1960), the Navy has pictured Guam, with its potentially fine harbor of Apra, as a likely Pacific outpost. If heavily fortified it would move the U. S. first line of Pacific defense just that much farther away from the U. S. mainland, into an arc far outside of the Alaska-Hawaii-Samoa defense line (see map). The Navy conceives that its duty is to do its fighting as far from the mainland as possible. It also knows that from Guam it could cooperate handily with the seapower of the likeliest U. S. ally, Great Britain, strongly based on Singapore and Hong Kong.

Opposition to authorizing improvement of Guam's facilities for seaplanes and small naval craft was hung on two main pegs by Congressmen who, whether or not they had thought it all the way through, were eloquent on their favorite objections:

i) "Improvement" of Guam would, in the present state of U. S.-Japan relations, be tantamount to fortification of Guam. It would be a provocative gesture even if excused by Japan's alleged fortification of islands in the absorbed mandate groups (Caroline and Marshall)--and particularly when viewed in connection with the British desire to control Japan's approach to the Netherlands Indies and British Malaya (oil, coal, rubber, food). More provocative, Guam is only 1,356 miles from Yokohama.

New York's professionally loud Hamilton Fish cried: "A dagger at the throat of Japan!" Wisconsin's Stephen Bolles said: "A small kumquat in the hand of Japan."

2) Extension of the Navy's "mainland defense" line would be an extension of U. S. foreign policy.

In defense of Guam, Republican Representative Maas of Minnesota cried: "We want the world to know that we intend to defend every inch of American soil anywhere, at any time, from anybody." Chairman May of the Military Affairs Committee joined in and shouted: "Americans must take their stand for or against this country. The American frontier is where the Stars & Stripes fly!"

Anti-Guamsters gathered aside in the House and sarcastically hummed Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever. When Mr. May suggested that the issue was, "Are we Americans or Japanese?", report was that 20 votes switched against him.

The question was finally put in an amendment by New Jersey's Sutphin, who usually speaks for Assistant Secretary of the Navy Edison (TIME, Feb. 20). Republican Leader Joe Martin shrewdly held his forces in hand until he could combine them with 64 anti-Guam Democrats. The vote was 205 to 168 against Guam, and then 368 to 4 in favor of the other eleven bases. Republican Adman Bruce Barton, unable to control himself: "Guam, Guam with the Wind."

Not gone forever was Guam. It would come up again in the Senate and perhaps in other defense bills. From the Navy's point of view a major catastrophe was that in the excitement, authorization of its submarine requirements in the Pacific had been forgotten.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.