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 vii 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 ix