A Double-Edged Sword
CNO Naval History Essay Contest—1st Prize Winner
(Professional Historian Category)—Sponsored by General Dynamics
The World War II ‘legacy bases’ scattered across the Central Pacific are a testament to the U.S. island-hopping path to victory—but they also hold potential as a two-way street.
By Andrew K. Blackley
February 2024 Naval History Magazine
In the Pacific Theater of World War II, the United States—wielding a trident of air, sea, and amphibious forces of unprecedented strength and sophistication—brought the expansionist Japanese Empire to utter defeat and unconditional surrender. One legacy of that conflict is the large number of island bases and airfields that still exist, in one form or another, across that vast oceanic battlefield.
Before 1941 such bases, whether built by Japan or the United States, were few and far between; however, the requirements for land-based air power and fleet replenishment for both defensive and offensive operations saw a large number of bases built where none previously existed. They provided the “stepping stones” that enabled U.S. forces to advance west through the Central Pacific to the Japanese Home Islands in less than two years.
These stepping stones, like the roads of ancient Rome, also provide a means for both defending and invading forces to move in either direction.
In early 1944, this strategic dilemma was identified by Admiral Chester W. Nimitz as a potential threat for the postwar security of the United States and its allies. Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet and Pacific Ocean Area, foresaw the possibility of a new aggressor from the West Pacific at some future time using these same bases to assert sea dominance in the Pacific. Navy planners would do well to consider his prescient analysis as they plan for future conflict in the Indo-Pacific.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2024/february/double-edged-sword
