What the Bases Mean

Last week U. S. naval strategists concluded that in getting leaseholds on eight British base sites (see map), the U. S. had gained the equivalent of five new battleships. An Army man might have said: 2,500 airplanes, or an Army corps, or perhaps a couple of new armored divisions.

No such comparisons conveyed the full import of the protective chain which the U. S. acquired. Their real value is to complete a U. S. defensive ring around the Caribbean and provide real outposts against attack from the Atlantic. But the biggest all-over value is preventive: however useful the new bases are to the U. S. they would be even more useful to any enemy who got them first. Military men all agreed that without some of the bases which the British last week placed at U. S. disposal, no enemy could successfully invade the U. S. from the Atlantic. Getting the bases means to the U. S. much the same thing as six inches' extra reach would mean to a boxer: they make it possible to keep an enemy from getting in close where he could do much damage.

Making the prospective bases into effective outposts is no simple, inexpensive, overnight job. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox last week said that the U. S. will begin immediately to spend $25,000,000 on its new bases. This sum can do no more than provide haven for ships (mostly destroyers, submarines for first-line patrol), initial facilities for long-range naval flying boats and both Army and Navy land-based planes. To build and fortify an advanced fleet base would cost at least $200,000,000 (the rock-bottom estimate for doing as much at Guam).

That the U. S. would immediately attempt such major development of its new sites was doubtful; it is already expanding its facilities at Guantanamo, Puerto Rico and the defensive centre of all Caribbean strategy--the Panama Canal. Only three of the new bases (Newfoundland, Bermuda, Trinidad) would lend themselves to development as even secondary fleet bases. But along its new defense line the U. S. can well place docks, tenders, other facilities for destroyers, submarines, patrol planes and protected anchorages for capital ships. President Roosevelt has in hand $200,000,000 of blank-check naval appropriations to spend as he likes, presumably will spend some of it on the bases.

The Army, which garrisons Navy bases, will have to put barracks, men, coast artillery and antiaircraft, land-based fighters and bombers on the islands. On its present schedule, the Army cannot do this job adequately before 1942.

Last week the U. S. "got there first," but not with "the mostest men." It must now get there as soon as possible with men, guns, ships, planes.

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