The Army Air Forces in World War II, Vol. 1 (archived PDF)

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armament in his message of 28 January 1938, it was in the interests
of “national defense,” a familiar In his comparable message
of 4 January 1939, he repeated the phrase but he also pledged “our
people and our resources” to the protection of the Western Hemi-
sphere and its common ideals.46This was only a reaffirmation of the
principles of the Monroe Doctrine, but the nature of the threats
against the Americas and the means of defense were rapidly changing.
Traditionally, military threats against the hemisphere had been con-
ceived in terms of a naval attack followed by an invasion by ground
forces. Against such dangers, the U.S. Navy had generally been con-
sidered our main bulwark, and since the inception of the Monroe
Doctrine we had enjoyed the tacit support of British seapower. Only
to the archisolationist did defense mean literally the repulse of an
enemy from our own shores. In January 1938, the President stressed
the need of keeping “any potential enemy many hundred miles away
from our continental limits.” 4 7 The war in Europe did little to allay
anxieties concerning an amphibious assault in force, and by the end
of June 1940 the danger seemed acute. The Nazis had overrun Poland,
Norway, Denmark, and the Low Countries; France had collapsed and
Italy had joined her Axis partner. The British Expeditionary Force,
broken as an effective army, had barely escaped from Dunkirk, and
the Atlantic coast from Narvik to Bordeaux was in the hands of the
Germans, who seemed poised for the assault on Britain. Gone was
American skepticism over the “sitzkrieg,” and our ideological sym-
pathy toward Britain was sharpened by concern for our own security.
It required not too much imagination to envisage a complete Axis vic-
tory in Europe which would a t best deny us the moral support of the
Royal Navy with its shipyards, and, at worst, place that fleet and
the French at the disposal of the Germans. Such additions to a com-
bination of Japanese, Italian, and German sea forces would have
imposed upon the U.S. Navy an impossible task. That the gravity of
the situation was widely appreciated in the United States was shown
not only by the wide publicity given to the threatened realignment
of ~ e a p o w e r , ~ ~but also by the celerity with which Congress sped
through additional appropriation bills to give us a “two-ocean navy.”
But there were, as well, threats of a new sort. The war in Europe,
with its co-ordination of military and political action, its emphasis
on surprise and speed, and its concentration of power against nodal
points had indicated that aggression against the western world might
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