Word: canal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...this is right up the professional alley of Dick Moore, who has been a supervising engineer on the U. S.'s great rivers, had a detail to Peru with the United States Naval Mission in 1928-30, commanded combat engineers and headed up the Atlantic Sector of the Canal Zone. A general officer since 1938, he was in command of the 18th Infantry Brigade in the Zone when George Marshall tapped...
...following pages TIME presents a map of the most important strategic area in the Western Hemisphere: the approaches to the Panama Canal...
Until the U. S. owns a two-ocean fleet-and such a fleet cannot be built in less than seven years-the Canal is the only insurance the U. S. has against leaving one of its coasts undefended against attack. If an enemy should succeed in blocking or capturing the Canal, that insurance would no longer exist. Hence the first paradox of U. S. strategy: the most vital point for the defense of the continental U. S. is an isthmus 1,300 miles south of Miami...
When a friendly and unthreatened British Fleet policed the Atlantic and made the Monroe Doctrine a working document, defense of the Panama Canal was a textbook subject. The only possible attack was from Japan in the Pacific, and Japan's No. 3 world Navy had to operate from too far away. Its long supply lines could be cut at will, even by an inferior Navy, from the Philippines, Hawaii, Alaska and, if the Japanese got past the great ocean fortress of Hawaii, by flanking attacks from the U. S. Pacific Coast...
Frontier. Instead of this remote danger of attack from the Pacific, there will be a new and far more serious danger from the Atlantic if Nazi Germany seizes or destroys Britain's Navy. The only route for an attacker crossing the Atlantic to strike at the Canal is through an area long regarded by most U. S. citizens as a source of rich commerce and a place for sunlit vacations: the Caribbean...