Daniel Immerwahr's recent book, "How to Hide an Empire," focuses on the U.S. as a colonial power surpassing even the Spanish, French, and (yes!) the U.K. It is alternately fascinating and irritating, but, fortunately the information and insights, the fascinating part, outlasts the Irritating.
The following are just a few initial notes I've made a week or so after finishing the book and deciding that my thoughts about it would not leave me any peace until I wrote some of them down.
Also I've already told my daughter who gifted me with the book that I wanted to talk to her about it. She is an avid reader herself, as well as a professional statistician, so I realized I'd better have a few details prepared.
Here are the first thoughts, somewhat randomly jotted down and then checked against the text. I need to mention that I am, for the first time, using an eBook here, rather than a hard copy where I love to dog-ear and mark up pages. Consequently I have not always been able to locate topics that Immerwahr may have explained further in footnotes, though, believe me, I have made the attempt. I suspect that readers of this blog will be better able to check up on my use of Immerwarh's notes.
Daniel Immerwahr, “How To Hide An Empire,” 2019
1) What happened to the U.S. Army Air Corps in the Philippines after Pearl Harbor?
Immerwahr effectively details the sequence of events from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941 (December 8 in the other Pacific Island Territories of the U.S. in a later time zone, as he correctly points out; he further notes that all other Pacific Island Territories of the U.S. were attacked simultaneously, which for all of them, and by far the larger number, the day of "Infamy" was December 8, 1941). The following is the sequence of events in the Philippines.
*MacArthur receives the news by telephone at his quarters (“penthouse atop the Manila Hotel” he can’t resist saying) in the Manila Hotel at 3:40 a.m. Philippine time. He goes immediately to his command headquarters.
*MacArthur’s air commander goes to headquarters. MacArthur refuses to see him. The air commander tries a second time with the same non-result.
*MacArthur receives “repeated warnings from Washington,” even “direct orders,” all of which go unacknowledged. Strangely Immerwahr doesn’t specify what the orders were that were ignored.
*The Japanese planes arrive “sometime after noon, nine hours after Mac
Arthur’s phone had rung,” and bombed the U.S. planes on Clark Airforce Base and a few other smaller fields; nearly all the planes were, shockingly, still on the ground.
Arthur’s phone had rung,” and bombed the U.S. planes on Clark Airforce Base and a few other smaller fields; nearly all the planes were, shockingly, still on the ground.
With some legitimacy Immerwahr concludes by comparing this catastrophe to the 1898 Battle of Manila Bay in which Dewey and the U.S. Fleet demolished the hapless Spanish Fleet completely while it remained confined in the harbor.
I have read a few speculations as to why MacArthur failed to act in the nine hours between news of Pearl Harbor and the arrival of the Japanese planes. The only one that I remember having any authority points out that about half of the U.S. fighter planes and bombers would have had to be in the air constantly for those nine hours while the other half refueled in order to remain on full alert.
More helpful are Immerwahr’s stats, which I had not seen as detailed in other treatments: eighteen of thirty five B-17s (the vaunted Flying Fortresses) and “ninety other aircraft” destroyed and “many others” damaged. The damaged planes either couldn’t get off the ground at all for some time, or else most of them were unable to get past the bombed or strafed wrecks.
Immerwahr makes clear what I hadn’t realized before. The U.S. actually did have a formidable air defense in the Philippines, but MacArthur's seeming paralysis doomed it to failure. Like the Spanish in 1898, the U.S. lost “its fleet in a single day.”
Immerwahr, to his credit, does not accuse or even criticize MacArthur (something he is happy to do elsewhere) for his failure to act at this crucial moment, but actually refers to his proven military genius before and after the loss of the air defense, and accepts what others have said. It remains a “mystery.”
2) Immerwahr helped me realize that I never fully understood the status of people living in U.S. Territories and the difference between U.S. nationality and citizenship.
Immerwahr makes the point very dramatically. With the (official) surrender of the U.S. Army in the Philippines (over eighty percent Filipinos) after battling valiantly for over five months, “Sixteen million Filipinos—U.S. nationals who saluted the Stars and Stripes and looked to FDR as their commander in chief—fell under a foreign power.”
In an age in which "voter registration" is a sensitive issue and a major concern of both liberals and conservatives (and everyone in between) this distinction jumped out at me, and I realized that I wasn't entirely up on it. Immerwahr goes into some of the colonial history, but he avoids (unfortunately perhaps) giving a brief civics lesson. Suffice it to say that in 1941, all native Filipinos were U.S. nationals though not U.S. citizens, unless their parents had become U.S. citizens. It is also further instructive to discover which "outlying possessions" (a term I well remember from elementary school classes) acquired citizenship and voting rights.
3) How the Japanese attack on Perl Harbor was an attack on the United States.
FDR’s famous “Infamy” speech on December 8 went through numerous drafts, all now in the National Archives. Initially Roosevelt announced a “bombing in Hawaii and the Philippines,” but after hours of “tinkering” he had eliminated the Philippines from equal prominence. Immerwahr intimates that Roosevelt wanted to emphasize that the attack was on the United States, and Hawaii was the closest territory. And it was, at least technically, a part of the U.S., while the Philippines, although the largest by far in population, was a “Commonwealth” and slated for eventual independence. Immerwahr also intimates that a further factor was that there were more white citizens on Hawaii proportionally than in the Philippines. Racism, he believes, here as well as throughout the colonial experience of the U.S., was a another important historical throughout the colonial experience and probably for Roosevelt; racially Hawaii was, although whites were a minority, more white than any of the other territories, certainly than the Philippines.
rhb
