Executive Order 6935

CXXXIX

Even Juan Trippe was surprised at the speed with which things moved.

An M-130 in “drydock” on a transport cradle

Trippe was used to the slow, deliberate, even lazy pace of the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover Administrations. It wasn’t that things didn’t happen fast from time to time during the Republican Decade, but the typical velocity of government action in those days was a steady lope. When Trippe saw the Roosevelt Administration in action his head swum, and he wondered what the mad rush could be. He soon found out.

If the American people were isolationist during the 1920s the government was not. Military interventions took place in the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua. The United States might have repudiated the League of Nations but it cooperated with the League’s various organs, and in numerous disarmament treaties. But for the most part, official American interests were narrowly supportive of American business interests rather than any kind of Weltpolitik.

U.S. sailors during the occupation of Nicaragua, 1912-1934

The onset of the Great Depression caused a further scaling back of American commitments overseas even in America’s own territories. America’s Pacific Fleet (then called the Battle Fleet) was based in San Diego. The Territory of Hawaii was left undefended. The U.S. was handling the Commonwealth of The Philippines with kid gloves due to the long aftermath of the U.S. - Philippine War of 1899-1902, when Filipino patriots tried to throw off the then brand new American overlordship of the islands. The war resulted in a now mostly-forgotten outbreak of ugly American war crimes. So rather than holding tightly to the Philippines, the U.S. had granted the territory self-governance in 1934. The Navy did maintain an Asiatic Fleet in Manila, made up mostly of outmoded nineteenth century warships. Guam had a naval station but was only lightly defended. Elsewhere, American soldiers stood guard with World War I–era tin hats and leftover rifles, many from the war with Spain. 

The Philippine town of Caloocan goes up in flames at the hands of U.S. troops, 1899

It was an age of dictators. In 1922, Mussolini had taken power in Italy under the Fascist banner. 1923 saw Zankov take absolute power in Bulgaria, Rivera seize Spain, and Kemal Ataturk take control of Turkey. Stalin seized power in the Soviet Union in 1924. Zogu took control of Albania in 1925, and Pilsudski in Poland, Gomes de Costa in Portugal, and Smetona in Lithuania became absolute leaders in their lands in 1926. King Alexander rose to power in Yugoslavia in 1929, and King Carol in Romania in 1930. Dollfuss became dictator of Austria in 1933. Just before Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated, Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany.  

 

The world’s worst: Hitler and Stalin may be responsible for more than 100,000,000 deaths in total. Their use of the modern technological state as killing machine makes Genghis Khan look like a piker

The United States did little to affect the course of events in Europe, but when Japan began covert hostilities against China in 1929, and then began a full ground war in 1931 (considered by some historians to be the true onset of World War II), the “China Lobby” in the U.S. demanded some kind of action. The China Lobby was made up of powerful and influential Americans many of whom were born in China and the children of missionaries. The U.S. government responded by secretly funding the China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC) and the American Volunteer Group (AVG), a group of American expatriate fighter pilots otherwise known as the Flying Tigers. By the time Franklin Delano Roosevelt came to the White House, Americans were opposing the Japanese in China, though they had exchanged no shots as of yet.

The AVG was a formal part of the Chinese Air Force. The group, comprised of U.S. born fliers, had been formed with the tacit permission of FDR, and almost all AVG fliers also held ranks in the U.S. military. The “Tiger Shark” livery is among the most famous in the world

Still, there had been rumbles from the Japanese government. They had dropped an impenetrable bamboo curtain over their holdings in the Carolines, the Marshalls and the Marianas. 

The Japanese objected strenuously to the presence of American aircraft on Guam or in the Philippines, for from either place America could surveille regional Japanese military activity.

 

The White House believed that Japan needed to be watched in the Western Pacific. Despite the need, neither Hoover nor his successor Roosevelt wanted to provoke any form of Japanese aggression. Minor “incidents” had already occurred. U.S. planes in the vicinity of Guam were accused of having strayed too close to the Japanese Marianas. U.S. planes in the Philippines frequently violated Formosan airspace “by accident.” It all added up to the clumsiest and most transparent sort of spying, and the Japanese government issued a diplomatically polite warning regarding the “irresponsible” maneuvers of U.S. military aircraft in the area. The next step, Roosevelt thought, might be gunfire, and America was not ready for a war in the Pacific. Rumors began to circulate that the Japanese might even try to occupy Guam. If they did, the U.S. had no contingency plan to dislodge them from the island.

During the Rape of Nanking Dec. 1937 – Jan. 1938  Japanese soldiers buried Chinese prisoners alive. The actual number of rapes is unknown, but it may be over 100,000

It was ever more crucial for the U.S. to bolster its presence in the region. And it had to be done without provoking a severe Japanese reaction.

Thus, when the President was approached regarding Juan Trippe’s idea of placing a string of otherwise-worthless mid-Pacific islands under official government control, Roosevelt, whose passion for stamp collecting had given him an encyclopedic knowledge of geography far beyond that of any of his predecessors, immediately understood that the islands Trippe wanted could be used as forward American positions. Roosevelt could, if he closed his eyes, picture them, like a beading of Christmas lights against the dark backdrop of the Pacific Ocean. 

For Trippe, they could be used as staging areas by transpacific clippers. For Roosevelt, they were the perfect Pacific picket stations. And if Pan Am used them, so much the better. A complete aviation infrastructure could be established on each island by and for Pan Am without arousing undue Japanese suspicion.  If the U.S. Navy happened to need to borrow back their islands every once in a while, that would be okay too.

 

Crossing the Pacific

And so it was that on December 29, 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 6935 which placed Wake Island, Johnston Island, Midway, Kingman Reef, and a number of other minor outlying islands under the control of the Department of the Navy. The language was buried in a prosaic Land Management Order, published but not announced, and therein Wake Island was designated as a bird sanctuary. Pan American Airways got the use of each island for a token rent of $100.00 a year.