Word: fleetly
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...more in appropriations and authorizations. With Britain backed to the wall before Adolf Hitler's armies on land and in the air, the job of transforming those dollars into a field army must be done quickly-perhaps, if 30 Britain should lose or surrender her fleet, within six months. While President Roosevelt's Defense Commission and U. S. industry carry out their own vast mobilization, the Army must: i) list its needs, from quinine to tanks and airplanes; 2) carry out a vast building program; 3) train close to a million raw and semi-expert troops; 4) feed...
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...
...Pirates Morgan, Stede Bonnet and "Black-beard" Teach once lay in wait to raid New World shipping. From the Bahamas, Jamaica and Martinique, Civil War blockade runners made their night-bound, fog-shrouded dashes to Charleston and Wilmington. And in 1898, the Caribbean was invaded by an inept Spanish Fleet. It had the U. S. Atlantic seaboard in a dither of fright until old Admiral Cervera holed up in Santiago, Cuba, finally came out to have his ships shot down like ducks in a shooting gallery by a U. S. Fleet which was short on strategic reconnaissance, long on guns...
...islands of the hook form a natural line of fine defensive outposts with great stretches of blue water between them and the closest jumping-off places for a European invader: the Azores or the Cape Verde Islands. Thus they are potential operating bases from which the U. S. Fleet and land-based aircraft can range far to sea, spotting and striking at any invader as close to his European base as possible. But while the islands make one of the world's finest strategic assets, they are also great potential liabilities. An enemy with a toe hold...