Bound by War by Christopher Capozzola

Author:Christopher Capozzola [CAPOZZOLA, CHRISTOPHER]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2020-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

THE PENTAGON FOUND NEW USES FOR AMERICA’S PACIFIC BASES in the tense years of the early Cold War. During World War II, US forces expanded existing facilities from Pearl Harbor to Guam, conquered Japanese bases in island-hopping campaigns, and dispatched seabees to construct new posts and landing strips. Now there were new challenges in the Pacific. America’s relations with the Soviet Union and China hardened into Cold War, and thinly stretched European empires increasingly passed the burdens of anticommunism to the United States. By the late 1950s, the United States maintained 450 bases in thirty-six countries. Two dozen in the Philippines complemented others throughout the Pacific: in America’s fiftieth state of Hawai‘i, on the US island territory of Guam, on the western Pacific island of Okinawa (under direct US military administration until 1972), and all over Japan and South Korea. The Korean War turned America’s Philippine bases from a clause in the 1947 Military Bases Agreement to the anchor of a Pacific strategy. They were useful for training men, storing equipment, repairing ships, listening in to radio broadcasts, and, if the time came, for launching a military assault. Legal arrangements accompanied US basing in every host country. Powerful European allies demanded respect for national sovereignty, but in the Philippines, decades of military control yielded basing agreements that looked more like colonial impositions than bilateral agreements.

Of the twenty-three installations covered in the Military Bases Agreement, the largest was Clark Air Force Base, a sprawling 247-square-mile installation sixty miles north of Manila in Luzon province. Clark was a home away from home for some 40,000 American service members and their families, who enjoyed libraries, theaters, schools, bowling alleys, a PX that rivaled the most modern of 1950s supermarkets, a 1,200-seat movie theater, and a fishing pool stocked with specially flown-in Minnesota bass. The authors of A Pocket Guide to the Philippines, a 1961 Defense Department booklet issued to arriving US personnel, emphasized ordinary airmen’s role as international ambassadors. “Be prepared to… explain different aspects of America, why American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines are based in foreign lands all over the world, and—most important of all—that the United States has dedicated its tremendous military strength (of which you yourself are a part) to the protection of freedom and the preservation of peace.”38

In 1957, at least 12,000 Filipinos worked directly on base at Clark as technicians, stenographers, and security guards. In the neighboring city of Angeles, residents were almost entirely dependent on Clark for work as entertainers and bartenders, gardeners and maids. A 1950s guide for American airmen’s wives promised a “full time housegirl” for just $25.00 a month. Leny Mendoza Strobel, who grew up in San Fernando, just a few miles south of Clark, recalled “the mystique of its isolation and separation by miles of barbed wire fences.” She visited the base once a year, on the Fourth of July, when it was open to visitors, and recalled a tour on “one of the army [sic] buses” with “a hamburger sandwich wrapped in star-spangled blue and red stars.

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