THE STRATEGIC GEOGRAPHY OF THE CARIBBEAN SEA

Monday, Jul. 29, 1940

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On the two 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, Fla.

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.

In its island coves and inlets 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.

But it remained for the late, great Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan to put down on paper for future Annapolis men the specific doctrine of the area's importance. "One thing is sure," he wrote, "in the Caribbean Sea is the strategical key of two great oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific; our own chief maritime frontiers."

The Panama Canal can be attacked in three general ways: 1) enemy saboteurs might block its locks or destroy its gates by blowing up a shipful of explosives on an apparently peaceful transit of the Ditch; 2) bombers launched from an enemy carrier at sea might succeed in a surprise raid in smashing lock machinery or breaching the great dam of Gatun Lake, thereby draining the Canal of water; 3) having gained a foothold in the Caribbean area, an enemy might go about systematic destruction of the Canal with large-scale attacks by sea and air.