National Affairs: It's the Upkeep

In chancelleries around the world, diplomats were conferring over green baize tables and mahogany desks about U.S. rights to postwar military bases. But to cold-eyed strategists in Washington, there was just as great danger from within as from without. Unless money were made available soon, defense lines and base symbols drawn on paper might prove to be no more durable than the paper itself.

The situation was most acute in the Pacific. Bases on former Jap-mandated islands, in the Philippines, Ryukyus and Aleutians, were the fruit of great and costly amphibious campaigns. The danger was that this fruit would be rotten before...

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