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At the probable minimum, the Army would have to support the Navy with an armored division, a motorized infantry division, land planes to put on the five airports near Dakar. Enormous problems of transocean supply (when the U.S. and Britain are already short of sea transport) would immediately develop. The Navy remembers what happened to General Charles de Gaulle and the British when they approached Dakar with an insufficient force. And Dakar's defenses—even without probable German reinforcements—are stronger today than they were last fall.
Martinique is Vichy's Caribbean hinge, equidistant (about 1,400 miles) from the Panama Canal and Key West, Fla. The U.S. has no particular reason to be in Martinique—but it has every reason to keep an enemy out. Once strongly based there, hostile naval and air power would be an effective, intolerable menace to the Canal, the Caribbean, the U.S. and its sea and airlanes to Latin America.
Getting there first is one job the Navy could successfully take on. Only deterrent to preventive occupation last week was not Navy realism, but the U.S. State Department. For any such blow at Vichy would destroy the last diplomatic threads between Washington and Petain, might even commit the U.S. to fighting where the Navy would have a harder time.
In the War of 1812 the British had a lively sense of Martinique's importance to the U.S., temporarily wrested Fort de France from the French to keep the U.S.
from doing the same. Until November a British containing force cruised outside the spacious (15 sq. mi.), deep harbor of Fort de France, bottling up the French warships inside: the old, waddly carrier Béarn, the cruiser Emile Bertin, a few lesser ships, and U.S. warplanes—now partly dismantled, salt-bitten, obsolescent but still useful if they were overhauled—which the Béarn had brought.
French sailors have gone ashore, started gardens on the hills above the harbor. The genial Governor, Admiral Georges Robert, regularly aims soothing nothings at the U.S., politely swears to fight at Vichy's order. Rather than risk an ugly incident, the British last November gave up their watch outside the harbor, left the patrol to two U.S. destroyers. Whether Admiral King sends a stronger task force to Fort de France is strictly up to Vichy's Admiral Darlan, Hitler, and the patience of Franklin Roosevelt.
The Azores belong to Portugal, which means that they will be within Hitler's grasp whenever he wants to reach. That fact can be gravely important to the U.S.
for reasons that Franklin Roosevelt touched on last year; "You and I think of Hawaii as an outpost of defense in the Pacific. And yet the Azores are closer to our shores on the Atlantic than Hawaii is on the other side." He might have added that the Azores lie at a pivotal position in the Eastern Atlantic, whence the U.S. Navy could control the approaches to the Mediterranean, do much to neutralize any Nazis at Dakar.