World War, STRATEGY: Minds on Martinique

We might speedily find it necessary to occupy . . . Martinique.

U.S. Senator Walter F. George of Georgia made this remark last week. Senator George, who until three weeks ago was Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was giving his personal opinion—but he had some pretty good reasons for holding the opinion.

Senator George is no rum-&-ruin imperialist. He knows that French Martinique is a dirty, uneconomic hole. That it is a place of open sewers and shoeless feet. That its desperate romantic crumbs—Napoleon’s Empress Josephine was born there, and Louis XIV’s Madame de Maintenon lived there—are not enough to make up for its boredom. That it grows a little sugar, much of which goes into rum, and that the beguine began there. That it is very congenial to malaria, typhoid, leprosy, syphilis and the dobie itch.

But Martinique also lies in the very center of the chain of islands known as the Lesser Antilles, which guard the Caribbean—halfway between U.S. bases on Puerto Rico and Trinidad on one of the direct routes from Europe to the Panama Canal.

Senator George remembers enough about Foreign Relations to know that Vichy’s declaration of collaboration with the Nazis was excuse enough for occupation of Martinique. In hostile hands, the island could be an awful nuisance. As a landing spot for Nazi agents bound for work in the Western Hemisphere, and even as an advance base for an actual attack, it has distinctly disturbing possibilities.

Senator George is not much on military affairs, but he knows that though Martinique has formidable natural possibilities for defense, it ought to be a pushover for a combined Naval, Marine and Army task force. That the island has no shore batteries to speak of, and not one airfield—so that the 100-odd dismantled U.S. planes which have sat there since the fall of France could not be used in defense. That Martinique is defended only by an old washbasin of an aircraft carrier, the Béarn, and a first-rate light cruiser, the Emile Bertin, whose crews cried when they heard that France had capitulated to the Germans and who since then have hoed beans and corn ashore and bickered angrily about Vichy’s waverings. He knows that the total French defending force comprises not more than 4,000 men, more than half native.

Senator George, who moved from Foreign Relations to the chairmanship of Finance, knows the power of money. He knows that more than $200,000,000 worth of gold, sneaked out of France at the collapse, is stowed away in Fort Desaix at Fort-de-France.

But Senator George did not know last week what was in the mind of the President of the United States, whose forces are empowered by the 1940 Havana Convention to occupy foreign-held American soil and talk about it afterward.

Presumably relations with Vichyfrance would be broken off. Ambassador William D. Leahy would be recalled and praised for having stalled the break for so long. This week, at any rate, Admiral Leahy went to Switzerland for what he described as “some good food and fresh air.”

Presumably a strong force of the U.S. Navy, accompanying marines and soldiers trained in the terrible job of establishing a beachhead, would appear off Martinique. Presumably the honorable Frenchmen on the island and on the Béarn and Emile Berlin would fire a few shots.

Perhaps the U.S. forces would then take the island more by a show of force than by force. But if not, Senator George’s prediction was the foreword to at least localized shooting war in the Western Hemisphere.