How South Pacific Soccer Fields Can Help Defend America

JG Randall

Security, Oceania

Welcome to the future of island hopping.

The renowned nineteenth-century author Robert Louis Stevenson, during his 1888 voyage across the Pacific, penned these words:

“The vessel plowed her path of snow across the empty deep,

 far from all track of commerce,

 far from any hand of help.”

Fitting words back then, perhaps still fitting today. Long forgotten or ignored by America, the key to a friendly and renewed access to these far flung Pacific island states is in the soft-stepping approach of a light footprint.

At first glance the Pacific appears vast and remote, yet upon further scrutiny, one can make out the myriad of islands that populate the world’s largest body of water—especially south of the equator.

And not far off from those pioneer days of early aviation, one remembers reading about the disappearance of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra searching in vain for a small speck of sand in the Gilbert Islands.

One can also appreciate the vision of Pan American’s founder, Juan Trippe. He had the gall to navigate over the empty reaches of the Pacific in the mid-1930s when he launched his fleet of China Clipper flying boats, where great distance and lack of suitable landing fields prohibited the use of conventional transport aircraft. Here, planes found refuge in their boat hulls as they flew and floated from San Francisco to Hawaii and beyond, hopping from one island to the next, all the way to the Far East.

It is not surprising that Pan Am’s refueling bases became vicious and contested battlegrounds during the opening salvos of our entry into the Second World War—as evidence by Imperial Japan's appetite for Wake Island, Guam and the Philippines, followed by a close call at Midway.

Then came a brutal six-month defense of the Australian life-line to America. A long and winding sea-lock of logistics was anchored, island by island, across the South Pacific, culminating at the tip of the spear—the place we would stop Japan's territorial grab—Guadalcanal. Turn-of-the-century adventure writer Jack London, wrote a short story, “The Terrible Solomons,” in which he articulated the harsh aura of this rock rising out of the Coral Sea: