Wings over the Pacific

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ALTHOUGH the twentieth century has not yet produced a Mahan to formulate the full significance in international politics of man's conquest of the air, the rapid strides of commercial aviation in recent years, and the overwhelming rôle played by air power in the present war, indicate that statesmen now have in their hands a new force of tremendous importance. Whether there is ultimate agreement upon a doctrine of "freedom of the air" as there sometimes has been for that of "freedom of the seas," or whether nations will continue to maintain jealously their air rights, the air lanes of the future cannot fail to be important channels through which the influence -- and the prestige -- of states will be spread to remote parts of the world.^[i] In this sense the "wave of the future" is the slip-stream behind a myriad spinning propellers and not the wake behind the screws of a laboring ship.

Because of its vast distances, the Pacific is of all the oceans the one where air power seems destined to play perhaps its greatest role. Here, at times in close juxtaposition, lie the scattered outposts of empire which formerly were tied to the mother country only by the tenuous threads of infrequent steamer service. Today this relationship has been profoundly changed by the cable, the radio, and the airplane, and Pacific dependencies have now become virtually integral parts of their respective states. Of these three new agencies the airplane is by all odds the most important. Thanks to it, these dependencies are no longer outposts difficult to administer and even more difficult to defend; they are now immensely valuable bases for both the commerce and the strategy of the future. In the Pacific, at least, air transportation bids fair to transform the whole traditional concept of empire.

This new influence of air power upon the character of empire in the Pacific is not a recent discovery on the part of the governments concerned. Long before the outbreak of the present war, even before the development of acute political tension in the area, governments controlling Pacific possessions had taken steps to link them to the homeland by a nexus of commercial air lines. Other governments, e.g. Germany, lacking colonies but desiring to expand their influence in the region, had attempted to set up such competition as they could...