"Protecting the Oceanic Frontier: United States Army Defense Measures in the Pacific and East Asia, September 1945-November 1946"

Between 1945 and 1947, the United States set out to create an exclusively strategic and even in many ways imperial sphere of influence in the Pacific Basin. Largely succeeding in this endeavor—especially in the former Japanese Mandated Islands of Micronesia as well as sovereign Japanese territory conquered during the war—the United States saw its postwar actions as almost entirely defensive even as foreign nations saw them as aggressive and offensive.1 For the United States Army, the time period under study here was a greatly tumultuous one. While carrying out postwar occupation duties in Japan as well as throughout much of the former Japanese Empire, the Army—like the other American military services—had to carry out these duties at a time of massive personnel demobilization—and therefore loss of most of its experienced personnel—as well as huge budget cuts. At the same time, the nation's foreign policy was radically changing from armed neutrality to the Containment Doctrine. For the Army, this was even more radical as it meant continuing to reorient its strategic focus from interwar frontier constabulary duties in the Pacific and Central America—where it had been primarily occupied for the last several decades—to its wartime focus on Europe, the Pacific, and East Asia as well as a possible future war with the U.S.S.R.