"Establishing COMNAVJAP: American Naval Bases in Occupied Japan, 1945-1947"

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. For the United States Navy, 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 Navy—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 Navy, this was even more radical as it meant reorienting its strategic focus from the Pacific—where it had been primarily occupied for the last four decades—to the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Persian Gulf while applying lessons from the Pacific War to the next possible war with the U.S.S.R. Along these lines, the attention here focuses on plans for the U.S.' postwar naval base system in Japan, always in a context of cutting the number of bases and personnel at those bases so as to devote scarce resources to a mobile striking fleet centered around aircraft carriers. In essence, this is a study of base system establishment in what had quickly become a tertiary theater.