US military’s destructive relationship with the Pacific Ocean explored in new book
LAWRENCE — The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest on Earth, covering more than 60 million square miles. Its area is even greater than the surface area of the planet Mars.
So it’s no surprise that trying to tame this region became a challenge for the United States when thrust into numerous wars that encompassed this ocean during the 20th century.
“U.S. military planners had to wrap their minds around the Pacific. It’s a huge area, and it’s not a single environment by any stretch of the imagination. The planners had to conceptualize it as something that they could control — and yet it’s not really a controllable space,” said Andrew Isenberg, Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas.
His new book, titled “The US Military and the Pacific Environment: The Making of an American Lake,” focuses on the military’s actions in the Pacific from World War II through the Vietnam War, offering essays on the inextricable relationship between the natural world and human warfare. The dozen chapters, written by an international group of scholars, consider how the physical environments shaped the process and outcome of battles and how warfare affected the locations themselves.
It’s published by the University Press of Kansas.
Co-edited with KU’s Beth Bailey, the Foundation Distinguished Professor and director of the Center for Military, War, and Society Studies, and Paul Landsberg, a professor of history at the U.S. Air Force Academy (who earned his doctorate at Kansas), the book takes its title from a description by Eleanor Frances Lattimore, an American journalist born and raised in China.
“She coined the term ‘an American lake’ in September 1945. At that point, a lot of people glibly thought that the U.S. was easily going to dominate the Pacific,” Isenberg said.
As he and Bailey write in the introduction, “By rhetorically shrinking the largest ocean on the planet to a lake, the phrase has obscured the vast expanse and the diversity – the inherent ‘ungovernableness’ – of Pacific environments.”
While the essays examine how the military was often thwarted when trying to tame this area, it also reveals the physical damage done in the attempt.
“Different people have different ideas about what the most significant environmental impact war had on the Pacific territory. For me, it’s nuclear testing in the South Pacific from 1946 until the early 1960s,” Isenberg said.
“The United States tested nuclear weapons at the Nevada Test Site, but the really big weapons — the hydrogen bombs — were tested in the South Pacific. In terms of the use of chemical herbicides in Vietnam and Korea, there are lots of things that went on — and I’m not diminishing those — but to me, everything pales next to nuclear testing.”
Isenberg said that the chapters cover a wide range of topics, from how napalm was used in World War II to how radiation affected the Marshall Islands to the testing fallout from underground nuclear explosions in Alaska.
“The most challenging thing was to try to find some throughlines, some themes and an analytical framework that would connect the various essays,” Isenberg said.
He points to Landsberg’s chapter titled “We Are Freed from the Tyranny of Terrain” as especially eye-opening. It examines how the U.S. created helicopters specifically to surmount locations that troops couldn’t march, drive or sail through.
“Yet they still ran into environmental problems,” he said.
“Humidity, air density and other things affect how much weight the machines can carry, and thus they could never carry as much as military planners had intended. Also, you can land anywhere, but you can’t land in the middle of trees, so you have to create a landing zone. Then the enemy in Vietnam figured out where those landings were going to happen. Despite efforts to transcend the environment, the U.S. military continued to run into environmental obstacles.’”
Now in his seventh year at KU, Isenberg specializes in environmental history and the history of the American West. His other books include “The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790–1850,” “The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920,” “The California Gold Rush: A Brief History with Documents” and “The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History.” He has also appeared as an expert source in several documentaries, including National Geographic’s “America Before Columbus” and AMC’s “The American West.”
“An edited volume like ‘American Lake’ particularly appeals to military historians and environmental historians, and students in those fields,” Isenberg said.
“But I hope it gets everyone to take a step back and think in a broader way about the U.S. military in the Pacific over many decades, rather than focusing on particular conflicts.”