This is the second in a series of posts on the relationship between the Territory of Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a once united entity driven apart by historical circumstance. Please read the first part here.
In his lengthy but accessible How to Hide and Empire: A history of the greater United States, Daniel Immerwahr begins with the circumstances around the “date which will live in infamy” speech by FDR after the Pearl Harbor attacks. Every schoolchild has heard the broadcast of Roosevelt delivering it in a joint session of congress.
The Pearl Harbor attack was meant to delay or prevent the American fleet’s response to Japan’s invasions elsewhere on the same day. Nine hours after the assault on Oahu, the Japanese attacked and seized the U.S. territories of the Phillipines, Midway Island, Wake Island, and Guam. They also attacked Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong - then British colonies - and invaded Thailand.
“Pearl Harbor” is shorthand for that sneak attack, but it was one of the few places the Japanese did not invade. It was also the only part of the attack that occurred on the East side of the International Dateline. By the time the first Kates dropped their torpedoes and bombs, at 7:55 a.m. Hawaii time on December 7, it was already 3:55 a.m. Guam time on December 8th.
The Japanese bombed Guam on the 8th and landed around three thousand invaders that arrived on December 10th. Nearly 400 POWs were taken when the Naval Governor surrendered after a half hour of resistance. The planes for the bombing were launched from 140 miles north, at Saipan. The bombs were stored a loaded at a bunker that is still standing.
A digression:
Back to the speech:
Guam was not mentioned in FDR’s address. The largest part of the operation was the beginning of their seizure of the US territory of the Phillipines, where 18 million US nationals lived. The average American may have heard of the Bataan Death March, or have the image of Douglas MacArthur wading ashore with the ‘I have returned’ statement, but it is the bombing on Hawaii, rather than the seizure of the Phillippines and the other territories that seemed to so many as the violation of sovereignty. The Phillippines were initially mentioned in the draft, but by the time the President addressed Congress in his broadcast, he had made substantial changes.
Roosevelt later inserted the “American” island of Oahu and talked about the damage to “American naval and military forces” and “American lives” lost. Japan was referred to as an Empire. There is a massive difference between the two governments- after all, Japan did have an emperor. But if you use the more precise definition of ‘empire’ as a central power holding distant territory abroad with a population of a different legal status, America was certainly an empire in the early part of the 20th century, though not a particularly enthusiastic one. It made sense to downplay this fact in the era of fascist landgrabs.
Because of the speech, because of how it is framed, because nearly two decades later Hawaii became a state and the Phillippines became an independent country, the scope of the Japanese attack is lost to all except history buffs. Even history buffs are more likely to be able to rattle off the French villages and bridges of Market Garden than to know much at all about the thirty month Japanese occupation of Guam.
In my next post, I will describe some of the key differences in how the Chamorros on Guam and Saipan experienced their time under Japanese military rule.