Commerce Follows Military’s Move
Alfred Thayer Mahan, the naval strategist whose policy arguments for a “Contiguous Sea Frontier” convinced a skeptical Congress and President Theodore Roosevelt to undertake the massive Panama Canal project in the first place, would have been pleased.
II. With clouds gathering for the coming global storm, top U.S. commanders wanted a way to move their biggest combatants—aircraft carriers and battleships—rapidly between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Accordingly, contractors began digging huge trenches for a third set of locks in 1939. Those trenches, their construction halted when Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war, were orphaned after the war because in addition to establishing naval fleets in both the Atlantic and the Pacific, the U.S. military now had bases all over the world. There was no need to hustle large fleet assemblages between the U.S. East and West Coast naval stations.
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But the military was not the only user of the canal once it was built. As history has shown, captains of commerce and industry all over the world quickly realized that with a canal waterway cutting 50 miles across the narrow Isthmus dividing the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, 5,600 miles of dangerous passage around the tip of South America could be bypassed, saving time and money for the shippers of goods and movers of people between ports all over the world. Throughout the 20th century, the Panama Canal became a mainstay in logistical planning in the U.S. and all over the world, as it still is today.
Heading to American Shores U.S. Ambassador John Feely, speaking
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