East meets West - 3 August 2001

If I were as sprightly as I was when, as Mr Shakespeare put it, the heyday in the blood was young, this letter would be datelined Canberra.

For that is where I most certainly should be or have been during a remarkable 24 hours last week when both Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, after their session with the rulers of China, chose to fly off, not back to Washington, but to the bottom of the world and call on the oldest and stoutest of America's allies in the Pacific.

It was time, the president decided, for his two leading handlers of foreign policy - not just the American ambassador - to sit in on the Australian government's annual joint meeting on diplomacy and defence, which is not an institution that has had much, if any, coverage before now.

But the new administration, being staffed mostly with men and women who've not been prominent in national politics, has been surprised by a discovery that many old American diplomats and politicians made long ago and learned more or less patiently to live with.

This was and is - how to put this delicately? - nothing more complicated than the general European ignorance of America's long history and continuous concern with Pacifica and the Far East.

Ask a few simple questions of intelligent, educated Europeans - including, if you'll excuse the inclusion, Britons - and it will, I think, sharpen the point.

What was the biggest amphibious operation in the history of the Second World War and therefore in human history? Oh, of course, the invasion of Normandy in June 1944.

Wrong. By big, of course, I mean the number of men involved, the number of weapons, tanks, planes, landing craft - and initial casualties.

It was the American navy and marine invasion of Okinawa in April 1945, the most important and crucial of American battles in the whole Second World War.

Okinawa is the largest of the Ryukyu Islands, 400 miles south of the southern tip of Japan, about 700 miles short of Tokyo. The purpose of this landing was to crush the Japanese garrison and secure a solid base for the final invasion of the Japanese mainland.

The shipping required to put, initially, 50,000 men ashore suffered many sinkings and appalling damage from kamikaze pilots.

The battle took almost three months. And the Japanese did not surrender until six weeks after that May day in Europe when, as the newspaper headlines had it: "The war is over".

The tenacious Japanese garrison of 120,000 men did not give up until 103,000 of them had died - a fact grimly recalled by President Truman, General Marshall and two other just men when they began to calculate what would be the cost in American lives if they pursued the main strategy of taking the Japanese islands one by one before the mainland invasion.

The Japanese, Mr Truman and his advisors believed, were prepared to lose three or four million soldiers and civilians. The most conservative guess on our side was one and a half to two million American losses.

It was this sombre calculation that after days and nights of appraisal and agonised reappraisal they decided to drop the Hiroshima bomb.

Okinawa remains in the American memory as poignant as the battles of the Somme in the French and British memory.

After the war, at the summit meetings of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, the Americans kept bringing up the future of Korea, of French Indo China - later Vietnam - and the looming possibility of mainland China being taken over by the Communists.

These American anxieties were to the others not much more than irritants getting in the way of the main problem - the gloomy prospect of an independent Poland and the Soviet Union's drifting satellites.

Time and again Mr Churchill privately deplored the Americans' "illusions" about China as a coming great power and begrudged the time Roosevelt gave to her.

And later he told Montgomery: "Korea doesn't really matter. I'd never heard the place till I was 74."

And four years later he confessed to his doctor: "I have lived 78 years without ever hearing of bloody places like Cambodia."

Today I doubt there's an educated American of middle age who at the mention of Cambodia does not wince at the name of Pol Pot - the third of the murderous tyrants of the 20th Century, a paranoiac as wounding to its civilisation as his brother tyrants Stalin and Hitler.

From the end of the Second War in Tokyo Bay Americans were as much concerned with the outcome of the Chinese civil war as with the fate of devastated Europe.

General Marshall, as Truman's Secretary of State, spent a whole year trying to reconcile Chiang Kai-shek with Mao Tse Tung, the Communist leader. They'd been allies during the war against the Japanese. Secretary Marshall failed.

The surrender of China to Communism was the first of three traumas, followed by Korea and seven years in Vietnam, which planted in Americans a deep anxiety about the future of Communism across Asia.

Throughout the 1950s, '60s and until the humiliating end of the Vietnamese War, Americans feared the dragon's tread in the Far East as much as the slamming of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe.

One thing that any European student of the United States has to learn is the long relationship between China and the United States - beginning in the 18th Century with a very lively barter trade. In the 19th Century China was flooded with American Christian missionaries.

And, as a compulsory item in the history lessons of Americans when I first came here, was the fact that President Teddy Roosevelt was the first head of state to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for having mediated the Russo-Japanese War.

The more ominous fact was that tiny Japan, whom no European could ever imagine as a serious power, had defeated the great Russian empire - trouble ahead!

Throughout my first year here at Yale I was puzzled at what my well-informed friends called the antics of the towering newspaper tycoon of the time - William Randolph Hearst.

He had a nationwide spread of papers and as he looked out on the Pacific from his mountain mansion in California, at least once a week, he'd go on editorially in highly passionate prose about the Yellow Peril - the imminent rise and triumph of Japan or China or both.

This behaviour seemed hysterical and silly until the astounding afternoon of 7 December 1941 when President Franklin Roosevelt learned that the Japanese airforce had flown 4,000 miles east and sunk from the air - which couldn't be done - five battleships, 14 other ships, 120 aircraft, 2,000 seamen, 400 civilians, all snuggly assembled at a place called Pearl Harbour.

That afternoon I was staying with the head of the British supply mission in Washington and listening to the New York Philharmonic broadcast.

When the words came panting over the radio we took out an atlas to see where was Pearl Harbour. It was the base of the United States Pacific fleet.

So Admiral Yamamoto, not Hitler, was the cause, within 24 hours, of America's entry into the Second World War.

For over a year after the United States was in the war its attention and its participation was of course overwhelmingly devoted to the Pacific and the nations around its rim.

America's first hero was General MacArthur. But the soldier who sprang from major to general overnight was an obscure aide to MacArthur, stationed in the Philippines.

He was picked by General Marshall, the Chief of Staff in Washington, to become supreme commander of all allied forces.

First, because he predicted that the war in Europe would be an industrial war of aircraft and tanks and movement and because in a report to Marshall he saw - insisted - that the base of the Pacific War, to have and to hold, must be Australia.

He knew what most Americans and all Europeans have to learn is how different your world and its potential enemies look when you're out there in the Far East, which they call the Near North and where for years the intentions of Sukarno were of more anxious concern than the plans of Stalin.

Any administration made up of men and women brought up on these experiences, these exploits, this Asian and Pacific history has to be more puzzled than embarrassed when they hear every day an outraged cry from European politicians and newspapers alike: "Do you realise that Europe is horrified by Bush's policies?"

A statesmen who would not care to be identified remarked the other day: "You know, when we get up in the morning we don't feel our first obligation is to please or displease Europe.

"When we think of our allies we have to think not only of Nato and Western Europe but about Japan and Taiwan and South Korea and Indonesia and the possible consequences of our military treaty with Australia."

It must have been an enormously welcome novelty for the Australians to see for once the two leading American cabinet officers appear in person to re-affirm that pledge.

It doesn't mean for a day or a night that the United States has, in an idiot tabloid phrase, "turned its back on Europe" or ceases from being knee deep with Britain (for one) in Kosovo.

"We shall stay there," said the president, "as long as we're needed."

But it should be possible for good allies and decent men and women to oppose the Bush policies that affect Europe and yet make a little leap of the imagination to see that America has just as many interests and anxieties looking across the wide Pacific as across the Atlantic.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.