How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

by Daniel Immerwahr

The governor insisted that the Nationalists had fired first. But an FBI agent reported privately to J. Edgar Hoover that it was a “common fact” that the police were “almost 100 percent to blame.”

During the war, the military tested its gases and gear on more than sixty thousand of its own men.

Some participants told their families only on their deathbeds. After the revelation of the tests themselves came another revelation: some of the experiments were race based. African Americans, Japanese Americans, and Puerto Ricans were tested to see if they would fare differently than whites against mustard agents.

wasn’t joking. The military police were “known to be overzealous,” one Japanese Honolulan recorded in his diary. “They shoot first and ask questions later.”

In the first four months in Honolulu, a single judge dispatched about a hundred cases per day. There were no juries, no journalists, no subpoenaing of witnesses, and, for the most part, no lawyers.

One of the most disturbing cases involved a black man who, running away from a bar where he’d been threatened by a bouncer, collided with two military policemen. He was arrested, charged with assaulting a police officer, and sentenced to five years in prison.

“Putting it crudely, we really went to town,” Beightler reported. “To me, the loss of a single American life to save a building was unthinkable.”

In Beightler’s mind, he was facing a trade-off—and not a particularly difficult one—between lives and architecture. But, as he well knew, those buildings were inhabited. Some by enemy soldiers, of course, but many by civilians. Those civilians were “Americans,” too, even if no one treated them that way.

The Second World War in the Philippines rarely appears in history textbooks. But it should. It was by far the most destructive event ever to take place on U.S. soil.