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AMERICA’S “VITAL AREA”

The workshops and the coalbins of the United States, together with the principal railroads
which must protect them. This bird’s-eye map made as though viewed
from an aeroplane at a point five hundred miles off of Cape Cod.

That was Mellen’s motive in making a large part of this second line of communication into first-class railroad—the perfecting of New England’s long, lean arm down into the Pennsylvania coal bin. But no matter what his motive—he has never pretended to be altruistic—his coal line is of great strategic value. Not alone does it circle around metropolitan New York at a reasonably safe distance, but it intersects the great trunk lines running west from the seaboard—routes that would be of unspeakable strategic value in the case of the seizure of our largest city. For these would be the lines that would have to feed our army—not with mere food, but with men and guns and shells and all that with these go. At Poughkeepsie this second line of communication intersects the main stem of the New York Central, in turn the main stem of the Vanderbilt system reaching almost every important city west of the Alleghenies and east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio. At Goshen it intersects the Erie Railroad, come in these recent years from being a reproach and a byword into one of the most efficiently operated railroads in the entire land. Farther south it intersects the Lackawanna and the Lehigh Valley—roads rich in money and in resources.

Suppose now the second line of communication is gone—the graceful span of the Poughkeepsie bridge a mass of twisted steel in the channel of the Hudson. What is the third line of communication? It consists of the aristocratic old Boston and Albany leading due west out of Boston, and threading Worcester and Springfield and Pittsfield—each of these a manufacturing center of no mean importance—and finally coming to Albany, and of the Delaware and Hudson, which, bending southwest from Albany, finds its way through the anthracite hills of Pennsylvania and eventually by way of Harrisburg to the main base at Philadelphia or Baltimore. This line also intersects the east and west trunk lines.

The fourth line of communication? Alas, we must believe that the capture of these three widely separated lines is almost humanly impossible. When they are gone the New England head is fastened to the body of the nation only by a thin artery indeed. For the fourth line of communication is a wavering, roundabout railroad, practically all single-track, which follows close to the Canadian border. It is of conceivable military importance only in the unthinkable event of a quarrel with our cousins to the north. In such a catastrophe this line, of potential military value, could be made of actual value only by double-tracking and by almost complete reconstruction.

Enough now of the possibilities of the cutting of the main military base of the nation. Go south with me for a moment from Washington and see the strategic position of our railroads along the more southerly portions of the Atlantic coast. Cross the Potomac on the nameless steel structure that superseded the historic Long Bridge more than a decade ago and yet is of hardly less military importance. For the trains of every railroad running south from Washington must cross upon its tracks. Of these railroads, three are the trunk stems that, while running many miles back from the actual coast, still serve it. They are the Southern Railway, the Seaboard Air Line, and the Atlantic Coast Line. These three railroads and their direct connections reach from Washington to Norfolk, to Charleston, to Savannah, to Mobile, and to New Orleans—the most important of the southeasterly ports. One of their most interesting connections crosses the keys of Florida and does not stop on its overseas trip until it reaches the last of them—Key West, which is almost within scent of the cigar fumes of Havana. If we ever had to send another army into Cuba, Tampa would be completely out of it.

There is hardly any comparison between these trunk railroads of the Southeast and the lines that struggled so hard to handle the armies at the time of the Spanish-American War. They have been double-tracked for long distances, more generously supplied with locomotives and cars, although they are still quite a way behind their northern brethren in this regard. Still it would not be a very difficult matter in a national crisis to move great fleets of rolling stock from one corner of the land to another. By careful advance planning and a study of rail weights and bridges this would become a comparatively simple matter.