Angela Wanhalla (Ngāi Te Ruahikihiki, Ngāi Tahu) is a professor of history at the University of Otago, New Zealand. She is the coauthor of He Reo Wāhine: Māori Women’s Voices from the Nineteenth Century and author of Matters of the Heart: A History of Interracial Marriage in New Zealand, winner of the Ernest Scott Prize for best book in Australian and New Zealand history in 2014. Her latest book Of Love and War was published in December by Nebraska.

In Of Love and War Angela Wanhalla details the intimate relationships forged during wartime between women and U.S. servicemen stationed in the South Pacific, traces the fate of wartime marriages, and addresses consequences for the women and children left behind.

Introduction

Between 1942 and 1945, over two million Allied troops occupied the southern Pacific theater, the majority of whom were Americans in service with the Marines, Army, Navy, and Air Force. Over the course of the war, the mainly small communities in the South Pacific Command Area hosted thousands of men during a brief, but intense, period of occupation. An estimated 100,000 American troops were stationed in New Zealand between 1942 and 1944. Around 2,000 men were evenly spread across Aitutaki and Penrhyn in the Cook Islands; 14,000 Americans were based in Western Sāmoa; an estimated 30,000 men passed through Tonga, doubling the total population of that island group; and around 20,000 American servicemen were based in Fiji. These men left a lasting impact on the lives of host communities, especially the 1,655 women from New Zealand, Tonga, Fiji, Sāmoa, and the Cook Islands who married American servicemen. Of Love and War traces the American wartime occupation of the South Pacific and its social impacts through the stories of these women in a part of the world often left out of global histories of the Second World War.

Wartime operations in the Pacific covered the expanse of the largest ocean in the world and its island communities. In order to ensure effective military strategy, the Pacific Ocean Area was split into four command zones: North, Central, Southwest, and the South Pacific. Of Love and War directs its attention to the South Pacific Command Area, formed in April 1942, but it excludes Australia, as that country was in the Southwest Pacific Command Area. Initially, the South Pacific Command headquarters was located at Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city. Founded as a British settler colony, from the late nineteenth century New Zealand had developed economic interests and an administrative role in the island Pacific, and for these reasons the British government gave it the responsibility of defending Tonga, Fiji, the Cook Islands, and Western Sāmoa during the war. Any analysis of military occupation and its social impacts on host communities in the southern Pacific therefore has to be attentive to the imperial and colonial connections between New Zealand and the island Pacific. At this time, Western Sāmoa and the Cook Islands were administered by New Zealand, Fiji was a Crown colony of Britain, and Tonga was a monarchy and a protectorate of the United Kingdom.

American mobilization in the South Pacific region took place against the backdrop of large-scale imperialist ambitions and expansion advanced by military forces during and after the Second World War. Although a reluctant participant, American involvement in the Pacific and European campaigns saw its global military presence grow from fourteen overseas bases in 1938, to thirty thousand installations (large and small) by the end of 1945, which retracted to two thousand installations across one hundred countries by the end of the decade. Prior to the war, the United States sought to protect the territories it had acquired in the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and Latin America as coaling and provisioning bases for its navy. These bases, notably in the Philippines, American Sāmoa, and the airbase at Midway Island, would prove to be critical when Japan attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

After Pearl Harbor, and as the Japanese forces rapidly advanced through Southeast Asia, the United States moved quickly to protect its bases across the Pacific starting with the naval base at American Sāmoa, which was reinforced in January 1942. A fuelling station at Bora Bora (French Polynesia) was established the following month, with installations at New Caledonia, New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), and Western Sāmoa in operation from March. Tonga and Wallis Island were occupied in May. A month later, bases located at Fiji and New Zealand were in operation. In August, U.S. forces were stationed at the Solomon Islands, followed by Tuvalu in October and the Cook Islands and Kiribati in November. Fearing that Japanese forces would invade, New Zealand and Pacific communities welcomed the arrival of the United States into the war, particularly because of the strength of its navy and the military technology at its fingertips.

American military movement into the South Pacific took place quickly, while the scale of the mobilization saw populations on small islands double overnight. The Cook Islands, Fiji, Western Sāmoa, Tonga, and New Zealand all formed important hubs for military activity in the South Pacific Command. Each hosted a chain of rear bases, established between March and November 1942, to protect communication and supply lines and to prevent the Japanese military from advancing into the southern Pacific region. In the year following the defeat of the Japanese forces in the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway in mid-1942, the Solomon Islands served as a frontline of defense. After 1943 the South Pacific Command bases mainly operated in support of the forward zone, most vitally as locations for training, rest, relaxation, and recovery. For this reason, Pacific communities were more likely to host American forces for a sustained period of time.

Military mobilization left an imprint on the political and economic circumstances of the islands. Americans encountered, as is discussed in the opening chapter, a range of governing arrangements in the region that required negotiation to establish wartime operations across the command area. Although a small command area in terms of size, it encompassed numerous South Pacific societies and cultures. Moreover, the economic and political histories of these communities were connected through an imperial relationship to Britain and a colonial relationship with New Zealand, reflected in the political arrangements of each territory.

As a “friendly” occupation force, American troops were embraced by local communities. Families hosted them, local men worked on American construction and engineering projects, and women expressed their patriotism and cultural leadership through the provision of food and entertainment. In small island societies such as those in the South Pacific Command, social encounters with Americans took place daily, especially for residents in towns and villages located near the military bases. New economies grew around military installations, and migration to the Pacific towns and cities of Suva, Apia, Nuku’alofa, Auckland, and Wellington accelerated.

Just as any account of New Zealand’s wartime mobilization and its defense strategies must encompass Tonga, Fiji, the Cook Islands, and Western Sāmoa, so must any analysis of the social impacts of the American occupation of South Pacific bases, including marriage. As the rear bases were largely used for training, rest, and relaxation, American troops tended to be stationed in the South Pacific for long periods. Close contacts forged between Americans and local communities, and the attempts to regulate those connections, means that it is possible to delineate how military policy and colonial regulations were interpreted and imposed at different administrative levels, thereby reconnecting the personal and intimate legacies of war in the Pacific with the geopolitical circumstances that produced them.

Accounts of war in the Pacific are numerous, but in recent decades studies of military strategy have been joined by investigations into the social impacts of war on Pacific peoples and societies. Apart from important work on Australian and Japanese war brides and the foreign war brides who came to New Zealand from Great Britain and Europe after the Second World War, little is known about wartime marriage in the South Pacific. In her survey of foreign war brides who came to the United States in the twentieth century, Susan Zeiger touches briefly on the South Pacific theater, as do Elfrieda Shukert and Barbara Scibetta in their monumental War Brides of World War II. Their focus, though, is on those brides who came to the United States in large numbers from Europe. Of Love and War brings the South Pacific to the center of the story, focusing on war brides from New Zealand, Western Sāmoa, the Cook Islands, Tonga, and Fiji and follows them as they navigated the legal and emotional complexities of cross-border marriages during wartime.

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For more books like this, check out our Studies in Pacific Worlds series, edited by Rainer F. Buschmann and Katrina Gulliver.