Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (79 page)

However, the Pacific islanders frequently misread these small acts of personal friendliness and interpreted them as gestures indicating a wider and more meaningful shift towards greater political equality. Sadly, the islanders were mistaken if they thought that the United States government was in any way committed to ensuring their long-term welfare. While the Americans were present, spreading their largesse, allowing the islanders access to the wonders of ice cream and Coca-Cola, the environmental devastation of the Ellice Islands was not too worrying. But when the Americans had packed up and gone the Tuvaluans were left unable to re-establish their gardens. On Funafuti they rebuilt their huts out of ugly corrugated iron left behind by the Americans and hoped for compensation from the British government.
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The people of Vaitapu, demoralized by the devastation of their home island, moved to a fertile island in Fiji which they bought with their combined savings and compensation money.
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The Americans could not be accused of plunder: they took responsibility for the feeding of the islanders while they were stationed there. But they were careless both of the negative impact the military campaign had upon the lives of the islanders and of the fact that after the war they would be completely unable to feed themselves. The Ellice Islanders’ traditional way of life was wiped out without a backward glance.

The Americans were more careful in the five easternmost Samoan islands, which had been a United States colony since 1899. They did not want their own colony to become food-dependent. Agriculture on the islands was sufficiently well developed for it to be realistic to hope that the Samoans would continue to feed themselves. However, the plan to establish a naval base at Pago Pago Bay, and the inevitable
influx of almost as many Americans as there were Samoans, was obviously likely to place a strain on the islanders’ food resources.
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In 1940 Captain A. R. Pefley arrived on the island with, among other things, the brief to set up an agricultural programme to increase food production. However, Pefley’s companion, G. K. Brodie, explained in a frustrated memorandum that the Samoans were completely unreceptive to their advice. Demonstrating an attitude to farming which was typical of Pacific islanders, and which had frustrated colonial officials for decades, he explained that ‘as long as they have sufficient food in the ground for their needs, they are satisfied. They do not entirely grasp that when we take most of their men for labour they will have to rely on the women, old men, and children for their plantation work. We are making every attempt to encourage or force them to keep planting in excess … If their food supply fails we will have to take over the task of feeding the island by the importation of rice.’
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This was exactly what happened.

The Second World War accelerated American Samoa’s integration into the modern world. Ships began putting in at Pago Pago in increasing numbers throughout 1942 until by March 1943 shipping arrivals had risen from 3 to 121 a month.
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‘The pouring of American troops into Samoa is something I will never forget,’ reminisced an islander. ‘The ships kept coming in, ships moving round the island, and ships anchored at the mouth of the harbour ready to come in. As soon as they finished unloading they moved out, the next one came in, dropping off marines and supplies.’
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Frenetic activity continued until March 1944 when the base was demoted back to the rank of naval station. But from January 1942 to the beginning of 1944 there was enough work to provide virtually every man on the island with a relatively well-paid job. One Samoan described how before the war he had worked for the Public Works Department as a general labourer, for 15 cents an hour. In 1942 he was a heavy equipment operator on 37 cents an hour. ‘When I got my pay check, I thought it was gonna kill me; it was so much money. I immediately turned it into liquid and did a little gambling.’
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The children of American Samoa had a bonanza. They would ‘attach themselves to soldiers or sailors and thereby get to eat in the mess hall and gain access to sweets and sodas that the troops could
buy at the [post] exchange. Once they learned the appetites for these foods, the children never lost them.’
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Dental caries among Samoan children sky-rocketed from a virtually unknown problem to an affliction which affected 72 per cent of American Samoan children in 1954, not helped by the absolute refusal of the Samoans to brush their teeth.
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The position of American Samoa as a colony meant that it was always likely that it would eventually adopt an Americanized diet, but the war speeded up the process. By 1942 bread and butter had replaced plantains for breakfast; coffee, sweetened with lots of sugar, was the most popular drink; and rice and chicken or canned meats such as corned beef had replaced taro and fish.
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By 1948, despite the fact that most of the American navy personnel had been moved to Hawaii, American Samoa was importing 1.8 million pounds of canned meat, 388,252 pounds of canned fish, and similarly staggering quantities of flour, biscuits, canned fruit and sugar to feed a tiny population of about 40,000 people, who before the war had been largely self-sufficient.
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A survey for the South Pacific Commission in 1952 confirmed that so many islanders had abandoned farming and fishing during the conflict (and refused to return to it once hostilities ceased) that the islanders were now dependent on imported food.
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The American approach to feeding Pacific islanders stood out in contrast to the treatment they received at the hands of the Japanese. As one Tuvaluan islander on Tarawa put it, ‘We fed the Japanese, the Americans fed us.’
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The contrast was exemplified on the islands of Palau. This previously German colony had been occupied by the Japanese during the First World War. By 1935 Palau was at the heart of the Japanese South Seas empire, with more Japanese living in the four Japanese farming villages on the island of Babeldoab than there were islanders. Relations with the colonial masters were not necessarily bad. There were mixed Japanese–Palauan families and personal bonds were strong enough for the islanders to give shelter to Japanese women and children during the war.
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However, the relationship deteriorated in 1944 when the Americans cut the supply lines and began bombing the island, reducing the capital of Koror to rubble. At the end of March, the Americans attacked and captured Peleliu and Angaur in one of the bloodiest and most useless battles of the Pacific. The Americans then
built an airstrip and bases on these islands and left the rest of Palau to ‘wither on the vine’.

Although the Americans evacuated some of the islanders by boat, many were trapped by the conflict and 50,000 Japanese soldiers and 5,000 islanders were left on Babeldoab to try and feed themselves despite constant strafing attacks, which prevented farming or fishing.
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The bombing forced the islanders to retreat to makeshift shelters in the woods. One Palauan recalled how he lived in ‘a hole. Covered with leaves. Rain came in.’
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Now the islanders encountered the harsh face of hungry Japanese who requisitioned the islanders’ pigs, took over their taro gardens and sent them out to gather food but refused to share any of it with the Palauans. One islander, whose younger brothers were ‘so weak, they couldn’t move’, was forced to forage for food for a Japanese soldier. He took his revenge by placing poisonous wild taro on top of the basket. The soldier was tortured for weeks afterwards by a sore and swollen mouth.
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When Japan surrendered in August 1945, the frightened villagers emerged from the woods. Every two weeks the Americans would arrive with supplies of food. The villagers were astonished. ‘We would say, “These are very kind people, very rich, like Santa Claus.” And it was a very awesome thing, you know. All the Japanese were telling lies, these people were like angels come from heaven, with these candies, food, everything, produce. We were no longer frightened of the Americans. We looked at them as an easy source of food, of abundance.’
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However, the Americans’ post-war behaviour as colonial rulers soon lost them their reputation for being Santa Claus. Unlike the Japanese, who had invested in their colony, the new American masters viewed Palau as an underdeveloped backwater and adopted the attitude that the islanders should be given no more than their means of production could earn them. This left them living in primitive conditions. Koror, which under the Japanese had been a thriving town with electricity, pavements, restaurants, theatres and shops, was never rebuilt. In the 1980s the best buildings in the town were dilapidated Japanese ones which the islanders had patched up. The Americans drove out the Japanese with amazing military might, lazily distributed largesse, and then appear to have lost interest.
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In the opinion of one Palauan ‘the United States [was] … the worst
thing that ever happened to the people of Palau’.
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Like many islanders all over the Pacific the Palauans regarded the Americans as ‘all-powerful, magnanimous new benefactors’.
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During the war islanders made unheard-of amounts of money from selling goods and services to the US military. On Western Samoa the natives sold the troops bunches of bananas worth a few pence for five dollars. Crude distilled alcohol sold for over three Samoan pounds a bottle.
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The enterprising Tongans opened laundries, sold coconuts at extortionate rates, and were surprised to find that Americans would pay 400 per cent above the usual price for souvenirs.
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Thousands of islanders had earned good wages, well above the usual rates paid by the British or the Australians, constructing airfields, roads and docks, unloading ships and simply carrying supplies from one place to another. By 1945 they had begun to take American largesse for granted. On Palau ‘it began to be “Give me this, and give me this, and give me this.” And then came the reality.’
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The Americans departed, uninterested in developing tiny remote island economies, and left in their wake high expectations and expensive tastes, and a group of disappointed wartime entrepreneurs who were unwilling to slip back into a quiet and extremely basic life of subsistence farming.

After the war Pacific islanders were restless and the war stimulated migration to the United States, New Zealand and Australia, which in turn increased contact with the wider world. The wartime construction of an infrastructure of airfields and roads allowed an inward flow of outside influences and some of the islands became tourist destinations.
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The islanders were often more critical of colonial or indigenous governments and the power structures within society shifted as traditional sources of power were usurped. In American Samoa, for example, the chiefs derived power from determining who could farm land. As young men moved away from farming into wage labour they lost their grip on this social group. The most powerful wartime legacy in the Pacific was a new interest in cash and the goods it could buy. The war had created unrealistic hopes and expectations of prosperity.
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Thousands of islanders switched from farming to wage labour in order to be able to afford western commodities. This led the Kilenge on New Guinea to switch from subsistence farming to copra production, with a devastating en-vironmental impact which has led to the disappearance of traditional sources of food. As food gardens disappeared the wild game birds and
animals grew fewer, and as the streams grew muddy, as a result of copra production, the fish moved further from the shore.
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Overall this meant that island economies became less agriculturally self-sufficient and more and more dependent on foreign exchange to buy in imports of food. This had the pernicious side-effect of drawing island economies into the under-developed world’s cycle of debt and dependency.
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Perhaps the most pervasive and damaging legacy of the war in the Pacific was to inflame the islanders’ passion for western imported foods such as pasta, wheat bread, ice cream and Coca-Cola. As Paul Madden, a technical observer running a Coca-Cola bottling factory on New Guinea, commented in 1945, ‘many of the smaller children had never tasted Coca-Cola before … but they’ll certainly be steady customers from now on’.
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The adoption of western foods had a powerful and mainly negative nutritional impact. The rice and fried flour balls which were used to replace the starchy element in Pacific meals, usually made up of taro or plantain, were far less nutritious. Instead of fresh fish islanders would often eat canned meat, and most meals were now accompanied by Coca-Cola or some other sugary soda. While western Europe emerged from the Second World War having shaken off the problem of malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies among its population, the war brought these problems to the Pacific.
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These non-traditional meals are packed with fat, sucrose and salt, and today Polynesians are afflicted by an epidemic of the modern diseases of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
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Without the Second World War Pacific islands would eventually have been drawn into the global marketplace but the war accelerated the process and often made it a painful experience.