Compared to Luxembourg, its European prototype, Tonga stands high both for economic sanity and prospects for ultimate happiness. It is 97 percent literate, even though some outlying islands receive visitors only two or three times a year. Typical of these is doughnut-shaped Niufaou, over which the writer flew, about halfway between the capital of Tongatapu and Fiji's Suva. “Tincan Island” has no protective outer reef, being a volcanic mountain peak with a flooded crater inside. Passing ships having to anchor outside throw mail and papers overboard in tin cans to be swept ashore on the ceaselessly pounded rocks.
Tonga is what Washingtonians might call intensely socially conscious. It may not be a republic, but it is certainly a democracy. At sixteen every youth receives eight and one-fourth acres of land as his own freehold and homestead. By this equitable land distribution, Tongatapu—“Forbidden Tonga,” the island of the capital—has been able to comfortably feed a population that since 1925 has jumped from 26,000 to 38,000. The means of production is in every family's hands.
Even bats, the flying squirrels of Tonga, are protected. At Kolovai, in Tongatapu, the writer saw them hanging by claw and wing, upside down and asleep, in a small grove in a village. Their yellowish rumps showing, they looked like so many tiny trussed-up packages on a holiday tree. The villagers went around almost on tiptoe while their guests slept, hanging by thousands from their favorite branches.
With its protection against Japan subsidized by the American people and its political direction under British control, Tonga is able to show a neatly balanced budget of about $300,000. Nor has the influx of free-spending American forces upset the economy. Such precautions as the establishment of a fixed-price market for fruit, and limitation of the money allotments to our men, have checked the natural American tendency to pay the highest possible prices for everything and cram every native hand as full as possible with folding money.
This money, in Tongatapu as elsewhere, is mostly being laid away for the day when it can be spent for radios, sewing machines, and other items of the aerodynamic age. Most of this American money, put away under a loose board, will probably find its way into the hands of British exporters. The import duty to Tonga on British imperial products is 12½ per cent.
Easy American money had one immediate social effect. It increased the number of divorces. Formerly the marriage tie's duration had been ensured by a divorce fee of £10. The kingdom has, however, sacrificed its possible profits by cutting the price to £6, still equivalent to four years' land fee for an eight-acre homestead. (The Australian pound is worth about $3.25, the British about $4.)
About the only upset this year in Tongatapu occurred when the police chief, a Fijian, had his car stolen. Search for the culprit was ineffectual, so fingerprinting was introduced. This method revealed that the thief was the lone occupant of the jail. Seized with car fever from seeing American jeeps, he had worked loose a board on the floor of the jail and gone joyriding.
Such minor matters do not greatly disturb the Queen's Methodist chaplain, Rodger Page. He is convinced that the kingdom's earnestly church-going people, who include Catholics, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists and Episcopalians, will save Tonga from corruption.
One surviving custom is the ceremonial apron. This sign of simplicity and toil looks like a plain potato bag loosely tied with old rope around the waist, giving a plain household look to the dress. Men and women wear it, and the Queen and the premier, Salamone Ata, are rarely seen without it, as some American nurses who had tea with the Queen observed.
Salote has two sons, tall and quiet Tupou Toa, 26 years old, an expert marksman who took an honors degree in history and law at the University of Sydney, and 22-year-old Sione Gnu, who studied farming at Gratton Agricultural College in Brisbane. Her majesty is retiring more and more often to her country place on Tongatapu—an island as flat as Holland, and lacking in water—and putting more of her affairs in the hands of Tupou Toa.
The Kingdom of Tonga resembles Ethiopia, another small power with a profoundly spiritual Christian sovereign, in that it began by having considerable bargaining leeway among several great powers, and has now put its principal controls in the hands of the British government, which has shown a tendency to gain more and more sway over Tonga. In 1879 the Foreign Office made a regular “most-favored nation” treaty with Tonga, whose ample harbors and key position on the Pacific routes made her a desirable ally. In 1900 Tonga agreed to have no relations with any foreign power without London's approval, and Charlotte's father, George II, agreed to give Britain a coaling base and the right to fortify.
The kingdom under Charlotte has adhered faithfully to the agreement made by her father, which was predicated on British naval control of the Pacific. Unlike Ethiopia, whose government London has subsidized financially, Tonga has no debts and has not accepted any monetary aid.
Next to the Queen, the British consul in the large white mansion of the consulate is the most important officer in Tonga. Despite the importance of these islands to us in a strategic sense, the United States is unrepresented politically. Although American forces, in dimensions which can be revealed only when peace comes, have stayed in Tonga, the United States has here, as nearly everywhere in the Pacific, given no attention to acquiring permanent political understanding commensurate with its heavy war burdens. The Americans with whom the writer talked, from low rank to high, spoke of Queen Charlotte with respect as “every inch a queen” but did not seem concerned at having to act individually as their own representative at her court.
Tonga has its own cabinet, and a parliament. The only non-native member of the cabinet is the minister of finance, a New Zealander. A common sight here is the prime minister, the Honorable Salamone Ata, a dignified middle-aged gentleman attired in a blue vala (Tongan for sarong), brown sandals, white shirt, grey felt hat and tortoise-shell glasses, entering the saltbox-style building on the main square to confer with the Queen's own affable counselor, 33-year-old John Brownlees, a plump college graduate who served several years as resident on Malaita, most savage of the Solomons, before coming to this tranquil post.
Across the dusty but magnificent broad street, past the post office which resembles a Middle Western railroad station, the ancient turtle Tu'Imalila, presented to the kingdom by Captain Cook at the time of Washington and Jefferson, waddles with dignity toward the refreshing, cool green palace grounds. The palace is a big white dwelling, with several odds and ends of outbuildings all built in the style of an American summer hotel of the 1890s, and exhaling the same general atmosphere of croquet, rocking chairs and peace. Tu'Imalila, the oldest thing in Tongatapu, wanders with the slow step of age through the palace's rail fence and meanders abstractedly past the Chautauqua-style chapel where Queen Charlotte makes her Methodist devotions.
ATOLLS ARE MOST SINISTER BATTLEFIELDS YET
TRIED BY U.S. FORCES
Somewhere in Australia—November 23, 1943
Those lovely, ring-shaped atolls, with their lapis lazuli lagoons and feather-boa palms continually bent before the trade winds, and thin outer beaches swept with terrific surf for which Americans are now fighting and dying in the Gilbert Islands, are among the most sinister battlefields the world has ever known.
Americans have fought this war on the bare stones of Alaska's snowy ancient mountains, on the open sweeps of Africa's desert, in the New Guinea and Solomon jungles, and on the cliffs of Italy's rainy and wintery hills, but never before have they staked their lives against an atoll, the most complicated form of land structure which the earth knows. Its insect-built, wave-shaped ring is like nothing else.
The difficulties of our “unknown front” in the Central Pacific—where this correspondent, during his stay at Funafuti, was the first newspaperman to live among forces preparing for the blow now in progress—are little understood. We Americans have been struggling alone for eighteen months to get the upper hand on what was lost after Pearl Harbor. War on this unknown front outdoes all others in demands on pioneering ingenuity.
These British-owned Gilbert and Ellice groups are totally unlike the Solomons or New Guinea. In the latter, Army and Marine landing parties have been able to take sizable ships directly into small, well-protected bays, so difficult for Jap night bombers to pick out that, once taken, they are virtually secure. And if our reinvading forces find strong gunfire from the beaches at one bay, there is always another farther up the coast.
Far different is the atoll, which lies in naked beauty blindingly unmistakable by day, and gives back moonlight and starlight almost as plainly by night. Nobody can conceal that staring white ringlet of coral. Here, anti-aircraft gunners find no thick green hills up which Bofors guns may be tugged to erect a ceiling of fire over beaches where men are toiling to haul ashore shells, food, tanks, and guns, and ever more guns. Sweating engineers and Seabees,* infantry and artillerymen wear sunglasses against the raging blindness that leaps from the coral surface. So bitter bright is the coral that they turn away to look at the greenish blue of the lagoon, which, though sparkling too in the sun, lessens their headaches and dizziness.
From a military standpoint, the essential thing about the atoll is that concealment is impossible. On one side are smashing breakers, swept by trade winds; on the other, sharks home in the lagoon. Between is what you live on: a curving strip of coral, penetrable only to pickaxes and dynamite—and from 300 yards to three feet in width. For the enemy bombardier peering through his sights, there is no doubt whether your camps are back in the hills or tucked along rivers overhung with branches. There is only one place you can be, for there are no hills or rivers. Under the immutable laws of the sea and the atoll, your ships can only be in the lagoon, and there is no chain of lagoons like the pearly bays along New Georgia or the Papuan coast but just a single naked anchorage with just one narrow entrance.
As a military form, the atoll is to the strategist what the sonnet is to the poet. What you can do is ferociously limited. What you dare try is sternly circumscribed by the fact that if you are defending, the enemy knows exactly where you are and if you are attacking, he knows with equal precision where that coral ring binds you to go if you want to dislodge him. This form of warfare, new even to the Pacific, is doubly new in that nobody has ever forced on the holders of these islands the power of mechanized warfare, with its aircraft carriers and shore listening posts, its long-range heavy guns and dive bombers. Never did tanks tread and bite atoll surfaces before the Americans brought them there.
Until today the political pattern of the Pacific has been determined by peaceful means. From the days of Britain's Captain Cook, France's Captain Bougainville and our own whalers, Americans were unique in claiming virtually nothing of what they found, being too preoccupied in domestic frontiers. Then came another period of peaceful interchange when diplomats at Europe's council tables determined the Pacific pattern, incidentally giving Japan the four great atoll groups that still separate us from our own Philippines. This means that atoll warfare, with all its hazards and peculiarities, has now entered our fighting men's tactical books. Exploration of the possibilities will be paid for not in treaties but in blood.
Until now it has always been the occupation of atolls that the Japs did not quite dare take—like Nanumea, northernmost of the Ellices and nearest to the Gilberts, where the writer flew recently with the first flying boat ever landed there. It is true we are still fighting for British territory, for the Gilberts, like the Ellices, are British possessions. That way lies Japan and that way we must go.
In this unknown form of atoll warfare in the Pacific's unknown front, America's abilities are still fundamentally untested. When strategists talk of island-to-island hopping, it makes all the islands sound alike. But Tarawa and Makin are as different from Kolombanga and Goodenough as the desert is from the Arctic.
To an atoll you must bring everything, even drinking water. Water is measured out as jealously as aboard a transport, but on an atoll it is not just for a voyage but for good. Water distillation equipment, with its long hose in the sea, pumps all day and God help you if the motor breaks down or the fuel runs out.
The atoll itself only looks like a continuous ring from above: actually, it is more often a chain of islets across which bridges or ferries must be placed if your guns are to be dispersed properly. You must fight against the tendency to congest everything at the windward side of the atoll, away from the lagoon's mouth. Yet because that is the only wide place, your air field must almost unavoidably be there.
How can you get the coral filled smooth for your delicate undercarriages? Only by digging up the very coral which is already supporting you in this vast ocean. For that you need everything from dynamite to steam shovels—all vulnerable targets themselves. And wherever you dig, seawater comes in. More holes to fill and nothing obtainable to fill them with except by digging more holes.
Atolls seemed valueless to our World War I diplomats. We shall see what taking them by storm—whose techniques the writer cannot discuss because Gilbert operations are still unfinished—cost us. It will be more than pen flourishes on the green table of a European chancellery, as any officer from Admiral Nimitz down to the lowest dogface could tell you if they could talk across the ocean. Atolls are easy to lose, tough to retake and invaluable in the permanent pattern of the Pacific.
*Count Cagliostro, an eighteenth-century Sicilian magician, occultist, and swindler.
*The Navy's construction battalion, whose name derives from the initial letters C and B.
XIV
Bases Overseas
For
Russell T. Churchill
It is often more easy to prevent the capture of a place, than to retake it.
—THOMAS JEFFERSON
Suffering heavily from malaria and overwork, Weller agreed to take a much-delayed home leave. En route by ship across the Pacific in late 1943, he wrote a draft of Bases Overseas, an exploration of military history and strategy proposing a global system of U.S. bases. He spent his early “vacation” revising the book, which contradicted the beliefs of many politicians in the States as well as of his editors—but then again, they had not spent a year and a half slogging across New Guinea and the Solomons, seeing American soldiers sacrificed for what Weller felt should not have been diplomatically conceded in the first place. His sorrow, frustration, and anger are palpable on every page.
The book appeared in November 1944 (by which time Weller was back in Europe) and aroused controversy; Moscow Radio denounced it as “American imperialism.” In the New York Times Book Review, a history professor from Columbia University called the author “hot-tempered … firing off salvos of argument like a heavily engaged battleship” and the argument “expansionism carried to an absurd extreme. He envisages a succession of titanic conflicts … He distrusts the future Russia … distrusts
China … This assumption of a world future of indefinite warfare … amounts to a counsel of despair.”
For the present purposes, I have abridged radically, and interpolated a few passages from an article Weller wrote for a magazine.
THE REBIRTH OF THE WORLDWIDE AMERICAN
The old American is dead. A new American, with a sense of the world, is being born: humanly wise, technically able, politically uncalculating. Of that soil where he regularly leaves his blood there is not an acre, except below his embassies, that he can call American.
He goes everywhere heavily laden with arms and sustenance. Yet if you ask why he is hurrying to build roads into Assam, and what keeps him busy at Lake Chad, he cannot tell you. He goes because he has been told to do so. The inner voice of war, if he hears any, gives him neither economic limit nor geographical guide.
Techniques of war interest him. But where he journeys, whether he fights for China and the Kuomintang above the Burma Road, or whether he negotiates with Persian and Russian for the passage of locomotives up the servant's entrance of the Soviet Union, it is all one. Politically this new American is not only ignorant; he is indifferent. There is the United States, or Ho
me. And there are all the other places. Milne Bay or Takoradi: they are only other places. He was sent here; that is all.
“I am acting as a guardian on a soil not my own,” he will say. “I fight, but I provide, too. I am a sort of grocer to the world of war. To this land I give food, airplanes, fuel, farm machinery. I leave behind air fields, wharves, thousands of miles of road. I pay the natives for the privilege of building or using anything in their defense. This New Guinea, these Solomons, were raw, roadless, defenseless. By my sweat and brains, by the debt of my children and the material of my soil, I am putting places like this in the category of civilized lands for the first time.”
A worker and doer, deliberately narcotizing himself with techniques, he is not used to thinking his international politics aloud. “I don't know what I'll do when we finish,” he mutters. “Go home, I guess. If that's what they want.” Where they will send him the American does not know. “Where there's a job to do” is enough. It is always this remote they that determines what men shall do. And in war even the American civilian ceases to query. The future can shell its own peas. He will be glad, some day, to look into the meaning of what he is doing. Today he is too busy.
The American committed himself to war despite fighters that were too heavy and bombers that were too light, the defective old ammunition, the unprotected naval base near the enemy and the carelessly patrolled base near home. In spite of his decision to fight, it was the enemy who selected the moment. The war was three-quarters lost when he entered it. Through all these months after the first help went to Britain, the new American was more acted upon than acting. His political failure he covered up with a moral pose, as false as that of the Nazis, about “being attacked.” Having been in the wrong about almost everything in the conduct of his foreign affairs since 1916, he felt an impulse to put himself morally in the right before he got started, with nothing familiar to fight for but his ideals.
Weller's War Page 55