The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food

by Lizzie Collingham

  If the American troops got fed up with their cans of stew, at least they still had plenty to eat, in contrast to their Japanese opponents. ‘For every four tons of supplies the United States shipped to its ground forces in the Pacific, Japan was able to transport to its own men just two pounds.’209 Onoda Hiroo, holding out against the Americans on the Philippines in 1945, found discarded chewing gum on one of the leaves which he had picked for his dinner. ‘Here we were holding on for dear life,’ he commented, ‘and these characters were chewing gum while they fought!’210 Ogawa Tamotsu, a doctor on New Britain, retreating through the jungle suffering from dysentery and starvation recalled that ‘sometimes at night a smell of coffee drifted through the jungle. That was a scent I will never forget. The enemy sentries having coffee from some kind of portable coffee pot.’211 Sergeant Funasaka Hiroshi, stuck in a cave on the island of Palau, observed the American camp below him. ‘I could imagine the Americans sleeping soundly inside those tents … And in the morning, they’d rise leisurely, shave, eat a hearty breakfast, then come after us again as usual. That sea of shining electric lights was a powerful, silent commentary on their “battle of abundance” … I had an image of the island divided in half with heaven and hell lying next to each other, separated by only a few hundred metres.’212

  FEEDING PACIFIC ISLANDERS

  Early in the morning of 2 October 1942 the islanders on the atoll of Funafuti in the British colony of the Ellice Islands* spotted what looked to them like ‘a huge group of crabs … crawling across the ocean towards us’.213 By 8 a.m. the convoy of two cruisers, five destroyers, a cargo ship, three supply ships and at least three other large vessels was lined up, waiting to sail into the lagoon. Seaplanes were busily flying around, dropping smoke bombs to indicate the dangerous reefs. Once inside the shelter of the lagoon, barges and landing craft were unloaded and the sea was soon full of vessels, bringing 853 marines, 122 naval construction personnel and 113 miscellaneous medical, aviation and administrative staff up on to the tiny island of a few square kilometres, along with a mountain of stores, trucks, bulldozers, mobile cranes, dozens of freezer containers, guns and artillery shells, water desalinators, and more than 4,000 drums of gasoline. One hundred kilometres away the coast-watchers on the island of Nukufetau observed a black cloud of exhaust fumes rising up into the sky and sent a coded message inquiring what was happening. They received no reply so as not to alert the Japanese to the covert American activity.214

  Although Admiral Nimitz used New Zealand as his main regional base, the US navy also built a chain of airfields and naval bases across the south and central Pacific. Until the Second World War Pacific islands were ‘isolated on the colonial fringe’.215 Their experience of westerners was limited to contact with traders, missionaries, planters and colonial officials. By the middle of 1942 there were tens of thousands of Americans stationed across the islands from Fiji and Samoa to New Caledonia. Three of the Ellice Islands’ six atolls were transformed into ‘anchored aircraft carriers’ and sheltered harbours for ships and seaplanes.216 From here the Americans launched their central Pacific offensive towards the Gilbert, Marshall, Mariana and Caroline islands. Western Samoa played host to between 25,000 and 30,000 American troops at any one time. This amounted to the equivalent of about one-third of the entire Western Samoan population. Tongatapu was swamped by around 8,000 soldiers and sailors in contrast to the entire native population of around 35,000 spread across the three Tongan island groups.217 The presence of the Americans had a huge impact on the lives of Pacific islanders. They brought with them military installations, incredible quantities of equipment and plenty of cash. In the Pacific the military power which the Americans employed to dislodge the Japanese from their island strongholds is still recalled with awe but, most of all, the Americans are remembered by Pacific islanders for their food.218

  The lives of the approximately 4,000 Ellice Islanders were changed for ever by the arrival of that convoy of ships on the morning of 2 October 1942. Until that date the only ships which had visited the islands had been small, but now the islanders were confronted by the sight of enormous battleships and a lagoon covered with hundreds of boats. Most of the islanders had never seen a car and for a few days after the American landing they stopped walking along the paths on the island until they overcame their fear of the speed at which the heavy trucks, bulldozers, cranes and graders moved.219 The Americans made no attempt to live off the land on the Ellice Islands as the Japanese might have done. Instead they destroyed the islanders’ means of growing food. In order to make space for an airstrip for fighter aircraft, thousands of food-bearing coconut and bread fruit trees were felled. The islanders’ ancient pulaka garden pits, dug by hand over centuries, and painstakingly filled with rich compost, took only five weeks to fill in and level.220 The Tuvaluans were now completely dependent on the stores of rice, biscuits and flour brought in from the United States and sold in a special government store. Those with GI friends also gained access to the foods sold exclusively to the troops in the PX store. Pole O’Brien, a nineteen-year-old nurse at a government clinic, tasted ice cream for the first time at a dance. ‘“Ask for ice cream,” said one of the girls. They had never eaten anything so cold in their lives. I told them, “swallow it, don’t hold it in your mouths like that, the Americans are watching us. Eat it! Finish it!”’221 The Funafutians shared their bounty with friends and relatives. Parcels were sent off regularly on the cargo ships visiting the outer Ellice Islands. In exchange for the Americans’ generosity the Tuvaluans would go fishing and give their catch to Colonel Good, the island’s commander.222

  Throughout the Pacific, Japanese and Americans alike employed thousands of islanders as labourers and porters. The Americans fed them more food than they had ever seen before. Isaac Gafu, a Solomon Islander working in a labour gang on Guadalcanal, recalled ‘those big shipments of food, my goodness! The food made us enjoy working very much. Because of the fact that we ate good food, we did not tire easily.’ The only danger was that ‘we might get tired from eating!’223 Another Solomon Islander was delighted when some Americans invited him and his fellow workers inside their tents to sit on their beds and share their food. They even provided their guests with glasses, plates and spoons. ‘That was the first we had seen of that kind of thing.’224 In Pacific island cultures the sharing of food is of immense social importance. The giver demonstrates his ability to command the resources to acquire food and cements his ties of kinship and community with those with whom he shares.225 Since their first contact with Europeans, Pacific islanders have been interested in western foods. By the 1930s canned meat, usually corned beef, was a normal part of islanders’ diets. But when the Americans arrived Pacific islanders were surprised and pleased by their generosity and open-handedness with food. The Americans’ willingness to share food made the islanders feel as if they were being treated as friends and equals. This unthinking distribution of abundance cast the more distanced colonial authorities in a poor light.226

  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.227 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.228 The Americans could not be accused of plunder: they took responsibility for the feeding of the islanders whil
e 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.229 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.’230 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.231 ‘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.’232 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.’233

  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.’234 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.235 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.236 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.237 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.238

  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.’239 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.240 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.241 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.’242 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.243

  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.’244 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.245

  In the opinion of one Palauan ‘the United States [was] … the worst thing that ever happened to the people of Palau’.246 Like many islanders all over the Pacific the Palauans regarded the Americans as ‘all-powerful, magnanimous new benefactors’.247 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.248 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.249 Thousands of islanders had earned good wages, well above the usual rates paid by the British or the Australians, constructing air
fields, 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.’250 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.251 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.252 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.253 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.254