On August 20, 1942, Jacob Vouza made a mistake that almost cost him his life. On his patrol along Alligator Creek in the thick jungle of Guadalcanal, the forty-seven-year-old Solomon Islander scout waved his pocket-size American flag at a group of soldiers he thought were friendly U.S. Marines, but turned out to be Japanese Army soldiers. They promptly captured him, tied him to a tree, and interrogated him about U.S. troop movements in the area. When Vouza repeatedly refused to talk, the Japanese soldiers began torturing him. As Vouza would later recall: “I was caughted by the Japs and one of the Japanese Naval Officer questioned me but I was refuse to answer & I was bayoneted by a long sword twice on my chest, through my throught, & cutted the side of my tongue.”Footnote 1 He was then left to die, but managed to chew through the ropes and escaped back to American lines.Footnote 2 Close to death from his bleeding wounds, Vouza was given six pints of blood and prepared for surgery by Marine Corps medics. Just before he went under, Vouza allegedly muttered: “I didn’t tell them anything.”Footnote 3 As if by miracle, he managed to pull through. A few days after Vouza’s life-saving operation, one of the American doctors joked to him: “This new blood we put in your veins is American, so now you are half Solomon Islander and half American.”Footnote 4 Meanwhile, the Marines had used Vouza’s vital intelligence to ambush and kill 800 Japanese troops.Footnote 5 For his part, Vouza wanted to rejoin the Allies in their war against Japan as soon as he had recovered: “I wad do my fighting with the Japs & paid back all what they have done with me”Footnote 6 (Figure 1).
Sergeant-Major Jacob Vouza in United States Marine Corps Uniform. Guadalcanal, March 1943. Source: National archives (127-GW-911-52167-B).
Vouza’s close encounter with death illustrates the complexities of World War II, marked as it was by uncertain allegiances, brutal violence, and human endurance. Vouza’s torture has become a staple in soldiers’ memoirs and military histories of the Pacific War, often described in lurid terms as “Vouza’s ordeal.”Footnote 7 As Japanese forces invaded and occupied large parts of Southeast Asia and islands in the Western Pacific in the wake of Pearl Harbor, islanders were forced to adapt to radically new circumstances. Many male islanders were coerced into manual labor, female islanders were threatened, and military occupation limited all of the islanders’ free movements. As a result, Vouza was one of thousands of Pacific Islanders who found themselves caught in the middle of a world war not of their own making. Few islanders voluntarily joined the Japanese occupation forces, while many others chose to support Allied forces as they struggled to push back over three and a half years of brutal warfare.
In the end, Pacific Islanders made the difference for the Allies. William F. “Bull” Halsey, Commander of the U.S. South Pacific Fleet, famously noted after the war: “The coastwatchers saved Guadalcanal, and Guadalcanal saved the South Pacific.”Footnote 8 But even as the highest military officials acknowledged how important the coastwatchers were in winning the Pacific War, their gratitude was more directed at white coastwatchers from Australia and New Zealand than at the Solomon Islanders themselves. Military historians have, by and large, followed the military top brass’s lead. Veterans, by contrast, have kept the memory of islander support alive. But if it is true that the coastwatchers saved Guadalcanal, then who saved the coastwatchers? More specifically, who were the thousands of Solomon Islanders who helped the Allies push back Japanese forces in the pivotal six months from summer 1942 to spring 1943?
In this article, I argue that thousands of non-Americans, such as Solomon Islanders, were essential workers for U.S. military success in World War II and for the expansion of U.S. imperial power. Solomon Islanders were crucial actors in World War II because they provided non-combat labor and had intimate knowledge of the terrain of their home islands. Without islander scouts, carriers, and other laborers, Allied campaigns against Japanese forces could not have succeeded, as many U.S. commanders were the first to acknowledge. In fact, recruiting and managing non-combat workers of color—such as Solomon Islanders in Guadalcanal—became an important source of U.S. military and imperial power during World War II. In their various labor roles, Solomon Islanders not only transcended facile stereotypes of unquestioned loyalty to the Allied cause, but also grasped at new opportunities for individual gain and collective decolonization.
Since the end of World War II, veterans and military historians have written extensively about the Pacific War and its human toll. Traditional military historians have focused on tracing the campaigns of the Pacific Theater in fine-grained detail. If they mention them at all, Allied soldiers’ memoirs often portray islander scouts and carriers as an anonymous labor force, loyal but faceless. Islanders only enter the stage of war drama when they can be linked to famous individuals—most prominently, the rescue of John F. Kennedy off Kolombangara in 1943—or to the fate of the Allied cause more broadly.Footnote 9 Memoirs and oral histories by Allied veterans construct a particular way of remembering World War II and the Battle of Guadalcanal that privileges the perspectives and suffering of Allied soldiers over those of Solomon Islanders. Their limited perspective is understandable as a product of the trauma of the war and near-death experience of fighting in it. Similarly, memoirs and histories of the coastwatchers center on their own experiences as hardy, lone white men rather than on the many islanders who kept them safe. In his memoir of running the coastwatching network in the western Pacific, Australian Navy veteran Eric Feldt literally replaces actual islanders with white settlers, who were supposed to have become “islanders” after five years of residence, and espouses unvarnished colonial racism toward Melanesian islanders: “The natives were all Stone Age men less than a hundred years ago, and many still are.”Footnote 10 Martin Clemens, the British coastwatcher who had recruited Vouza, avoids explicit anti-islander racism in his important memoir, Alone on Guadalcanal. Based on his wartime diaries, Clemens’s memoir, however, erases islanders in its title and imbues its portrayal of ignorant but well-meaning and loyal Solomon Islanders with benevolent paternalism. Clemens’s overall tone is sympathetic toward Solomon Islanders when he concludes that “there is no doubt that we could not have done without them.”Footnote 11 Steeped in long-standing racial stereotypes about Melanesian backwardness, these memoirs generally see islanders as unthinking pawns in the Allied war machine. As Gen. Alexander Vandegrift (USMC) noted after the war: “In the British Solomon Islands there was not one serviceman surrendered to the enemy. Not one! The fidelity of the islanders was unbelievable.”Footnote 12 In wartime intelligence reports, islander loyalty was implicitly explained as the product of a successful British civilizing mission—a colonial argument that U.S. officials had little reason to challenge as they were desperate for accurate information on the islands and their people.Footnote 13 Overall, the conventional narratives put forth by most veteran memoirs and traditional military histories render islanders invisible or dehumanize them as either loyal helpers or heroic supermen.
Over recent decades, military historians have widened their lens to include social, cultural, and environmental issues.Footnote 14 Among other things, they have written about militarization, militourism, military bases, and the global division of military labor.Footnote 15 In doing so, these military historians have joined historians of U.S. foreign relations, historians of the U.S. empire, and labor historians who have explored the intersection of labor and the U.S. empire.Footnote 16 As recent scholarship on labor and the U.S. empire has demonstrated, non-combat workers have been crucial to the rise, expansion, and maintenance of U.S. imperial power since the country’s founding. Historians have produced case studies ranging from African Americans performing non-combat labor for the Union and Confederate armies to Filipino carriers during the War of 1898 to Marshall Islanders servicing U.S. bases during the Cold War.Footnote 17 National guards and indigenous scouts, trained by U.S. military officials, have also received attention.Footnote 18 As the bloodiest war in human history, World War II required an unprecedented degree of labor mobilization and logistical planning on the part of the U.S. military.Footnote 19 Indeed, as Andrew Friedman has noted, the United States could not have fought World War II “without tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of colonized laborers—often described, no matter the part of the world, as ‘natives.’”Footnote 20 The experience of Jacob Vouza and other Solomon Islanders working for the Allies complicates our conventional understanding of World War II as the “Good War” by highlighting the importance of non-combat labor, race, and colonialism.Footnote 21
Pacific historians have long stressed the importance of World War II as a catalyst for fundamental political, economic, and social change on Pacific islands on the frontline as well as those in the rear. As military supply chains set in motion soldiers, non-combat laborers, and tons of equipment, Pacific Islanders witnessed dramatic changes in their lives and environments.Footnote 22 Since the 1970s, historians and anthropologists have worked with veterans in the Solomon Islands to record their lived experiences during the war. Through oral history conferences, interviews, and memoirs, Solomon Islanders have been able to tell their own stories, thereby disrupting dominant tropes about voiceless, unthinking, and naturally loyal islanders.Footnote 23 It is no coincidence that a more thorough engagement with the history of Solomon Islander service in World War II began in the wake of formal political independence of the islands in 1978. On the one hand, the dominant narrative of islander loyalty to the Allied cause helped justify continued British colonial control over the Solomon Islands after the war as well as the Anglo-American alliance during the ensuing Cold War.Footnote 24 On the other hand, as the deeper reckoning with the war showed, World War II also accelerated anti-colonial activism against outlander rule over the islands, as it did in other parts of the western Pacific.Footnote 25 If loyal islanders had helped the Allies win the war, they also came to question their continued allegiance to a British government that had betrayed even its own mission of protecting islanders against other colonial powers. Loyalty in wartime thus morphed into the foundation of postwar anti-colonial nationalism. In this context, military service during the war could serve as a usable past to help explain the coming of political independence of the Solomons. More recent historical scholarship on World War II in the Solomons has further complicated this proto-nationalist reading of military labor for the Allies. As Annie Kwai has argued, the historiography on Solomon Islander coastwatchers homogenizes the diversity of islander experiences during the war.Footnote 26 Solomon Islander involvement with Japanese and Allied forces, Kwai shows, was influenced by indigenous cultural values, the relationship with the British colonial government, and observations of military developments in local contexts.Footnote 27
This article joins recent scholarship at the intersection of U.S. foreign relations, military history, and Pacific history to argue for the important role of war workers during World War II.Footnote 28 The historical experience of Solomon Islander scouts and laborers has not been fully told because their diverse forms of military labor have fallen through the cracks of these three fields of historical inquiry. Historians’ lack of attention to non-combat labor is, in part, a result of its spatial and racial alienation from combat labor: non-combat labor is often performed by people of color in spaces segregated from combat operations. In Guadalcanal, the U.S. military forcefully inserted itself into the colonial labor management system of its ally, Great Britain, to gain access to non-combat laborers of color. Revisiting the Battle of Guadalcanal reveals the colonial roots of the U.S. military’s non-combat labor supply, which was critical in projecting U.S. imperial power in World War II and beyond.
This article’s historiographic intervention goes along with its methodological rethinking on how to read the wealth of military records and veteran memoirs on the Battle of Guadalcanal. Both government and private sources on Guadalcanal constructed their narratives about islands and islanders through long-standing binaries of civilization and savagery, loyalty and betrayal, and good and evil. Clemens, for instance, appears constantly worried about retaining his civilized British subjectivity as he struggles to keep his colonial uniform dry, yearns for a hearty meal, and carries his Shakespeare volume into the jungle.Footnote 29 White coastwatchers, such as Clemens, frame their experience in Guadalcanal as the struggle of lone white men defending the British civilizing mission in the Solomons through self-sacrifice and sheer will. The paternalistic portrayal of Solomon Islanders themselves reflected long-standing colonial anxieties: one moment, islanders were loyal and unquestioned servants of their colonial masters; the next moment, they threatened to become ungrateful traitors ready to slay them.Footnote 30 In both scenarios, what was at stake was nothing less than the British civilizing mission in the Solomons, and by extension in the entire Western Pacific. The fact that it was actually the British missionaries and plantation owners in the Solomons who had deserted the very same islanders they had proclaimed to protect was less frequently noted in these memoirs.
Other tropes of colonial discourse on indigenous people infiltrated British government reports, U.S. military reports (which initially relied on British sources), and soldiers’ memoirs as well. In his memoirs, Clemens vacillated between tapping into the martial spirit of his islander scouts who were supposed to “love the smell of death” and faulting Solomon Islanders for their unmanly fear of the Japanese war machine.Footnote 31 Clemens and other white veterans often assumed that Solomon Islanders felt overwhelmed and helpless in the face of the unprecedented scale of organized violence in the wake of Japanese invasion and occupation. Across theaters of war in the Pacific, outlander officials saw islanders as part of the natural environment and therefore as deserving little consideration.Footnote 32
Given the prevalence of these colonial stereotypes in government and veteran sources on Guadalcanal, this article seeks to reread the extant records against the grain to recover the voices of islanders. Solomon Islanders are actually all over the place in the archives of the Pacific War, but often in the margins, as nameless statistics, or in stereotypical roles.Footnote 33 Besides the extensive written records, the visual archive on Guadalcanal offers an important but understudied window into islander experiences. As scholars of U.S. photographs on Guadalcanal have noted, much of the visual archive on Solomon Islanders in the Battle of Guadalcanal focuses on scouts and other laborers, while only very few photos show other islander civilians, women, or children.Footnote 34 The few photos that do feature Solomon Islander civilians were designed, as in World War II photographs more generally, “to underscore the humanity of U.S. soldiers.”Footnote 35 The photographic archive remains entirely silent on sex, rape, labor strikes, or accidental deaths. No Pacific Islander photographers took their own pictures to counterbalance the outlander perspective. In addition to rereading the operational and veteran sources on Guadalcanal, this article also foregrounds islander perspectives through oral histories, cultural texts, and memory practices.Footnote 36 Only by piercing through the thick layers of colonial and racial stereotypes of Pacific Islanders can we begin to uncover a fuller account of the Battle of Guadalcanal and its dramatic consequences for Americans and Solomon Islanders alike.
War Comes to Guadalcanal
The Battle of Guadalcanal was one of the iconic battles of World War II for several reasons. It was on this island in the southeastern Solomons that the Allies launched their first successful counteroffensive against the Japanese on August 7, 1942. After more than six months of heavy air, ground, and naval engagements, the Japanese were forced to withdraw their forces further north. Guadalcanal then became a supply station for campaigns in the northern Solomon Islands and New Guinea.Footnote 37 The fighting left a devastating human toll: 30,000 Japanese, 7,000 Allies, and scores of Solomon Islanders were killed.Footnote 38 Due to its unprecedented human death toll, World War II has been remembered by Solomon Islanders as “The Big Fight.”Footnote 39 Warfare caused widespread fear, hunger, and dislocation on the islands. By February 1943, the battle over Guadalcanal was over.
Over the last eighty years, Guadalcanal has become a central site of memory in the military history of World War II, in the institutional identity of the U.S. military (especially the Marines, but also the Navy and Army), and, most importantly, for the dwindling number of living veterans of that battle. As Samuel E. Morison has famously noted, Guadalcanal “is not a name but an emotion.”Footnote 40 Today, there are various war tours offered to veterans, which include visits to battle sites, war memorials, and local museums. Over recent years, this veteran tourism has incorporated more recent findings from scholars and has also opened up to include local and islander perspectives, and even Japanese experiences.Footnote 41
Named after a village near Sevilla, Spain, the island of Guadalcanal is 90 miles long and 25 miles wide, with mountain ranges in the south reaching 7,000 feet and dense jungle plains in the north. Since 1893, Guadalcanal had been part of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, a vast chain of 1,000 volcanic islands stretching as many miles from the coast of New Guinea in the west to the southeast. At the onset of World War II, around 14,000 islanders lived on the island together with some sixty European settlers.Footnote 42 The islands’ subtropical climate turned especially rainy and hot from November to March, providing fertile ground for fungi and malaria-carrying mosquitoes. During the Battle of Guadalcanal, malaria would prove more deadly than bullets. Guadalcanal was also home to a wide array of tropical fauna, including crocodiles, sharks, poisonous snakes, tarantulas, fire ants, giant wasps, and leeches. As one U.S. Army soldier remembered: “Jungle was really rough. We were hit by the heat, mosquitoes, leeches, and a little bit of everything else.”Footnote 43
The Solomon Islands turned into one of the major battlefields of the Pacific War when Japanese military officials expanded their reach into the “Outer South Seas” in the summer of 1942. Japanese forces moved to occupy Guadalcanal in June 1942 from their major air base in Rabaul in the occupied Australian mandate of Papua New Guinea. From the start, Japanese officials intended to build an airstrip near Lunga on the island’s northern coast to threaten Allied bases in New Caledonia and even Australia. After islanders refused to help the Japanese construct the airfield, Japanese officials issued an order that forced islanders to contribute manual labor.Footnote 44 Under the order, islander men between fourteen and fifty years of age were required to work for the Japanese occupiers in exchange for basic food and shelter, but without pay.Footnote 45 Only few islanders on Guadalcanal trickled in to report for work, including Dovu—one of Clemens’s scouts—who got work as a carrier, helping bring stores from the beach to the airstrip site and making careful note of everything he carried.Footnote 46 Because local islanders could not be conscripted to build the airfield, the Japanese imported their own construction units, made up of forced laborers from Korea and Java, in early July 1942.
U.S. Marines landed in Guadalcanal from Fiji on August 7, 1942, just before the Japanese were able to finish the airfield. Marines met little resistance from only 250 armed Japanese troops as unarmed construction workers scattered into the jungle or surrendered. No one defended the nearly completed airfield, the main strategic prize in Guadalcanal. As they began unloading, the Marines encountered their own labor problem: they simply had too much equipment and too few carriers. As a result, Marine Corps officials promptly recommended “to organize natives as carrying parties as soon as possible after landing.”Footnote 47 Over the course of six months of heavy fighting on Guadalcanal, the ability of Allies to recruit islanders as scouts and carriers proved key.
Solomon Islanders were central protagonists in Guadalcanal and in the broader Pacific war because they provided crucial support on the battlefield and beyond. Their heroization after the war has both clouded and oversimplified the complex human interactions between islanders and Allies during the war. Warfare brought unprecedented violence to the island with effects on human bodies, the environment, and the political and cultural autonomy of islanders. By August 1942, food had become short on Guadalcanal, leading to widespread hunger, emaciation, and sickness.Footnote 48 Lack of food was exacerbated by the breakdown of health services that had been provided by missionaries and the protectorate government before the Japanese invasion. By the end of the war, the population of south Guadalcanal had declined by 14 percent.Footnote 49 To cooperate under these harrowing conditions, islanders and Allies had to overcome racial, cultural, and linguistic barriers.
Communications between islanders and Allies proved to be one of the challenges in the early encounters. Solomon Islanders speak more than eighty indigenous languages, but during World War II only a few thousand islanders knew Solomon Islands Pijin and very few spoke English. By contrast, most Solomon Islander scouts who had served in the colonial police force knew Pijin fluently. Solomon Islands Pijin is a creole language based on selective and modified English vocabulary (and meanings) but local language grammars and pronunciations that originated among migrant workers on sugar plantations in Queensland, Australia, and then spread to copra plantation workers back in the Solomon Islands.Footnote 50 Before the war, local British officers used this highly descriptive and adaptive language even when speaking to constables who had an excellent command of colloquial English.Footnote 51 During wartime, the Pijin vocabulary had to be updated to allow islander scouts to do reconnaissance, so new words were invented to accurately report enemy military equipment.Footnote 52 One of the Marine officers, Cpl. “Hatch” Schofield had picked up a simplified version of English while panning gold in the Rocky Mountains to communicate with Native Americans there. In Guadalcanal, he used this basic English to become the point person to communicate with Vouza and other scouts.Footnote 53 Other Marines who had not learned Pijin encountered communication problems with scouts in neighboring Choiseul in October 1943.Footnote 54 But many islanders on Guadalcanal picked up Pijin and basic American English quite quickly. A young islander told an Army soldier in June 1944 how he learned to speak “American”: “American him come, him talk, me say.”Footnote 55
After they landed on Guadalcanal, U.S. and Allied forces were in dire need of information on the Japanese, the island, and the islanders. Even before wading ashore, U.S. officials had relied on intelligence provided by the coastwatching network in the Western Pacific. Created by the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) in the early 1920s, the coastwatchers consisted of civilian observers—mostly older white European planters, miners, and missionaries—stationed in a far-flung network stretching from Australia’s northern coast through the Solomons up to New Guinea.Footnote 56 At the onset of World War II, the organization had grown to nearly 1,000 white coastwatchers, mostly stationed in Australia to secure its long undefended northern coast, and around 400 Melanesians.Footnote 57 Led by Lt. Cmd. Eric Feldt, RAN, from his headquarters in Townsville, Australia, the coastwatchers were an adventurous bunch who “drank very, very hard, loved widely and freely, looked down upon the natives with a protective paternalism.”Footnote 58 As Feldt himself was ready to acknowledge, the coastwatchers could never have existed without the help of local islanders who fed them and kept them informed.Footnote 59 When war came to their stations in the Western Pacific, coastwatchers conducted risky reconnaissance and search and rescue missions and even launched guerilla attacks on Japanese forces. Because they were officially classified as non-combatants, coastwatchers did not receive weapons from Allied forces.Footnote 60 In the summer of 1942, there were three coastwatchers on Guadalcanal—Martin Clemens from Britain, Donald S. Macfarlan from New Zealand, and F.A. (Snowy) Rhoades from Australia—who sent daily intel reports, which the U.S. Marines partly relied on for their first estimate of Japanese troop strength. Later in the year, the coastwatchers were absorbed into the Allied Intelligence Bureau, which also coordinated partisan warfare in the Philippines.Footnote 61 According to Feldt, the coastwatchers killed 5,414 Japanese soldiers, wounded 1,492, and captured 74 more; rescued 335 prisoners from the Japanese; and saved 321 airmen, 280 sailors, 190 missionaries, and thousands of villagers.Footnote 62 Even accounting for some exaggeration on the part of the commanding coastwatcher, these detailed statistics show the organization’s contribution to the Allied war effort.
For their part, the Japanese knew about the Allied coastwatchers, but failed to track them down or to contain their operations otherwise.Footnote 63 Among the many challenges facing the Japanese Army in Guadalcanal was the gathering and use of intelligence. Japanese units initially had to do their own scouting.Footnote 64 Only later did the Japanese create their own coastwatching network, but in general they devoted much fewer resources to gathering intelligence than the Allies did.Footnote 65 In a prolonged battle in mutually unfamiliar terrain, intelligence from Allied coastwatchers and their islander scouts tipped the balance.
Scouts
Throughout the Battle of Guadalcanal, Solomon Islanders worked as scouts for U.S. forces and their British, Australian, and New Zealand allies. The Solomon Islands Scouts were formally part of the British Solomon Islands Defence Force (BSIDF), which was organized in 1937 with all-male islanders from the colonial constabulary and police force. Officered by white Europeans, the BSIDF at its peak boasted around 800 Solomon Islanders, including Jacob Vouza, who waged guerilla warfare against the Japanese occupiers throughout the Solomons.Footnote 66 Scouts gathered intelligence, joined Marine patrols, took Japanese prisoners, and even paddled out in their canoes to rescue drowning Allied soldiers.Footnote 67 By the end of the war, thirty-two Solomon Islanders in the BSIDF had given their lives in defense of their home islands.Footnote 68
From the organizational perspective of the U.S. military, the Solomon Island Scouts during World War II stood in a long line of auxiliary fighting forces drawn from local recruits. From the Indian Scouts in settler colonial warfare in North America to the Philippine Constabulary after 1898 to national guards in Central America and the Caribbean in the first decades of the twentieth century, the U.S. military had long relied on Indigenous recruits for intelligence gathering and the bloodiest of fighting.Footnote 69 In Solomon Islands during World War II, U.S. forces benefitted from the transfer of military training from the BSIP police force, organized by the British in 1915, to the BSIDF and its scouts. With Cpl. Andrew Langabaea in command of eight trained policemen, the BSIP police joined forces with the BSIDF during the war.Footnote 70 Over the course of the campaign, 120 policemen served in Guadalcanal, including Vouza, who had been a high-ranking police officer in Malaita before the war.Footnote 71 Given the exigencies of war, the second major source of scouts consisted of prisoners—including a string of long-service murder convicts—who were organized by Tabasui and conscripted into carrying equipment.Footnote 72 Recruits also included clerks, hospital dressers, and gardeners.Footnote 73 Most scouts were stocky, muscular, and carefully groomed. Initially unarmed, the scouts scavenged for Japanese weapons, later received rifles from the Allies, and also carried bush knives in rawhide scabbards “with the hair still on.”Footnote 74 By November 1942, Clemens had divided the scouts in Guadalcanal into four sections, each containing one company of about seventy-five scouts, with sixty reserve men and carriers each.Footnote 75
Solomon Islander scouts served in various roles during the Battle of Guadalcanal and beyond. First and foremost, the scouts gathered vital intelligence on Japanese troop landings, movements, and numbers. According to Clemens, scouts were trained for local security, then in accurate observation and estimation of enemy ships, planes, and actions, later of parties, numbers, and equipment.Footnote 76 Scouts did not receive more formal training because they were never out of battle for long enough. As part of their daily tasks, scouts were expected to report strange sights and happenings and teach villagers to accurately report intelligence. Drawing on so-called “home guards” in the coastal villages, scouts collected information on the Japanese by talking to local villagers.Footnote 77 Even before the Japanese invasion, scouts had set up an air warning system with a lookout post on top of a giant banyan tree, giving warning signals with conch shells, and confirming the sighting of a Japanese plane with a red flag.Footnote 78 According to Clemens, Guadalcanal men “had excellent sight and hearing, and by now most of them could distinguish the different planes by the sound of their engines.”Footnote 79 On land, too, scouts were said to be able to spot camouflaged Japanese positions and distinguish between actual bird calls and Japanese soldiers imitating them to communicate.Footnote 80 Japanese forces on Guadalcanal made the frequent mistake of talking to islanders who would report the information to Clemens and Allies.Footnote 81 U.S. Marines initially were skeptical of scouts’ reports on Japanese troop numbers, but quickly accepted them after their accuracy had been proven.Footnote 82 As the final report on the combat experience in Guadalcanal noted, islander scouts had a “superior sense of smell, sight, and hearing.”Footnote 83 In these and other comments, white coastwatchers and military officials betrayed their racial stereotypes about the superhuman sensory capabilities of Solomon Islanders. As if to qualify this praise, the report immediately went on to say that “due to native inability to put into words what they had seen, we either sent white officers or men out with these patrols.”Footnote 84 By and large, U.S. military officials acknowledged the important role of Solomon Islander scouts to Allied victory in Guadalcanal. A Marines operational report on the immediate post-landing phase lauded the coastwatchers as an “outstanding informative agency, proving the most complete and reliable service in a way that was unique and that can never be repaid.”Footnote 85
Aside from collecting counterintelligence, the scouts provided perimeter security for U.S. Marines and soldiers by joining dangerous patrols. Regular patrolling was seen as crucial to defend the perimeter in the dense jungles of northern Guadalcanal. Local scouts drew on their intimate knowledge of the terrain by guiding Allied troops through treacherous and hidden trails, while keeping them safe from Japanese ambushes. According to a Marines patrol report from November 1942, the tracking skills of Guadalcanal scouts made regular patrols possible in the first place: “Native scouts are invaluable. In fact troops would be lost without them. These black boys know every trail. In working a raid they can take you in one route and out by another. They are tireless; taking the trails at a run while a white man struggles along at a plodding walk. In approaching an objective they can be a mile in advance of the party, scouting the area and return in ample time to prevent the party from approaching too close while yet in the single file formation.”Footnote 86
In Guadalcanal and beyond, scouts joined U.S. Marines on their patrols on a regular basis.Footnote 87 On October 7, 1942, for example, Clemens led a patrol with BSIP policemen and Marines that ambushed and killed over two dozen Japanese seamen.Footnote 88 Most famously, scouts accompanied Evans Carlson’s Raiders as guides and carriers. Going barefoot, experienced guides like Poi and Tabasui could approach a man to within a few feet without being detected.Footnote 89 Perhaps catering to racial stereotypes about Melanesian superhuman senses, some scouts boasted to Marines that they could smell Japanese because their uniforms, equipment, and perspiration had distinct odors.Footnote 90 On Carlson’s storied “Long Patrol,” Vouza not only joined himself as the most important guide, but was also in charge of recruiting and supervising other scouts from various villages. At its peak, nearly one hundred scouts worked for the Raiders.Footnote 91 According to a U.S. Marine, Vouza “would inspect them in the morning, as he walked down the ranks his presence elicited a shiver as he passed. He was highly respected and I assume feared.”Footnote 92 Working for food and tobacco, scouts also carried equipment for the Raiders, including heavy radio gear to report new intelligence back to base.Footnote 93 For the Raiders, their cooperation with islander scouts was evidence for their central credo of “Gung Ho,” or working in harmony: “We proved that we would get along with the natives. At times we had as many as fifty to a hundred of them working as guides and scouts. We went Gung Ho together even though they were black-skinned and strange to us. We shared our food and sleeping places. We were men and they were men. And this Gung Ho between us saved our lives, for during the month when we marched along trails that were too complicated for our own scouts and primitive maps, these Melanesians took our hands and led us. Only twice were we surprised and ambushed. On Guadalcanal that was extraordinary.”Footnote 94 As Clemens summed up after the war, the Raiders “would not have got far without scouts and carriers.”Footnote 95
Warped by eventual Allied victory, the postwar image of harmonious cooperation between scouts and Raiders downplayed fundamental conflicts over coercion and pay during the war. As Annie Kwai has argued, the threat of physical coercion kept islander scouts in line: “In most instances, and as seen later during the campaign, islanders feared the consequences of disobeying orders from ‘white masters’ far more than the risks of combat.”Footnote 96 Scouts who did not communicate intelligence on Japanese movements within twenty-four hours faced serious punishment, including physical violence.Footnote 97 Nathan Oluvai, a scout in the Western Province, recounted the fear of corporal punishment in an interview from the 1980s: “We were all afraid of the Coastwatcher who was like the government man, and the headman. Their orders were the law and if you didn’t obey, they put you over a drum and gave you twelve or so whips … you know that time, the word of the government was the last word.”Footnote 98 For Oluvai and other scouts, loyalty to the Allies was not only the product of anti-Japanese sentiment, but was also exacted under threat of the whip.Footnote 99
When and how scouts would get paid was another major point of contention. By mid-November 1942, more than 300 scouts were helping the Allies, but none were getting paid. As Clemens noted in his war diary: “I would have to start paying the scouts. Up to this time, all the old hands had received six months’ pay in advance; but the larger part of the force had volunteered, and had joined at various times, and no arrangement had yet been made about signing them on or paying them. I had also made several promotions as the force had expanded, and there was the question of what pay they were to receive.”Footnote 100 On November 23, 1942, Clemens began paying off the first islander scouts, some of whom said, probably somewhat facetiously, that “they had not expected pay for their share in beating the Japanese.”Footnote 101 Islanders decided to enlist in both the Defense Force and Labor Corps for a variety of internal and external reasons. Aside from British coercion, internal community pressures, sense of adventure, and longing for recognition as fighters equal to the Allies and Japanese made young islander men join the scouts.
Islanders’ sense of pride in supporting the Allied cause is reflected in their affection for Allied, especially U.S. Marine Corps, uniforms and insignia. In the surviving visual archive of the Battle of Guadalcanal, a series of photographs display Solomon Islanders donning Allied uniforms, equipment, and service awards. On the one hand, such photographs are a staple of any war because they symbolically represent the alliance of Allied forces with local auxiliary forces.Footnote 102 Photographers in the Army Signal Corps and in the Marine Corps certainly followed long-standing precedent as well as more immediate directives to highlight the close cooperation of Allied soldiers and islander scouts. In this vein, these images serve as the visual complement to the colonial trope of islander loyalty. On the other hand, however, photographs showing islander scouts in Allied uniforms also reveal the desire of colonized young men for empowerment and martial equality. After all, uniforms are designed to make a diverse set of wearers equal in rank and rights.Footnote 103 In these deliberately staged photographs, islander scouts visually replace both their British colonizers, who, after all, had abandoned them before the Japanese invasion, and their American liberators. The militarization of islanders in wartime—including weapons training, drill discipline, and combat experience—threatened to unsettle the surface of sartorial mimicry.
An image of Daniel Kalea, taken in November 1943, is a good illustration of the visual politics of scouts in uniform (Figure 2). Kalea was a thirty-year-old father of four who joined the scouts after Japanese troops had killed his wife.Footnote 104 It is likely that Kalea saw his service as a way to engage “in his own private quest for vengeance in guerrilla skirmishes.”Footnote 105 Kalea poses with a pipe in the corner of his mouth and without shoes, donning a thick Marines uniform. The caption continues: “Daniel shows off in a suit of winter greens given him by a friend, replete to [sic] sharpshooter and expert bayonet medals. He wears them proudly in the sweltering tropical heat even though the uniform is intended for near-zero ‘state-side’ climes.”Footnote 106 In light of the added sweat, the caption’s comment that Kalea wore the oversized winter uniform “proudly” can probably be taken at face value. Showing allegiance to the U.S. Marines who empowered Kalea to take revenge on his wife’s killers clearly outweighed any physical discomfort. Given Kalea’s personal motivation for revenge, the Marines uniform also strengthened his performance of martial masculinity in defense of islander womanhood. And as the caption makes clear, Kalea’s affection for U.S. military uniforms and insignia was not an isolated case: “Since the advent of Americans on the island, most of the natives have gone G.I. in the matter of clothes.”Footnote 107 Kalea, and other islanders who joined the scouts on Guadalcanal, the caption suggests, have successfully Americanized and thereby civilized themselves by turning government-issued U.S. uniforms into their second skin.
Daniel Kalea in United States Marine Corps Uniform. Guadalcanal, November 1943. Source: National archives (127-N-65305).
Vouza and Islander Suffering
No single Solomon Islander has been written about more in memoirs and histories of the Battle of Guadalcanal than Sir Jacob Charles Vouza. Like Kalea, Vouza liked to don his Marine uniform to show both pride and power.Footnote 108 As one historian put it, Vouza was “highly popular among the Marines. He wore their dungaree uniform when inside the base, the medal they had given him pinned proudly on the jacket.”Footnote 109
Born as Sale (Charles) in 1894 in a small village near Koli Point in Guadalcanal, young Vouza lived up to his last name—fighter—by getting into regular fights with other strong boys. In his early twenties, Vouza enlisted in the BSIP constabulary in Tulagi and served as a police sergeant in Santa Cruz and later in Malaita. Without formal schooling, Vouza learned to read and write in the police to complement his language skills (he spoke four indigenous languages, together with Solomon Islands Pijin and English). Inspired by his pious wife, Irene, Vouza converted to Christianity in 1941 and adopted the name Jacob, just before retiring from a quarter century of government service and returning to his native Guadalcanal.Footnote 110
When the Japanese occupied Tulagi and Guadalcanal in the summer of 1942, Vouza decided to come out of early retirement and joined the BSIDF with a promotion to Sergeant-Major. As a senior police officer, Vouza was put in charge of Clemens’s company of scouts at Aola. On the day of the Allied landing on August 7, 1942, Vouza proved himself right away by rescuing a U.S. Navy pilot off the U.S.S. Saratoga. A few days later, the Marines first encountered Vouza:
Dignified in bearing while awaiting to be heard, he saluted Col. Goettge in the smartest manner. His party had brought in with them that morning a Lt. Southerland, aviator off the Saratoga, who had crashed behind Koli on the 7th. Wounded and injured, the pilot had been given all care and rest before transportation along the coast by canoe to our area. Vouza and his men offered at the same time their services in any way they could be of use, as scouts and guides, to help round up and fight the Japanese. His friendly sincerity was never questioned, and a message to all division units was sent out that afternoon by D-2 stating that Solomon Island natives were to be treated as friends and as covered by orders.Footnote 111
Vouza’s rescue of a U.S. naval pilot inaugurated months of close cooperation with the Marines as they confronted Japan. Vouza regularly joined Marine patrols, including Carlson’s Raiders on their “Long Patrol” through Guadalcanal. Asked why he joined the Allies, Vouza reflected after the war: “I think better me die than Japs take our island because then I know all of us die.”Footnote 112 Less than two weeks after his first official meeting with the Marines, Vouza went on the fateful patrol that opened this article. Vouza’s harrowing experience—of being captured and tortured by Japanese soldiers, followed by his miraculous escape—has become one of the most repeated episodes in memoirs and military histories of the Battle of Guadalcanal.Footnote 113 But what functions does the incessant retelling of Vouza’s “ordeal” service for the Allies serve? In other words, who benefits?
On the one hand, Vouza’s ordeal offers veterans and historians from the winner’s side an opportunity to reaffirm their alliance with occupied and suffering Solomon Islanders. Through an act of vicarious suffering, readers of Vouza’s torture are invited to relive a story arc that culminates in redemption and righteous vengeance. Fittingly for a recent convert, Vouza’s ordeal echoes the genre of Christian conversion narratives in which a sinner finds God and joins a holy alliance against evil. Vouza’s body—bound to a tree and accessible to his torturers—recalls the suffering body of Christ on the cross.Footnote 114 In both scenes, the potential for spiritual redemption through physical suffering threatens to slip into a pornography of pain. Similarly, Vouza’s ordeal also resonates with larger historical narratives about World War II as an epic struggle in which the forces of good—the Allies—ultimately prevailed over the forces of evil—the Axis. As the returned son, Vouza waged the “Good War” in the name of all Allies and their islander helpers on his home island of Guadalcanal. In the end, Allies and their embedded historians prove their racial liberalism and general good intentions through the Marine surgeons who stitched up the gashing wounds on Vouza’s tortured chest: “This new blood we put in your veins is American, so now you are half Solomon Islander and half American.”Footnote 115 Infused American blood—segregated “white” blood, to be more precise—confirmed Vouza’s status as a reliable blood brother, indeed.
On the other hand, the story of Vouza’s ordeal and valor is hard to kill because of long-standing Western images of Pacific Islanders, especially Melanesians, as savage.Footnote 116 As part of the trope of islander loyalty, Vouza’s ordeal serves as evidence that the British civilizing mission was successful in producing courageous, loyal, and manly islanders. Since most British settlers in the Solomons had selfishly deserted their islander wards in their moment of greatest need, the benefits of the British civilizing mission had to be enlarged to include space for the Anglo-American alliance during the war. Under this wartime umbrella, the American war machine could be invited to share the white men’s burden in Melanesia and bail out the defenseless English-speaking racial brothers from Britain, Australia, and New Zealand as they faced the Asian imperialists. In the end, the expectation of unquestioned islander loyalty to the Allied cause was designed to shore up the crumbling structures of white supremacy and colonial control over islanders of color. So prevalent was this trope of islander loyalty during wartime that Vouza himself catered to it. When Lt. Col. Edmund Buckley asked Vouza why he was prepared to give his life for the Americans, even though he had never seen the United States, he replied: “No, but I am your friend. I cannot break a friendship once I have said I am your friend.”Footnote 117
Vouza’s numerous awards and honors ensured his story would not be forgotten. The recommendation for his Silver Star for “conspicuous gallantry and outstanding bravery in action,” awarded on December 31, 1942, did not fail to mention the eight wounds he suffered during his ordeal. In an interview from the 1970s, Vouza remembered his injuries before echoing Halsey’s famous remark about coastwatchers saving the war: “But we all won that fight, and it was all because of what we did.”Footnote 118 Four years after being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1979, Vouza died peacefully in his home in Guadalcanal.
Carrying the Allied Burden
The spring of 1943 was a turning point for Guadalcanal and, as it turned out, the Pacific War. As the Japanese withdrew from the island, the war moved north in the Solomons and into New Guinea. For the remainder of the war, Guadalcanal became an important supply base for the Allies. By 1944, more than 3,700 laborers had been recruited for the Solomon Islands Labor Corps (SILC) from southern Guadalcanal and the neighboring islands of San Cristobal and particularly Malaita.Footnote 119 Workers unloaded ships, carried supplies and stretchers, built Henderson Field, cleaned jeeps, peeled potatoes, collected trash, and drained swamps. In these and other ways, islanders continued to enable the more deadly tasks of Allied servicemen north of Guadalcanal.
In Guadalcanal, as elsewhere in the Pacific, war bases became powerful labor magnets for young, mostly male islanders.Footnote 120 Despite challenging work conditions, most Solomon Islanders joined the SILC on their own volition and out of a mix of motivations: cultural obligation, adventure, patriotism, faith, fear, coercion, food, goods, and cash.Footnote 121 Labor tasks were often difficult, exhausting, and outright dangerous. On January 26, 1943, for example, eleven SILC workers were killed and nine more wounded when a Japanese plane bombed their camp at Lunga.Footnote 122 All told, more than seventeen SILC recruits were killed over the course of the war.Footnote 123 Carriers had to transport forty pounds of ammunition, food supplies, water, or military mail sacks. They also picked up wounded or dead soldiers on stretchers and carefully muscled them back down muddy trails to coastal hospitals. More than two days of rest in a month was uncommon. SILC workers were constantly worried about adequate food, even as U.S. soldiers sometimes referred to them as the “Cannibal Battalion.”Footnote 124 SILC recruits blamed their British supervisors for burning and dumping food donated by Americans.Footnote 125 In an interview from the 1980s, Isaac Gafu from Malaita remembered his busy days in the labor corps in Guadalcanal: “During the war, as soon as it was daybreak, the Americans would come and collect us to go to work. Each section worked in a different place. Building airfields was really hard work. We would go to spread the steel mats in a line. We would spread the steel mats and the Americans would hammer the rivets to hold them down. We really enjoyed working for the Americans. But the sun, my goodness! No matter how hot it was, we just went ahead working.”Footnote 126 Overall, workers’ memories of their war work was heavily influenced by the way supervisors treated them, especially the food and provisions they received.
Apart from food, adequate payment emerged as a central conflict between SILC workers and their Anglo-American employers.Footnote 127 Afraid of postwar wage inflation, British colonial officials sought to keep wages as low as prewar wages for plantation labor.Footnote 128 Com. C. V. Widdy, a former planter, and other British SILC supervisors thought Americans were overpaying and “spoiling the natives.”Footnote 129 SILC workers, in turn, blamed British colonial officials for preventing Americans from paying higher wages.Footnote 130 Wages for SILC workers ranged from $2 to $3.20 per month, while British officers received $4.50 per day.Footnote 131 In addition to wages, U.S. Marines and Army officials also provided clothing and goods, items that SILC workers eagerly stowed away in trade boxes to take back home. When British SILC officers, mainly ex-planters, tried to prevent migrant workers from taking back their goods, they complained bitterly: “We came here without anything, but we were willing to die, so why does the government want to stop us from having these things? We should get something because of the risk. Don’t spoil things for us. You whitemen never go away empty-handed so why do they [British] want to do this to the section [of the Labor Corps]?”Footnote 132 Such heavy-handed restrictions fueled anti-British sentiment during the war and exposed fissures in the Anglo-American alliance.
The crucial labor power that war workers, like those in SILC, provided to the Allies increased their bargaining power. In a series of strikes, carriers withdrew their labor power to demand higher wages. Already before the Allied landing, carriers for one of the coastwatchers in Guadalcanal, Macfarlan, left their jobs. In mid-July 1942, village leaders held a meeting and argued that they had paid taxes to the colonial government for years. As Clemens recounted their complaints: “Now that the government was running away, why should they help carry our food? They also said our money was now no good and only Jap occupation currency or New Guinea money was of any use. Mac tried to reassure them, saying that we were going to bring soldiers and ships. They replied that we were taking a devil of a long time doing it. To that he had no answer.”Footnote 133 In the end, Macfarlan had to agree to a pay increase of 25 percent, which made Clemens angry, “for it would probably cause carrier strikes at some later and more critical moment; but he had no choice—the situation was pretty grave.”Footnote 134 In early January 1943, a group of 130 carriers from Guadalcanal struck for higher wages while on patrol with the U.S. Army infantry, “which resulted in the arrest of their leader.”Footnote 135 And in mid-March 1943, unpaid wages resulted in the largest strike by SILC workers during the war. Five out of the six sections of the labor corps walked out in protest, which resulted in the arrest of their section leaders.Footnote 136 Along with other frustrations, these strikes helped precipitate the postwar independence movement.
Legacies of War
War left a complicated legacy in Guadalcanal. World War II extended the duration of outlander rule over the Solomons and even added new layers of military occupation by the Japanese and then Allies. At the same time, the war also served as a catalyst for the gradual collapse of British colonial rule over the Solomons. The sudden incursion of 60,000 U.S. service members unsettled the colonial rule of difference in the British protectorate, never to return to prewar conditions. Even though relegated to service roles themselves, African American soldiers personified the collective aspirations of many Solomon Islanders who, for the first time, saw fellow people of color commanding power and respect.Footnote 137 As islanders exchanged local souvenirs for uniforms with African American soldiers, they created new types of relations with outlanders.Footnote 138 As scout Esau Hiele put it: “The war brought a very big change. Peoples’ minds were open, eyes were open, brains were open, to outside things. People no longer found it difficult to understand new things.”Footnote 139 For their part, African American service members shared racial stereotypes about Pacific Islanders as primitive savages, but also worked toward building transracial solidarity with fellow colonized people of color.Footnote 140 Before the last American soldiers left Guadalcanal in October 1949, the Maasina Ruru movement posed a fundamental challenge to British rule. Islanders from Malaita to Guadalcanal refused orders, organized work stoppages, and asserted greater control over their cultural and political affairs.Footnote 141 Many islanders who had worked for the Allies during the war—including Jacob Vouza himself—played leading roles in this anti-colonial movement. Fearing armed resistance led by respected war veterans, British colonial officials tried to suppress the movement by arresting over 2,000 supporters but failed to understand the islanders’ deep-running grievances against colonial rule.Footnote 142
Formal independence for the Solomon Islands, however, would have to wait another three decades. When it finally arrived in 1978, a U.S. Marine veteran sent his compliments while rewriting the Battle of Guadalcanal as an anti-colonial intervention by the U.S. military: “We are gratified that the Solomons are now an independent nation. It will not be easy for them, but worthwhile, as was the battle of Guadalcanal. We feel that our struggle on their behalf was not in vain.”Footnote 143 Despite this well-meaning paternalism, it was the blood, sweat, and tears of thousands of Solomon Islanders that helped the Allies win the war and gain the islands their eventual independence. The military infrastructure built by the Allies and islanders during the war was reverted to civilian use first for the protectorate and then for the independent government. As a long-term legacy of wartime centralization, Guadalcanal emerged as the political center of the Solomons, with the capital Honiara built on the site of the former 5th Island Command base. Henderson airfield, the great strategic prize on Guadalcanal and the site of the most intense fighting, became Honiara International Airport, the gateway to the world for islanders, veterans, and tourists.Footnote 144
As militarization has begotten war tourism in Guadalcanal, former enemies have been returning to the island to commemorate their vicious battle.Footnote 145 With the memory of the few surviving veterans rapidly fading, Guadalcanal has recently received renewed attention by U.S. and Japanese officials seeking to bury their old feuds to confront another Asian power with imperial ambitions. At the eightieth commemoration of the Battle of Guadalcanal in August 2022, Caroline Kennedy, U.S. ambassador to Australia and John F. Kennedy’s daughter, expressed both personal and national gratitude: “Countless Americans and Allied families have Solomon Islanders to thank for their survival.” Today, as then, Solomon Islanders find themselves in the middle of clashing empires, while doggedly pursuing their own interests.
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