UP FROM GUADALCANAL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 266, 28 July 1944, Page 6

UP FROM GUADALCANAL

Scenes Change in the Pacific War : Says Dur Correspondent A.M.R:

the last island in the Pacific to pass under European sovereignty-a mere 50 years ago. But Saipan lies alongside the first Pacific island ever seen by Europeans-nearly three hAundred and fifty years ago. New Guinea is the world’s last stronghold of Savagery -Old Style; but the islands into which cur troops will next step, having now reached New Guinea’s farthest point, are the ones that lured Columbus . across the Atlantic and Bartolomeo Diaz around the Cape. To them came Magellan’s ships on the first voyage made round the world, and Drake’s on the second. They were indeed the goal of both. And the king to whom they reported at journey’s end became the envy of Europe for his wealth and magnificence. In short, the dreadful two years of warfare among naked savages and stinkwas almost

ing jungles-disastrous to standards of conduct as well as to health, as General Barraclough recently notedare near their end. The world’s most gigantic pincer movement has only to close on Yap and Palau the prongs that have already pushed through to Saipan and the Moluccas-and then Truk, Ponape, Kusaie, Rabaul, and, in fact, every single Japanese island remaining in the Pacific will wither on the stalk. The eastern war moves into a new phase, new scenes, and older and better conditions. The Isle of Flies The Moluccas, the Palaus, the Mari-annas-this is the new cutting arc of advance, What are these lands like that are so ancient in history and civilisation compared with New Guinea and the Solomons? It must surely have surprised many people to read, for example, that the U.S. forces had captured the "capital" of Saipan and offered safe conduct to 10 or 12,000 ’ civilians.

PPP BIO P PDP PDD DD DD DP DP Oeaeaewe~ The Mariannas are primarily distinguished from the rest of Micronesia in being neither sea-level atolls nor densely-jungled volcanic peaks, but comparatively large, comparatively low, limestone dishes. Inside their sea-rims, edged with fern-trees, flame trees, bananas and cocopalms, wild cattle used to roam among horn-high wild grass. They still do on Guam. But the Japanese, working with tremendous speed, have turned their Mariannas into sugar plantations. Accordingly, Saipan in particular has become a Land of Flies. Flies churn in with the cane entering the fdctory hoppers, and ate barely strained out from the crystals spouting from the chutes. Flies billow with the wind over the waving fields. Flies pester the thatched huts of the

loin-clothed Kanakas,. the German-built stone houses ‘of the Spanish dressed Chamorros, and the mile of bamboo and paper shops, bonito dryeries, and geisha houses that make up Garapan township. Yet drivers neither of oxcarts, mnor_ charcoal lorries, nor_ stripped, sweating naval yard labourers are supposed to swat flies seriously. For it is on one little fellow, much less pretentious than his name of Microceromasia Sphenophori VIIL, that their jobs all depend. A forced labourer from New Guinea, he preserves the island from reversion to unprofitable grass by preying on the insects that prey on the cane.

i i lt lt i hi i iil All flies look much alike. The people of Saipan play safe by tolerating all. To sail south from the Mariannas to Yap means leaving Garapan’s bustling main street, which-vegetation and oxcarts apart-might have been dropped complete out of some Japanese smalltown, for a clothesless, shopless, hurryless tropic isle. The Japanese, of course, insist that young .Yapians must go to school and wear clothes there. But as they leave the class room, each rolls. up shorts or gym-frock and changes back to tan. Adult Yapians likewise cling to loin-cloths and voluminous grass skirts, even though the latter may weigh 30 pounds. This sounds surprising considering that Yap has been these 40 years one of the world’s chief cable crossroads. Apparently what keeps the natives to their old ways is the observation that innovations and epidemics have gone together in the past — and a.preference for their own complicated, if simply dressed, culture. Yap has its own currency, too, which no invaders will rifle or World Monetary Conferences control. The "coins" are stone "life-savers,"’ several feet or even yards across, which each household, knowing noiseless theft to be impossible, proudly banks at its front doorstep. Counterfeiting has been impossible, because only canoe voyages to a dangerous distant island can procure the correct type of stone. However, one early Irish adventurer caused wholesale inflation by indenting a schooner-load from that land literally made of money. Yap also continues its system of First, Second and Third-class villages. Lower-class men may not sleep in the First-class settlements. They _merely work there, being, in fact, slaves to the latter. The whole body of free(continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) men owns them in common, but it is only the Twelve Kings who may issue them orders. A barbaric, but not a savage, trio of islands, is Yap. An Eccentric Centre Palau is south of Yap, in the extreme south-east of the North Pacific. The farsighted Japanese, however, had made it the administrative centre of their South Seas Territories long before occupation of the Indies made it the geographical centre also, Planes fly from here dead east to Philippine Davao (500 miles), south to Timor (1000 miles) and west to Rabaul (1500 miles), Tradesmen and labourers have worked a decade of overtime flattening Palau’s_ airfields, enlarging the natural sea-basins,, and artificially complicating the maze of coral channels which surrounds it. In fact, fed by its own tropical gardens, this group of islands may be still holding out when Tokio surrenders-a Base without anything based on it. At present Palau is getting attack from both sides. Planes from the carriers off Saipan wave to pilots up from New Guinea. The New ‘Guinea land forces will, however, shortly be making for somewhere nearer-the island of Halmaheira-a large and: fantastically-shaped structure that is perhaps best described as four arms without a body. New Zealanders who have visited Halmaheira can probably be numbered on the thumbs of one hand, and I doubt if over a score could have placed it as animal, vegetable, or mineral up to a fortnight ago. Yet Halmaheira was. the land. best known to the Spaniards and Portuguese who pioneered the exploration and exploitation of these regions. When Sumatra, Java and Celebes were mere dotted lines on their charts, they had Halmaheira already carefully plotted in all its re-entrant complexity. The Isles of Spice The natives of Halmaheira are mainly forest nomads, living in bough shelters, hollowing out sago palms for food, and breaking down coconuts for drink. (Strangely enough, in one region they are Polynesians-a pocket of population

left behind by the great migration that swept through Micronesia to Tahiti and New Zealand at some prehistoric date). Why, then, should Alphonso’ d’Albuquerque have groped through the whole labyrinth of the Indies immediately on reaching Malaya and halted nowhere until his ships arrived here? Why should Magellan, seeking: the same spot round the opposite flank of the globe, have sailed round and about once he reached the Mariannas and Philippines until he, too, sighted Halmaheira among its smaller sisters, the fabulous Moluccas, or "Isles of the King"? And, why should Francis Drake, after the exploration of California, have taken on cargo nowhere but off this island of jungle nomads? The nature of that cargo-four . and a-half tons of nutmegs and clovessupplies the answer. Halmaheira was the Land of Spices when spices were to world trade what tin and rubber are to-day. To-day Food Controller Llewellin would probably swop all the nutmegs in the world for just one more egg per person per year. But

in pre-preserving days, "spices" were such a necessity to Europe that Africa and America were both rounded in the greatest race of all time to reach them, and rivalry in the Moluccas themselves was furious and

fast. Scarcely were the Portuguese established than the Spaniards broke in. Scarcely were the Portuguese swallowed by Spain than the Dutch arrived. Then the English took the main Dutch "factory." But scarcely had Dutch and English combined on paper in London to despoil the earlier than their representatives on the spot staged a massacre, And then the Sultan of Ternate, who had given the Dutch a monopoly of spice trading in return for help to conquer all four arms of Halmaheira and two of Celebes, turned on his allies when they interpreted the treaty as meaning that he must pull up_ his own spice gardens. A barbaric region, but again-not a savage one. Ternate itself is the metropolis of Halmaheira, though situated on a larger edition of Rangitoto, just off the coast at the point where east and west coasts come within five miles of each other. Its Chinese-Malay-Portu-‘guese population had no _ excitement other than eruptions (70 of them): between the revolt of the Sultan and the arrival of the Japanese. In their good stone houses among their wealth of trees their main ambition, activity and achievement has been indolence. Many and great jungles and swamps still wait between Noemfoer Bay and Manila. But it will be a relief to jungle troops to break through into a rggion. which, if not civilised by American plumbing standards, has some comforts and a culture to offer them in welcome. ,