Distant, dreamy atolls have been the focus of an American love affair since James A. Michener first published his “Tales of the South Pacific” in 1947. “I wish I could tell you about the South Pacific,” his book begins:
The way it actually was. The endless ocean. The infinite specks of coral we called islands. Coconut palms nodding gracefully toward the ocean. Reefs upon which waves broke into spray, and inner lagoons, lovely beyond description.
Readers drank in his words. They were food for the war-weary imaginations of a public desperate to escape the aftermath of global conflict.
Michener collected his magical mix of fact and fiction while working as a “paperwork sailor” — one who’s known as a paper pusher — and historian for the Navy in the South Pacific during World War II. Although he traveled widely between islands, Michener spent most of his time after being sent to the South Pacific in April 1944 at the U.S. naval base on the island of Espiritu Santo in the archipelago of Vanuatu, then known as New Hebrides. This meant that what would become the South Pacific Ocean country of Vanuatu, an Anglo-French colony that gained independence in 1980, was central to his experience and a major influence on his outlook. Inspired by these wartime experiences, Michener’s collection of 19 vividly written yet loosely connected short stories would gain him a Pulitzer Prize in 1948. His exponential success was made more astonishing by the fact that the 40-year-old Michener was a first-time author and this his debut book.
Michener’s “Tales” took an anxiety-ridden Middle America on a journey. It transported readers from the reality of postwar austerity to imagined exotica. The book celebrated a war zone already enshrined in myth, the South Pacific being a theater of conflict that mixed shimmering seas and beautiful islands with patriotism and naval nostalgia.
Although the subject of “Tales” is war and its setting the South Pacific, its rich array of characters — Indigenous, colonial, immigrant and American — seem to leave the page and find lasting life in popular memory. Michener’s protagonists have a convincing realism. They struggle with the suffocating heat and humidity, with insects, disease, madness, malnutrition, celibacy, sickness, death in battle and at peace, and with waiting — the intolerable waiting in steaming tropical temperatures for the fighting to begin. But also portrayed are those chronic human frailties such as fear, jealousy, greed, cruelty, pride, racism … and even love, which pushes its way through the verdant undergrowth of several chapters.
But love would not take a commanding role until Michener’s book was optioned by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II and adapted for the Broadway musical “South Pacific,” which opened in April 1949. Out of the myriad possible storylines, Rodgers and Hammerstein chose to focus on the experiences of the American nurse Nellie Forbush and French plantation owner Emile de Becque, from the short story “Our Heroine,” and the Tonkinese workers Bloody Mary, her daughter Liat and U.S. Lt. Joe Cable, from “Fo’ Dolla.” Rodgers and Hammerstein did incorporate individuals from other stories, such as Luther Billis, Bus Adams and Tony Fry. But to intensify the impact of their libretto and musical score, they dramatized fewer settings and characters.
Rodgers and Hammerstein were creatively on fire while working on the stage show. Record has it that the score for “Happy Talk” was composed in 20 minutes after Rodgers received Hammerstein’s lyrics, and that the legendary three-note motif in “Bali Ha’i,” inspired by the stage show’s mystical Bali Ha’i backdrop, was composed in 10 minutes over a cup of coffee.
The blockbuster Broadway production of “South Pacific” introduced Michener’s most romantic characters to a mass audience. It would become the second-longest-running Broadway show after Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma.” “South Pacific” won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1950, and would earn 10 Tony Awards, including Best Score, Best Libretto and the coveted Best Musical award. But perhaps Rodgers and Hammerstein’s greatest achievement was that their songs, like Michener’s characters, would have an afterlife beyond the stage. The album with soundtracks from the original cast was the best-selling record of the 1950s, and songs such as “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Bali Ha’i” and “Happy Talk” were recorded as popular standards by artists such as Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Jo Stafford.
Audiences became infatuated with “South Pacific,” with its representation of paradise mixed with romance. On stage, the two love stories are woven together to convey a powerful but also unsettling message. There is Nellie, the naval ensign, who is captivated by the sophisticated, middle-aged French plantation owner, Emile. Their attraction is instant and they quickly make plans to marry. The sticking point for the Arkansas-born, “hick” girl is that Emile has two children with a Polynesian wife who has passed away.
In Michener’s original version, Emile has eight daughters of both Asian and Polynesian descent, born to several different local women, all out of wedlock. “South Pacific” simplifies Emile’s backstory and sanitizes his libido. But even two legitimate, mixed-race children of Polynesian descent are two too many for Nellie, who exposes her racism. Her onstage struggle is to learn to love Emile’s children as much as he does.
Nellie is ultimately more successful in overcoming her prejudice than the unlucky Joe, who, in a second plotline, falls desperately in love with a young Tonkinese woman. His desire is fervently reciprocated by the beautiful Liat, and the couple spend a night of passionate lovemaking on the island of Bali Ha’i. Joe is the Princeton-educated son of a wealthy Philadelphia family that will never accept his marriage to a woman of Asian heritage. Normally, a second romantic plot would offer comic relief to the first, but this is not the case in “South Pacific.” Both stories take a serious look at the looming problem of racial prejudice, and Joe and Liat’s relationship will end tragically because of it.
Humor in “South Pacific” is carried by characters such as Luther, a Seabee, and Liat’s mother, the foulmouthed, toothless Bloody Mary, who haggles over the price of grass skirts and shrunken heads and is ever plotting to marry her daughter off to a well-to-do American. Once again, Rodgers and Hammerstein streamline the more complicated Liat, creating what feels like a cardboard cutout of Michener’s original incarnation. But, in a way, stereotypes sing loudest on the popular stage. And Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Liat sent the difficult message of anti-racism home to a domestic audience that urgently needed to rethink its discriminatory attitudes.
While Michener, and then Rodgers and Hammerstein, were creating the dream destination of a generation of Americans, the people of the South Pacific were suffering monstrous indignities at the hands of the U.S. government. In February 1946, at the same time as Michener was pounding out his “Tales” on his typewriter, the Indigenous population of Espiritu Santo, where he had been stationed, were reeling from the dumping of millions of dollars’ worth of war equipment in the sea close to the town of Luganville. The U.S. government owed the people of the Vanuatu archipelago a debt. The naval base of Espiritu Santo was crucial to U.S. success and the Allied victory in the Pacific. Vanuatu resupplied and repaired the U.S. fleet. Tipping its excess naval supplies into the sea was as much an act of vandalism as it was a betrayal of the people of Vanuatu.
To comprehend the enormity of this U.S. treachery, it is important to understand exactly how central Vanuatu was to the Pacific campaigns. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the naval base on Espiritu Santo became the largest base in the region, only overtaken in size by the one at the Ulithi Atoll in the last 18 months of the war.
The base at Luganville was enormous, hosting the U.S. Army, Army Air Corps, Coast Guard and Marine Corps. By the end of the war, over 500,000 American service members had lived or passed through the base. Of enormous strategic importance, Espiritu Santo and its archipelago had provided vital supplies of food, fuel, arms, ammunition and dry docks to restore damaged ships and equipment. The three auxiliary floating dry docks could handle the repair of the fleet’s biggest ships. Without a base of this size and capacity, the fleet would have had to return for repair and resupply to Pearl Harbor, Brisbane or Sydney.
The first U.S. airstrip on Espiritu Santo was built by Seabees in 1942 to facilitate bombers and their attack against the Japanese on Guadalcanal. Two more airstrips were constructed to accommodate bombers, followed by an airfield at Turtle Bay to service fighter planes. The runways were made of crushed coral dredged from the sea and the airfields’ buildings from coconut logs. Espiritu Santo also became the base for a fleet of seaplanes that became increasingly essential, carrying communiques, personnel and supplies between the islands. Seaplanes required ramps and hangars. Airstrips and plants built to facilitate Allied aviation were constructed at considerable cost to the local environment.
The base was huge, providing ongoing support to military action in both Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. Covering acres of land, the base provided piers, wharfs and a transport network; it supplied shops, a bank and a post office; it accommodated naval personnel; it provided staff with mess halls and an officers’ club. It kept ammunition stores and gun emplacements and covered large areas of land in tank farms that stored oil, fuel, diesel and gasoline. The base was a miniature city built on land requisitioned from the people of Vanuatu.
Espiritu Santo also boasted four well-equipped naval hospitals, the largest — with 1,500 beds housed in semicircular Quonset huts — at Bellevue plantation. In its lightweight structures of prefabricated corrugated iron and steel, nursing staff treated sick and injured service personnel. But the island was a salve to more than just the wounded. The base was a destination for personnel on rest and recuperation leave. Instead of returning to the U.S. mainland, they could restore themselves by enjoying the white sand beaches of Vanuatu.
In spite of the fact that World War II had nothing directly to do with Vanuatu, the archipelago and its Indigenous people lived under the constant threat of Japanese attack. Ironically, however, it was not enemy fire but a friendly error that brought about Espiritu Santo’s biggest disaster of the war.
Moving large numbers of soldiers around the South Pacific was difficult. To address this problem, luxury liners were converted into troopships. On Oct. 26, 1942, the refitted cruise liner SS President Coolidge, coming into Luganville harbor carrying 5,340 troops and crew, strayed into a field of U.S. mines, hitting two and sinking. A firefighter in the engine room was killed instantly in the explosion, and an artillery captain went down with the ship when he returned to save men reportedly trapped in the infirmary. Remarkably, these were the only fatalities.
A much greater disaster was averted by Capt. Henry Nelson when the ship was run aground along a coral shelf, allowing those aboard a near-miraculous evacuation and saving a vast number of lives and equipment. A human chain of local Vanuatu residents, along with naval personnel, helped move survivors and gear ashore. The SS President Coolidge was not stationary long before it slipped from the shelf, settling ultimately in the channel more than 650 feet underwater.
Over the time that Espiritu Santo acted as a U.S. naval base, nearly 10 million tons of military gear were shipped to the island. By the end of the war, there was so much material — vehicles, supplies and equipment — that the decision was made not to repatriate the goods. Instead, the plan was to offer them to the governments of Britain and France, which were joint administrators of Vanuatu until 1980. The U.S. government offered the hoard of equipment and stores (including bottles of Coca-Cola) to the Anglo-French administrations at the very reasonable rate of 6 cents on the dollar. The matter would become a governmental standoff, with the war-beleaguered administrators believing that, if they didn’t agree to the terms, the goods would be abandoned along with the base when the U.S. departed in February 1946.
The three wartime allies refused to negotiate a civilized handover. Nearing the day of departure and under government instruction, naval Seabees built a ramp into the sea off the southern coast of the island near the Luganville airport. Over two days, the U.S. Navy began submerging their wartime surplus in the sea. Tanks, jeeps and military vehicles of all kinds were driven into the water and dumped along with weaponry, food, clothing, medical supplies and much more. Finally, the bulldozers providing the muscle to move equipment were also driven into the sea. In just 48 hours, millions of dollars’ worth of goods were destroyed or rendered unsalable by seawater, on a stretch of beach that was subsequently named Million Dollar Point.
The destruction of naval property on this scale made the environmental damage caused by the sinking of the SS Coolidge seem insignificant. The release into the sea of fuel, rubber, metals and plastics, along with a large amount of rotting waste, caused considerable and ongoing contamination. Chemical leaching affected water quality, disrupting food chains and killing coral reefs. Fish, a dietary staple of the Indigenous people, along with birds and other animals, were killed.
After the U.S. left, people on Vanuatu salvaged as much as they could from the waters, but this was only a tiny portion of what was permanently left on the sea floor. The sudden evacuation of U.S. troops caused many social and economic challenges, too. Suddenly, after years of occupation, life returned to a new normal. Nothing would ever be the same again.
There was an infrastructural legacy left behind by the U.S. Among the positives were roads, bridges, wharfs, warehouses, hangars, airstrips, hospitals and the remnants of buildings on the base. Many of these are still in use today, including the Quonset huts originally crammed with hospital beds. But the negatives are equally lasting. The landscape has been changed and the environment contaminated by rusting hulks littering the seabed. The wreck of the SS Coolidge and the carnage of the dump site are permanent reminders of the futility and waste of war.
Ironically, just as Michener was penning what would become in the hands of Rodgers and Hammerstein a love letter to the South Pacific, the U.S. government was signing off their “Dear John” letter to Vanuatu. The U.S. owed the people of Vanuatu a war debt but could not see them as separate from their colonizing overlords, Britain and France. Instead of recognizing its obligation and treating the Indigenous people of Vanuatu generously, the U.S. dumped its enormous bounty in the sea. One cannot help but see a link with the racism explored by both Michener’s “Tales” and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific” in this shameful demonstration of systemic blindness to the needs of Vanuatu’s people.
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