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Angela Wanhalla discusses the intimate relationships forged during wartime between women and U.S. servicemen stationed in the South Pacific, traces the fate of wartime marriages, and addresses consequences for the women and children left behind.

Image courtesy of interviewee. March 13, 2024

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This video video discusses a research project focused on the relationships between American servicemen and indigenous women in the South Pacific during World War II, particularly emphasizing the phenomenon of "war brides." Led by Professor Judy Bennett, the project examines the social impacts of American military presence in the region and explores the complex dynamics of intimate relationships across cultural and legal lines.

The author of the text expresses interest in the experiences of about 1,600 couples who married during the war years, touching on the challenges these marriages faced, such as divorce, legal recognition, and the ability of war brides to move to the United States. The research involved creating a database from various records, including marriage and consular documents, to track the lives of these couples and their children after the war.

This video video outlines the need to understand how global events like war shape personal lives and relationships in specific cultural contexts. It highlights the vast differences in marriage customs across Pacific nations and the implications of such differences for the war brides, particularly those of indigenous or non-European descent who often faced additional difficulties.

The author aims to shed light on the often-overlooked intimate dimensions of war and colonial interactions, advocating for more attention to the South Pacific in historical analyses of global conflict and its social repercussions. The research aims to honor the lives and struggles of the women and families involved, contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the consequences of international marriages during the wartime period.

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That book emerged out of a different project,

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but one that was related.

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And that project was led by a colleague of mine,

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professor Judy Bennett, now emeritus,

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who's a expert on environmental

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history in the South Pacific.

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And she led a big,

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very collaborative project about the social impacts

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of American servicemen during World War ii,

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and the South Pacific Command.

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Um, and what she was particularly interested in is the

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impacts that those men had on indigenous communities,

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and particular, to the extent to which those men left

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behind children, with, indigenous mothers,

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in the South Pacific.

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'cause there's a really vast scholarship

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and growing scholarship on, the stories

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of war children born as a result of, wartime relations,

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sometimes across, cultural lines

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and also political lines.

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Um, and so we were interested in it kind

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of exploring that question.

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What emerged from that project

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and the work that I was doing,

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which was on the New Zealand side of the story, is the

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interesting number of indigenous women who actually managed

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to marry American servicemen.

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They didn't always get to go to the United States.

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So I'm reading any literature that's around war brides,

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and there's a kind of big scholarship on that.

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Sometimes that scholarship's quite popular.

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Um, a little bit romanticized at times as well.

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And then there's also a kind of very important, kind

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of academic work on kind of war brides as well that aligns

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with some of that popular literature, which kind

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of explores questions of the extent

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to which these relationships were able to be maintained,

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across international lines, across international laws,

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and across cultures, as well in the post-war period.

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So in that scholarship,

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you might not necessarily find very much about the Pacific.

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Often it's about Japan,

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or Germany, particularly

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because the United States was an occupation force,

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in those countries.

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And there were non fraternization laws, and regulations.

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Um, and there's some work on France, as well.

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So I was really surprised in doing work in this earlier

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project, which is called Mothers Darlings,

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about the social impacts for Americans.

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Uh, I was very surprised to find

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a large number of indigenous women.

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It became war brides.

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So that was the starting point for kind

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of exploring the South Pacific story,

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within a slightly wider context, of the story of,

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American servicemen, in the Pacific,

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and their kind of imperial interests, in the region,

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but also the nature of the kind of intimate,

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relationships that emerged, as a result

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of encountering each other on small islands,

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where everybody knew

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Each each other too.

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Um, so, and also the, I was very interested in the question

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of kind of, what,

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marriage looked like within the context

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of Tonga versus Fiji versus Samoa New Zealand,

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or the Cook Islands, which all make up,

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what we would call during World War ii,

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the South Pacific Command Zone.

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Uh, and for people who don't know, during World War ii,

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the Pacific was, carved up into four command zones,

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and the, the islands that I just named were part

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of the South Pacific Australia was in the southwest Pacific.

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I keep getting asked questions why I haven't looked at

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Australia, but I think it's enough

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to just look at several island groups

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and very different cultures with very different,

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relationships to Britain and the United States as well.

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So there's a kind of politically quite interesting context

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to explore there as well.

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So I'm very interested in the way in which

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intimate lives are shaped by big global events like war

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and, political, situations

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and legal regimes as well.

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So that's the setting for, of love and war.

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The book focuses on around 1600, couples

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who married during the period 1941 through

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to about 46, 47.

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Um, because even though the war officially ended in, in 45,

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there are many more servicemen who were still kind

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of occupying, in, the Pacific region.

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Um, so it's not easy to track 1600 couples,

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across, a time period of the war itself where

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so much was in flux and very dynamic.

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Um, and you don't always have the best records,

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available for kind of tracking them.

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Um, and I was also trying to track them across their lives

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as well, because I'm interested in what happened to them

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after the war, whether

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or not those marriages, were successful.

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Um, 'cause often the story is that sometimes they,

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they had high divorce rates.

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So the research I did was really, building a database,

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tracking every couple I could find

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through newspaper reports, marriage records

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and tension to marry records,

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Imperial records from Great Britain, records

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that were held in the Pacific as well, such as,

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consular records.

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Uh, and I also worked in the United States, looking at,

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army and Navy records.

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Um, one of my best resources for doing this work was the

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American Red Cross Records held in the United States

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at College Park, Maryland,

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because they dealt with a lot of the welfare issues

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that arose as a result of the stationing

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of American servicemen in the Pacific as they did,

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around the world.

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Um, and also,

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American consular files. 'cause there were consular

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Office offices in New Zealand and Auckland

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and Wellington, but also in, in Fiji.

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Um, and so there were huge numbers of letters sent

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to consular officials from American servicemen

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who had married women, and they couldn't get their wives

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into United States, or they couldn't get

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their children in either.

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Um, others that were, letters from the families of women

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who felt that they'd been abandoned

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by their American husband were seeking to, deal

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with paternity issues, divorce, as well.

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So those social records

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of letters were really quite critical

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to helping open up the data set

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and give me a little bit of an insight into the anxieties

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and the concerns of people,

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in the South Pacific on a more intimate level,

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and gave me a little bit more flesh to the bones of the data

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that I was following.

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Um, and if you look at the book, I'm not able

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to follow every single couple

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because the, the level of information that's available

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for all of those people is very buried.

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Not everybody is in the archive sometimes, all

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that they're represented by, as a marriage record.

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Um, and there's not much else that you can follow.

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The other source material

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that I was looking at were passenger records,

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which have been digitized, of the war bride ships,

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that were sent out from the states to the South Pacific,

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to Australia to New Zealand.

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They also went through, American Samoa and also Fiji,

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and I think through Tahiti as well.

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Uh, and those passenger records are wonderful

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because what they show is not, you know, everybody's name,

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where they're from, their ethnicity or nationality,

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but also who paid for those, passages as well.

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So whether they were paid for by the, American military,

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which was, something that they agreed to,

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in 19 42, 43, I think so.

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Um, so there's a whole range of records

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and a bit of record matching that I had to do

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to start following these couples.

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And the final source for me was doing interviews,

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with some war brides.

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I did talk to the families

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of three New Zealand war brides in the United States,

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about 10 years ago.

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And they hosted me in their homes, wonderful people,

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and also talked to some in New Zealand, as well.

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Uh, and if I could, you know,

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had the all the money on the earth,

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this is what I'd do, I'd do.

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The next stage would be really talking to the,

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the descendants, of those marriages to get a real

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more kind of complete sense of their lives.

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Post World War ii, the Pacific War Brides,

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basically were those women who married American servicemen.

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Um, and they,

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those American servicemen were based in the South Pacific,

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command making

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Up New Zealand, Fiji, Samoa, the Cook Islands,

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and Tonga and a number of other kind of small island groups.

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Um, and many, I should point out that many women

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that were in those island groups did move

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around quite a bit during the war.

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This is a dynamic period

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and quite a bit of mobility going on.

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So quite a pe a lot of people from, for instance, Samoa come

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to New Zealand because New Zealand has a,

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a legal relationship and political relationship with Samoa.

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So some of those women will meet

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American servicemen in New Zealand.

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So it's, it's quite complicated.

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Um, and so I was interested in tracking those relationships.

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So at the very basics, we're talking about geography

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and location, number one about

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who those Pacific War brides are.

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Um, and as I mentioned earlier,

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when thinking about militarization,

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and also questions of politics

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and global war, we're talking about other part

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of the world, that is very far away from most other

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parts of, the globe,

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but was deeply impacted by global war

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because of the opening up of the Pacific Theater.

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Um, and

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that the South Pacific became a staging post for that.

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Uh, and never before had we really had this moment in the

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South Pacific, beyond the kind of early encounters,

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where, you know, the British explorers coming through

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of having, a moment where so many men from this

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part of the world that many people kind of knew about

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but didn't have much experience of, arrive all

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of a sudden in their communities.

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And what we're talking about are very small

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island societies.

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You are looking at Tonga, you might have 30

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or 40,000 people who live there,

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but we have 30,000 Americans coming through.

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Um, so they're doubling the population

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and they're overwhelming it,

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and they're overwhelming it with American money

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and American goods too, which really,

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has a significant social and economic impact.

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And lots of great historians have kind of

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explored those kind of questions.

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Uh, but what they haven't necessarily explored is the

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question of intimate relation.

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So our Mother's Darlings project had a look at that.

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Um, and this war brides project is a kind

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of extension, of that.

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So by focusing in on those 1600 war brides, some

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of whom are indigenous about 60

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or so who are kind of indigenous

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or non-European, the vast majority of a European background,

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British or Irish heritage, New Zealand born

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and whatnot, sometimes Australian born too.

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Um, they as, as groups have very distinctive experiences

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as war brides as well.

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Those who are people of color have greater difficulty,

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I found and accessing the ability to marry, legally,

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because marriage was controlled by the military.

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Um, and then you had local, regulations that had

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to be operated, were in operation as well.

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Um, and there were also, for those who are indigenous,

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didn't always make it into the United States,

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if they did manage to get married as well,

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sometimes those marriages actually followed local custom

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rather than being legal.

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So this idea of a war bride is not just about a legal

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marriage or a legal relationship under the law.

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Sometimes it also comes under the umbrella

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of cultural concepts of marriage as well.

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So that's what I was trying to explore, in this question

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of war brides, too, so the kind of variety

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of marital like relationships that emerged.

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Um, and so one of the chapters in the book kind of covers,

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what happens to those women who had those relationships

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that were marriage like, but not necessarily legal

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and didn't have the same rights as married couples,

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what happens to them and their children?

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And those are ones who are often left behind.

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Um, so there's a, there's a range of her mutations

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and complications that emerge out

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of these, relationships.

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Uh, and for some it also ended up in divorce too.

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And one of the big issues around international marriage

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during World War ii, is that, if a,

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I'm gonna take an example here.

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A New Zealand woman married an American serviceman.

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Um, if she wanted to get a divorce, she had to,

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under the law, get that divorce from

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the place her husband lived,

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because once she got married,

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she took on her husband's legal identity.

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So there was huge complications about

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how to actually manage that.

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It's not possible for very poor people to get on a boat

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and make it over to the United States, find a lawyer,

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to assist them.

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So often these women ended up finding out

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that they were divorced through the post, through,

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you know, things arriving in the male.

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So divorce was a very kind of,

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deeply gendered experience, in the forties made worse

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by the complications, of war

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and international law around marriage and divorce as well.

13:59.285 --> 14:02.055
It's a bit complicated, but hopefully I, you know, managed

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to get across the, the, the, the cultural complexities

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of being in the South Pacific marriage in Tonga looks

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different to marriage in New Zealand,

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and Americans got caught up in that in terms

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of the scholarly work on war brides

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and social histories of global war,

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that the South Pacific is taken seriously,

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that it's a part of that conversation.

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Uh, the South Pacific is often, missed out, in kind

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of, global and analysis of, social histories of war,

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that home fronts matter in the history of war as much

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as the battle fronts do as well.

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And that on the home fronts,

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those home fronts have their own particular complexities

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that are associated with intimate relationships.

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Um, and what I also hope to get out

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Of this, I hope readers will see, is that,

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the South Pacific is a really important,

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it's an important place for seeing how global war

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actually really shapes the lives of people,

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literally on the ground.

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It shapes their economic life,

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it changes the way people work,

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because the plantations go,

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because the Americans come in with all this money

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and these major camps,

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and their immobilization really shifts things,

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completely, and it's overwhelming

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and it's a major,

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significant moment in people's memories.

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Um, and intimacy is a really important part of that story,

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but is often sometimes forgotten

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because it's seemed to be less important

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or less significant in a political context.

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But it has political and legal, complications

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and importance for the people

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who are stuck in the middle of it.

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And the story of, Pacific War Brides, that book is,

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tries to tell that story, on behalf of those families

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and, and women, and I hope it, does so in a way

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that does justice, to those women in their lives.

Intimate Relationships in the South Pacific War

00:00:00 - That book emerged out of a different project, but one that was related. And that project was led by a colleague of mine, professor Judy Bennett, now emeritus, who's a expert on environmental history in the South Pacific. And she led a big, very collaborative project about the social impacts of American servicemen during World War ii, and the South Pacific Command. and what she was particularly interested in is the
00:00:36 - and particular, to the extent to which those men left behind children, with, indigenous mothers, in the South Pacific. 'cause there's a really vast scholarship and growing scholarship on, the stories of war children born as a result of, wartime relations, sometimes across, cultural lines and also political lines. and so we were interested in it kind
00:01:04 - What emerged from that project and the work that I was doing, which was on the New Zealand side of the story, is the interesting number of indigenous women who actually managed to marry American servicemen. They didn't always get to go to the United States. So I'm reading any literature that's around war brides, and there's a kind of big scholarship on that. Sometimes that scholarship's quite popular. a little bit romanticized at times as well. And then there's also a kind of very important, kind
00:01:39 - with some of that popular literature, which kind of explores questions of the extent to which these relationships were able to be maintained, across international lines, across international laws, and across cultures, as well in the post-war period. So in that scholarship, you might not necessarily find very much about the Pacific. Often it's about Japan, or Germany, particularly because the United States was an occupation force,
00:02:08 - And there were non fraternization laws, and regulations. and there's some work on France, as well. So I was really surprised in doing work in this earlier project, which is called Mothers Darlings, about the social impacts for Americans. I was very surprised to find a large number of indigenous women. It became war brides. So that was the starting point for kind of exploring the South Pacific story, within a slightly wider context, of the story of,
00:02:44 - and their kind of imperial interests, in the region, but also the nature of the kind of intimate, relationships that emerged, as a result of encountering each other on small islands, where everybody knew Each each other too. so, and also the, I was very interested in the question of kind of, what, marriage looked like within the context of Tonga versus Fiji versus Samoa New Zealand,

Marriage and Relationships in the South Pacific

00:03:18 - what we would call during World War ii, the South Pacific Command Zone. and for people who don't know, during World War ii, the Pacific was, carved up into four command zones, and the, the islands that I just named were part of the South Pacific Australia was in the southwest Pacific. I keep getting asked questions why I haven't looked at Australia, but I think it's enough to just look at several island groups and very different cultures with very different, relationships to Britain and the United States as well.
00:03:52 - to explore there as well. So I'm very interested in the way in which intimate lives are shaped by big global events like war and, political, situations and legal regimes as well. So that's the setting for, of love and war. The book focuses on around 1600, couples who married during the period 1941 through
00:04:22 - because even though the war officially ended in, in 45, there are many more servicemen who were still kind of occupying, in, the Pacific region. so it's not easy to track 1600 couples, across, a time period of the war itself where so much was in flux and very dynamic. and you don't always have the best records, available for kind of tracking them.
00:04:53 - as well, because I'm interested in what happened to them after the war, whether or not those marriages, were successful. 'cause often the story is that sometimes they, they had high divorce rates. So the research I did was really, building a database, tracking every couple I could find through newspaper reports, marriage records and tension to marry records, Imperial records from Great Britain, records that were held in the Pacific as well, such as,
00:05:24 - and I also worked in the United States, looking at, army and Navy records. one of my best resources for doing this work was the American Red Cross Records held in the United States at College Park, Maryland, because they dealt with a lot of the welfare issues that arose as a result of the stationing of American servicemen in the Pacific as they did, around the world. and also,
00:05:56 - Office offices in New Zealand and Auckland and Wellington, but also in, in Fiji. and so there were huge numbers of letters sent to consular officials from American servicemen who had married women, and they couldn't get their wives into United States, or they couldn't get their children in either. others that were, letters from the families of women who felt that they'd been abandoned

Exploring Pacific War Brides' Lives and Challenges

00:06:28 - with paternity issues, divorce, as well. So those social records of letters were really quite critical to helping open up the data set and give me a little bit of an insight into the anxieties and the concerns of people, in the South Pacific on a more intimate level, and gave me a little bit more flesh to the bones of the data that I was following. and if you look at the book, I'm not able
00:06:57 - because the, the level of information that's available for all of those people is very buried. Not everybody is in the archive sometimes, all that they're represented by, as a marriage record. and there's not much else that you can follow. The other source material that I was looking at were passenger records, which have been digitized, of the war bride ships, that were sent out from the states to the South Pacific,
00:07:28 - They also went through, American Samoa and also Fiji, and I think through Tahiti as well. and those passenger records are wonderful because what they show is not, you know, everybody's name, where they're from, their ethnicity or nationality, but also who paid for those, passages as well. So whether they were paid for by the, American military, which was, something that they agreed to,
00:08:02 - so there's a whole range of records and a bit of record matching that I had to do to start following these couples. And the final source for me was doing interviews, with some war brides. I did talk to the families of three New Zealand war brides in the United States, about 10 years ago. And they hosted me in their homes, wonderful people, and also talked to some in New Zealand, as well. and if I could, you know,
00:08:31 - this is what I'd do, I'd do. The next stage would be really talking to the, the descendants, of those marriages to get a real more kind of complete sense of their lives. Post World War ii, the Pacific War Brides, basically were those women who married American servicemen. and they, those American servicemen were based in the South Pacific, command making Up New Zealand, Fiji, Samoa, the Cook Islands, and Tonga and a number of other kind of small island groups.
00:09:04 - that were in those island groups did move around quite a bit during the war. This is a dynamic period and quite a bit of mobility going on. So quite a pe a lot of people from, for instance, Samoa come to New Zealand because New Zealand has a, a legal relationship and political relationship with Samoa. So some of those women will meet American servicemen in New Zealand. So it's, it's quite complicated. and so I was interested in tracking those relationships. So at the very basics, we're talking about geography

Exploring Pacific War Brides and Their Experiences

00:09:37 - who those Pacific War brides are. and as I mentioned earlier, when thinking about militarization, and also questions of politics and global war, we're talking about other part of the world, that is very far away from most other parts of, the globe, but was deeply impacted by global war because of the opening up of the Pacific Theater. and that the South Pacific became a staging post for that.
00:10:08 - South Pacific, beyond the kind of early encounters, where, you know, the British explorers coming through of having, a moment where so many men from this part of the world that many people kind of knew about but didn't have much experience of, arrive all of a sudden in their communities. And what we're talking about are very small island societies. You are looking at Tonga, you might have 30 or 40,000 people who live there,
00:10:39 - so they're doubling the population and they're overwhelming it, and they're overwhelming it with American money and American goods too, which really, has a significant social and economic impact. And lots of great historians have kind of explored those kind of questions. but what they haven't necessarily explored is the question of intimate relation. So our Mother's Darlings project had a look at that. and this war brides project is a kind of extension, of that.
00:11:11 - of whom are indigenous about 60 or so who are kind of indigenous or non-European, the vast majority of a European background, British or Irish heritage, New Zealand born and whatnot, sometimes Australian born too. they as, as groups have very distinctive experiences as war brides as well. Those who are people of color have greater difficulty, I found and accessing the ability to marry, legally,
00:11:43 - and then you had local, regulations that had to be operated, were in operation as well. and there were also, for those who are indigenous, didn't always make it into the United States, if they did manage to get married as well, sometimes those marriages actually followed local custom rather than being legal. So this idea of a war bride is not just about a legal marriage or a legal relationship under the law.
00:12:16 - of cultural concepts of marriage as well. So that's what I was trying to explore, in this question of war brides, too, so the kind of variety of marital like relationships that emerged. and so one of the chapters in the book kind of covers, what happens to those women who had those relationships that were marriage like, but not necessarily legal and didn't have the same rights as married couples, what happens to them and their children?

Complicated Legacies of Pacific War Brides

00:12:46 - so there's a, there's a range of her mutations and complications that emerge out of these, relationships. and for some it also ended up in divorce too. And one of the big issues around international marriage during World War ii, is that, if a, I'm gonna take an example here. A New Zealand woman married an American serviceman. if she wanted to get a divorce, she had to,
00:13:17 - the place her husband lived, because once she got married, she took on her husband's legal identity. So there was huge complications about how to actually manage that. It's not possible for very poor people to get on a boat and make it over to the United States, find a lawyer, to assist them. So often these women ended up finding out that they were divorced through the post, through, you know, things arriving in the male.
00:13:48 - deeply gendered experience, in the forties made worse by the complications, of war and international law around marriage and divorce as well. It's a bit complicated, but hopefully I, you know, managed to get across the, the, the, the cultural complexities of being in the South Pacific marriage in Tonga looks different to marriage in New Zealand, and Americans got caught up in that in terms of the scholarly work on war brides
00:14:20 - that the South Pacific is taken seriously, that it's a part of that conversation. the South Pacific is often, missed out, in kind of, global and analysis of, social histories of war, that home fronts matter in the history of war as much as the battle fronts do as well. And that on the home fronts, those home fronts have their own particular complexities that are associated with intimate relationships.
00:14:50 - Of this, I hope readers will see, is that, the South Pacific is a really important, it's an important place for seeing how global war actually really shapes the lives of people, literally on the ground. It shapes their economic life, it changes the way people work, because the plantations go, because the Americans come in with all this money and these major camps, and their immobilization really shifts things,
00:15:22 - and it's a major, significant moment in people's memories. and intimacy is a really important part of that story, but is often sometimes forgotten because it's seemed to be less important or less significant in a political context. But it has political and legal, complications and importance for the people who are stuck in the middle of it. And the story of, Pacific War Brides, that book is,