Occupations, the Pacific

Pacific oral history and archaeology suggest that territorial occupations occurred often in the Pacific. In historic times, for example, New Zealand Maori forces occupied the Chatham Islands and eliminated the indigenous Moriori population. In the late nineteenth century, Tongan warrior chief Ma'afu occupied eastern Fiji and Kamehameha of Hawaii conquered most of that archipelago. As a political concept, however, occupation is tied to a notion of the territorial state; this type of occupation only emerged after European powers and the United States had agreed upon a final division of the Pacific islands. This division largely followed the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898. Although, preceding this, German traders had already moved into the Marshall Islands and the new German state had declared this archipelago a protectorate in 1885 despite Spanish claims.

Occupation principally occurs as a reflex of war, and at the outbreak of World War I in 1914 both Australia and New Zealand sent squadrons north to occupy German's Southwest Pacific colonies, aiming particularly to seize cable and wireless communication centers. The Australians occupied German New Guinea and Nauru while New Zealand forces took Western Samoa. In the North Pacific, Japan moved quickly into the Marshall Islands and also the Marianas and Carolines—the other Micronesian archipelagoes that Germany had acquired from Spain in 1898. German forces, realizing the difficulty of defending these distant colonies, quickly withdrew. Australian, New Zealand, and Japanese militaries occupied these territories until their seizure was regularized as League of Nations C-class mandates.

World War II (1939–1945) occasioned even greater occupation of colonial territories. In late 1941 and early 1942, the Japanese moved swiftly to occupy American-controlled Guam and Wake, Dutch New Guinea, Australia's Territory of New Guinea, parts of Papua and Nauru, and British-held Solomon Islands and Gilbert Islands. In response, the Allies (mainly U.S. forces assisted by Australia and New Zealand) rushed troops into the rest of the Pacific including Samoa, Fiji, Tahiti, New Caledonia, and Ellice and Cook Islands in order to protect lines of communication between Australasia and North America. The largest number of U.S. forces occupied the New Hebrides (then a joint British and French Condominium colony), carving out two large advance bases that supported the subsequent invasion of Japanese-occupied Guadalcanal.

These Allied occupations were friendly insofar as military forces consulted, at least officially, with existing colonial administrations. In the New Hebrides (Vanuatu), however, U.S. military commanders, frustrated with colonial incompetence, assumed much of the day-to-day administration of the archipelago.

Bypassed behind the frontline, the Japanese occupied a number of islands (including much of New Guinea) until the end of the war in 1945. Distracted by battle, neither Japanese nor Allied forces concerned themselves much with Pacific Island populations apart from recruiting native labor corps. The huge U.S. presence in the New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands, however, helped spark several postwar social movements, including the Maasina Rule on Malaita and the John Frum movement on Tanna.

The United States assumed control of Micronesia as a strategic trust territory under the aegis of the new United Nations. This U.S. Navy administered these islands until 1951 when authority passed to the U.S. Department of the Interior. The Trust Territory eventually dissolved as the Northern Marianas became a U.S. Commonwealth (1975) while the remaining districts gained separate nationhoods—the Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands in 1986, and Palau (Belau) in 1994—although these have signed "compacts of free association" that give the U.S. oversight of their foreign affairs.

Since World War II, Pacific occupations have been less frequent. In 1963 Indonesia occupied Western New Guinea—the last remnant of the Dutch East Indies colony—and, in the 1990s, Australian and other forces occupied Bougainville Island (part of Papua New Guinea) and Guadalcanal (Solomon Islands), to help settle a secessionist war and civil unrest.

see also Empire, Japanese; Pacific, American Presence in; Pacific, European Presence in.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Grattan, C. Hartley. The Southwest Pacific since 1900. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963.

Lindstrom, Lamont. The American Occupation of the New Hebrides (Vanuatu). Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies Working Paper 4. Christchurch, New Zealand: Macmillan Brown Centre, 1996.

Lindstrom, Lamont, and Geoffrey M. White. Island Encounters: Black and White Memories of the Pacific War. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990.

Poyer, Lin, Suzanne Falgout, and Laurence M. Carucci. The Typhoon of War: Micronesian Experiences of the Pacific War. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001.