Abstract
This article reviews and compares the literary fictions of the United States and New Zealand, as they have sought to respond to the ‘occupation,’ 1942–1944. During the period in question, approximately 100,000 United States Army and Marine Corps servicemen landed and resided in New Zealand, where they undertook final preparations for the island campaigns of the Pacific War. In the aftermath of the war, American fiction writers wrote of the social and cultural difficulties endured by New Zealand civilians, but New Zealand writers took longer to come to terms with the events.
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Notes
In this article, I use the term ‘occupation’ in the loosest possible sense throughout. The New Zealand ‘occupation’ (jovially termed an ‘invasion’ in some writings) was sanctioned by the government and did not in any way compromise the sovereignty of the nation. It followed on the military exigencies of both countries and is thus of an altogether different character to the (capitalised and non-parenthesised) Occupation of Japan. Implied in the term, as I use it, is a conflict between two sets of social mores, the details of which are what I seek to explicate using literary fictions as my source material.
Even the most sympathetic reader of Battle Cry will readily admit that Uris’ sentimentality dulls the narrative in nauseating ways. As Jonathan Lighter has observed, “It is a world of romance, and in a world of romance everything and everyone conforms to type. Any depth or subtlety one might have hoped for in a novel of 175,000 words is thus forestalled by endless theatrical and familiar incidents and innumerable dialogues of limited originality or interest” (Lighter 2011, para 6).
As just one example among many, the following letter was printed by an irate mother living in Wanganui: “I was very pleased to read in ‘Truth’ that someone has at last raised the question as to what is to become of those New Zealand girls who have been deserted by their American husbands. My daughter married an American Marine about two years ago, and has a son one year old. Since her husband’s discharge from the Marines in September, 1944, she has not received one word from him, neither has she received any maintenance for herself and child. I can’t imagine what would have happened if she had had no parents to support her. It certainly is time the New Zealand Government took this matter up with the American authorities. Why should these men be allowed to avoid their responsibilities? Our girls were good enough for them to marry. They should be made to maintain them” (Deserted Wives 1945).
For a representative sample of testimonials relating to encounters between U.S. Marines and New Zealand women, see Ellis (2006).
Booth received a grant from the Japan Foundation to assist in the research of the novel, which he used to fund research activities at the Tokyo National Museum, the Yasukuni Shrine, and the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Peace Memorial Museums, among others.
The notion of American troops in World War II ‘overwhelming’ a host society by their sheer numbers may appear so outlandish as to be barely worth mentioning, and yet this was in fact the case in Trinidad, Greenland, and those Pacific Islands with a population many times smaller than New Zealand’s (Coates and Morrison 1991, p. 213).
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Acknowledgment
The author wishes to thank the National Research Foundation (South Africa) for postdoctoral funding that aided in the completion of this article.
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McKay, D. All aboard the U.S.S. New Zealand? Voyaging through the literary responses to the American ‘occupation,’ 1942–1944. Neohelicon 39, 321–335 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-012-0138-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-012-0138-9