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Australasia and the Pacific Islands, Book Reviews

Volume 90 – No. 4

MOTHERS’ DARLINGS OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC: The Children of Indigenous Women and U.S. Servicemen, World War II | Edited by Judith A. Bennett and Angela Wanhalla

Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016. xxiv, 379 pp. (Maps, illustrations.) US$65.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-5152-1.


There are a lot of accounts of the Pacific War, but they are not concerned with topics such as the love relationships between indigenous women and wartime servicemen. No one has been interested enough to ask questions about the children born from those relationships. While these children and their mothers remain absent from the official military record, Judith A. Bennett and Angela Wanhalla have cared enough to ask the question: What happened to the children who were left behind by American servicemen based in the South Pacific between January 1942 and the end of the Pacific War?

Each chapter of this book provides an answer specific to the communities and families of one island where American military bases were established. By the end of 1941, the Unites States began to send servicemen to the South Pacific in order to stave off the Japanese offensive and organize a counter-offensive. Although allies from the Netherlands, France, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand also served in the Pacific, this book only concerns the American servicemen, particularly those who never met their children, born after their departure. And it only focuses on the South Pacific, leaving the North, East, West, and Central command areas out of the scope.

The structure of the book reflects the chronology of the arrival of the US forces, with a few exceptions. It begins with the chapter about the children of American servicemen in Bora Bora, the second to be occupied, followed by the chapter on Western Samoa, although that was the fifth base to be established. The subsequent chapters follow the series of American occupations: New Caledonia, New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), Wallis Island, Tonga, Fiji, New Zealand, Solomon Islands, Cook Islands, and Gilbert Islands, totalling eleven chapters plus an introduction and epilogue.

The style oscillates constantly between the detached prose of historiography and the engaging voice of storytelling. For example, in the introduction, Bennett writes in the first person, telling an anecdote about a Fijian man searching for his American father, which gave her the original inspiration to research this book. On the other hand, the central question of this book is a genuinely historical one: Why have these histories been ignored? In answering this question, the book is not informed by archives only. Rather, long excerpts of interviews intersperse the narration; individual life stories intersect with the historical records; and much space is dedicated to the representation of emotions. For instance, recurrent reference is made to the sense of abandonment that Pacific families felt, and the healing that resulted from discovering that many fathers did not leave out of their own initiative, but rather were forced to do so by the military laws.

The index provides quantitative evidence of the prominence of the emotive theme. The most recurring words of the book are: children, fathers, marriage, women, and emotions. The reason for this insistence on emotions seems to be found, on the one hand, in the societal purpose of the research. Research participants have apparently gained in health as a consequence of “seeking and sometimes finding relatives” as well as from learning that “they were not the only ones with such wartime legacy” (xiii). On the other hand, emotions emerge from the historiographical salience of the theme of emotions. “Love,” Bennett writes, “is something historians rarely speak of” (23), presumably even less in the sub-field of military history. This book seeks to counter the tendency to portray intimate wartime relationships with indigenous women as essentially matters that involved no feelings. By representing the love of mothers, children, and fathers, this book succeeds in carving a space in the extant historiography for the forgotten subjects of the Pacific War.


Rodolfo Maggio
University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

pp. 880-881


Last Revised: April 23, 2018
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