War, Memory, and Culture. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2016. xii, 278 pp. (Maps, illustrations.) US$59.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8173-1884-0.
Back in the 1960s, one of my undergraduate anthropology professors, Robert McKnight, liked to speak of what he called anthropological “triangulation.” Specifically, he wanted to see work that would include Palauan, Japanese, and American viewpoints on Palauan social and cultural life, and I still recall diagrams he chalked on the board, illustrating what this process might look like. I have no reason to think Stephen Murray ever knew McKnight, but he fully realizes my teacher’s vision in this book.
The 1944 American invasion of Peleliu, the southernmost island in the Palauan archipelago, was an unmitigated disaster for everyone involved. It’s among World War II’s least-known major actions, but it remains etched in the consciousness of everyone involved in the battle, and their descendants. Its public obscurity notwithstanding, a good deal about the battle has been written by Americans and Japanese, both historians’ accounts and combatants’ memoirs. I have distinct recollections of watching the US Navy’s “Victory at Sea” television documentary series (1952–1953) as a child, and the scenes which lodged most deeply in my mind were undoubtedly those of marines with flame-throwers torching Japanese troops out of caves. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was Peleliu.
What’s been missing in all this outpouring is any consideration of what happened to the people of Peleliu itself. Murray, who first encountered Palau as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s and who subsequently wrote an anthropology PhD dissertation on this topic, has done an outstanding job of rectifying this. While his primary focus is on the islanders’ displacement during the battle, their subsequent return, and the complete devastation they found when they got home, he has managed to interweave analysis of not only of how Americans and Japanese, respectively, view the battle but of how entirely absent the Peleliu people have been in all these accounts. He has returned them.
I recall reading E.B. Sledge’s celebrated first-person account of the battle, With the Old Breed(New York: Random House, 1981), which he fought as a young marine, and wondering where the Palauans were while all this action was taking place, how they survived, and how they managed to re-establish their way of life following the war. Now I know that they had been removed to islands in the north, and that when they were finally able to return home they encountered conditions not unlike Gertrude Stein’s summary of returning to her hometown, “There’s no there there.”
Murray establishes all the many ways in which the island’s landscape and seascape were woven into the fabric of people’s lives. Because the lives of these individuals, families, and clan groups were all rooted in their natural world, it wasn’t merely that their history had been demolished, but that all the articulation points for ongoing social relations were erased. The Japanese and American veterans who wanted to commemorate their own losses on the island had virtually no interest in recognizing what they had done to the Palauans. They’ve visited the island and built monuments to celebrate their own sacrifices and remained oblivious to the disaster they wrought upon the islanders.
Lawrence Carucci, Lin Poyer, and Suzanne Falgout (The Typhoon of War, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000; Memories of War, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007) have reported on Micronesians’ accounts of what World War II did to them and their islands, and Geoffrey White and Lamont Lindstrom edited two volumes analyzing islanders’ stories about the war from throughout the island Pacific (Island Theater: Island Representations of World War II, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1989; Island Encounters: Black and White Memories of the Pacific War, Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1990). The literature on the war in the Pacific, as the combatants understand it, is almost infinite. But this book is to the best of my knowledge one of the very few works that gives us a full picture of how the decisions made by the warring parties played out in the continuing lives of the noncombatants. Documentaries about the devastation of war in Europe and Asia commonly portray streams of refugees driven from their homes, and the rubble that is all that is left of those homes. In this book we finally get something comparable for the island Pacific.
There is another very compelling aspect of this book that deserves mention. It is clear in retrospect that there was little if any need for US forces to take Peleliu. It could have been bypassed in the way that so many other spots were during the island-hopping campaign that drove toward the Japanese homeland. This was recognized by many at the time. But because so many lives were lost in the battle, officials believed they had to emphasize the victory’s strategic importance. Much the same can be said about the invasion of Iwo Jima, one of the most iconic battles of the Pacific War (Robert Burrell, The Ghosts of Iwo Jima, College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2006). The refusal of military and political leaders to acknowledge their vast mistakes, for fear of offending those who made the sacrifices and the families of their survivors is, I suppose, understandable. As Murray notes, “Knowledge that their lives were cut short elicits the need to believe they did not die in vain” (155). But it has the disastrous consequence of preserving the preposterous notion that a victorious military makes few mistakes, and this in turn conditions people to attribute much greater wisdom to leaders than they’ve truly earned. As one marine veteran Murray quotes put it, “That sort of thing does disservice to the men” (199). Each disaster, covered up, begets a series of newer disasters.
Everybody lost at Peleliu, and Murray does a remarkable job of making us understand why.
Glenn Petersen
City University of New York, New York, USA
pp. 641-643