World Battlefronts: Yanks in the Cannibal Isles

It was a relief to the soldiers in the bar of the Grand Pacific Hotel at Suva when Secretary of War Stimson announced last week that there were U.S. troops in the Fiji Islands. They had begun to worry about being legally admitted to this war. Not long ago a lugubrious major, shaking his head over his first highball after several weeks in the jungle, had observed: “We might go all the way through the war and nobody would ever know we’re here. Nobody but the Japs. The other day the Navy radio was checking its time with Greenwich, when Tokyo busted in and said: ‘Hey, you Yankees down there in Suva, your clock’s a minute slow.’ “

Aside from their anonymity, the U.S. troops in the Fijis were getting along very well. The British, led by a popular new Governor, had been extremely hospitable. The climate (average 77°) is delightful. The Fiji native, one of the world’s finest indolent characters, is happy, hospitable, courteous. He is an excellent singer and he sings almost all the time. He is also a superb sailor and navigator. The 19th-Century Chief Thakombau was the title character of Adolf Brewster’s King of the Cannibal Isles, and there have been cases of Fijis eating each other and missionaries, but the habit has died out.

The Fiji native is as black as his New Guinea cousin and wears the same unsanitary mop of fuzzy black hair, but usually shorter. He was the last of the Melanesians in that race’s eastward sweep across the Pacific. But the Fiji native is in danger of losing his majority on his islands. When the idle Fiji would not cultivate the sugar fields assiduously, the British went to India for recruits. That was about 65 years ago. So prodigiously do Indians breed that there are now 94,000 Indians to 102,000 Fijis, 2,000 Chinese, 5,000 Europeans, 4,000 half-castes and 2,000 Polynesians.

The Fiji Islands number 250, of which 80 are inhabited. They spread over 300 miles across the international dateline, so that it may be Thursday on one island and Friday on the next.

“Sambula vanaka” is the native greeting, meaning “God bless you,” and the shortened “bula” means “hello.” U.S. soldiers and grinning natives shout “bula” at each other whenever they meet. One day a corporal said “bula” to a black boy. Reply: “Bula, hell, I came over on the boat with you.”