At the next stop, farther along, we lost four more enlisted men, and at the third stop a young second lieutenant bade us farewell and gave his Samoan girl a big hello. Out to the far end of his run Samosila drove his truck, depositing young swains along the way. At the last stop we dropped only one. Samosila parked his truck there and said: ‘We stay here tonight. Johnson friend to my sister,’ and for the first time I slept in one of the gracious Samoan fales, spotlessly clean with neat woven walls to be rolled down when the time came to sleep.
Samosila’s sister was a delightful girl, about nineteen I would guess or maybe younger, and she had met her man, Johnson, when her brother brought him home for a Samoan dinner of fish and coconut milk. She and the American had become close friends, with Johnson bringing many things from the PX for her family, and he, like all the others, was making her fale his home, with the approval of her parents and certainly of Samosila. In the morning, refreshed and happy, Johnson climbed into the truck and Samosila took the wheel with me a trifle bewildered beside him. This time when we stopped sleepy-eyed Americans climbed down from the fale platforms and headed for the truck. At seven sharp our truck and the other two were at the gates and the day’s work began.
Samosila informed me that a family whose father was an official of some standing on the island had taken note of me on my various trips and had concluded that I was a responsible officer, since I was a full Navy lieutenant; he wondered if Samosila would bring me around to his fale to meet his daughter, Matua. When I agreed I found that his fale was one of the best and neatest and that Matua was one of the most attractive girls on the island, about eighteen and as stately as a young queen, which in essence she was.
Samosila gave me a remarkable message from Matua’s father that I can only repeat in the words in which it was delivered to me: ‘Matua not happy. All girls have good American boys. Many girls gonna have babies, strong American babies. Good for Samoa, good for Matua. But Matua all alone. Why you not stop by our fale till time you go?’
That was the proposal delivered with the aplomb and dignity used in inviting a guest to a formal dinner, and I was flabbergasted. Since an invitation like that was indeed a rare thing, it merited a response that was totally candid; ‘As a boy I had mumps—lumps in my neck. As a result I have reason to believe that I can’t have babies.’ They understood what I was saying and there was a profound silence, but then the father spoke: ‘Samosila your friend. He say you fine man. No matter about baby. We like to have American here, like all others. You stay.’ And that was how I happily learned the rules of life within a Samoan fale, with its latticework and woven ceilings and the majestic coconut palm pillars that held it up. If I speak well of Samoa and its people, it is because I lived for a while in one of the fales beside that glorious, ocean-swept coral road leading from the little airstrip to Apia.
It should be obvious that I had now compromised myself so completely that I had sacrificed any right to criticize a lovelorn general who had used government funds to build a first-class highway from the north side, where he was stationed, to the south side, where Aggie Grey’s sister lived. So I approached the problem of the road with apprehension and a good deal of confusion. But with Samosila’s help I started my investigation.
We drove east from the airfield toward Apia as if heading back to Aggie Grey’s, but at a point somewhere near the halfway mark we turned sharply to the right—that is, toward the southern shore of the island—and we were soon on a fine road among low hills cut by shallow ravines. It was obvious that the American engineers who had built the road had spent on it a good deal of study, ingenuity and money, for it climbed easily through rather difficult terrain until it reached a height from which I could look down upon one of the most serene sights I would see in the islands. It was a half-moon bay protected by a small reef and lined with palm trees, almost an artist’s vision of a haven from storms, and around its perimeter stood some half dozen fales of better than average construction, one of which had attached to it a kind of Western addition. That, I was told, was the house of Aggie’s sister, the one to whom the general came on his visits. He was remembered in the other fales as a fine man who had brought many good things to this side of the island, which had previously been ignored by the British government. Why Aggie’s sister had settled in this once remote hiding place I never fathomed, and after my inspection of the area and the road leading to it I decided what I would say in my report: ‘If the Japanese had invaded the north side of Upolu and had tried to attack the south side, this road would have been quite valuable to the American defenses.’
As I made this note I thought of the great story Alexander King had circulated in Greenwich Village about the impecunious student from India who cadged one free meal after another from him, always paying for them by reciting as he left, well fed, a short blessing in Hindi. One night, irritated by the fact that his Indian guest never offered anything other than the mumbled prayer, King demanded to know what the words meant. Which was: ‘May this house be safe from tigers.’ When King remonstrated that that was a silly statement to make in Greenwich Village in return for all the good food the young man had eaten, the Indian asked: ‘Well, have you been bothered by tigers lately?’ If the Japanese had invaded, that road would have been of great value.
Meanwhile the Catholic bishop was holding vast prayer services in Apia, so that when I returned to Aggie’s rooming house I found all rooms taken by the visiting faithful from other islands. But Aggie found me quarters in a fale occupied by the family of one of her ablest singers, a young woman of great beauty whose younger sister was in a state of depression. The great Catholic conclave was to end with the laymen giving a huge ball supervised by Aggie and her musicians, and if there was anything on earth the young girls and ladies of Samoa loved more than a gala I never discovered it.
But so many longed to attend that the dancing area would have exploded with saronged and swaying bodies if Aggie and the bishop, working together, hadn’t devised one of the most effective weeding-out procedures I had ever heard of. They announced throughout Upolu and Savaii: ‘Only those girls will be admitted to the ball who are known to live in the European style.’ The question then became: ‘Who’s a European?’ Englishmen were, of course, and Frenchmen too; so also were white Americans. But trouble came with the numerous Samoans, where distinctions were more difficult to make. The girls who sang and danced at Aggie’s were obviously European, and so were the typists at the stores and those who worked indoors at the American base and at the PX. But then definitions fell into a gray area until the bishop solved the problem with a judgment Solomonic in its fairness and ease of enforcement: ‘Any girl will be considered European if she wears shoes.’ Small wonder the bishop was so highly regarded throughout his island see.
It was fortunate that I had stopped first in Samoa among the Polynesian islands because it was there that I not only formed a friendship with Aggie Grey, a friendship that would last throughout our lives, but also was inducted into the joys of Polynesian life. And what were they? Singing, enjoying the wonders of nature, sitting around at night swapping yarns, lovemaking, organizing a feast or a gala at the merest pretense, accepting one’s fellows pretty much as they are, and exhibiting a warmth that nourished the heart. Nowhere were all these more in evidence than the place to which I traveled next, Bora Bora, a magical island belonging to France and situated some hundred and fifty miles northwest of Tahiti.
To put it quite simply, Bora Bora is the most beautiful island in the world. Geologically it consists of a series of concentric circles: first an almost perfect coral reef about ten miles in diameter, with deep blue tempestuous ocean waves on the outside, lime-green placid water on the inside; then the island itself, a masterpiece of dark green, almost circular in form but broken by deeply indented bays defined by tall palm trees swaying in the breeze, which seems to be constant; and in what might be called the center of the island a gigantic, dark pillar of rock, the basalt plug of an ancient volcano whose mo
re fragile sides have broken and eroded away. The three components—reef, island, volcano—are so perfectly placed and so harmonious in their relationship that they seem to have been designed by some master artist. To come back to Bora Bora at the close of day after a long trip in a small boat and to see the setting sun illuminate the volcanic tower, massive and brooding in gold, is to see the South Pacific at its unforgettable best.
The people in those war years were as attractive as their island, the most natural and uninhibited Polynesians of all, the ones who regularly won the wild dancing competition held in Tahiti to celebrate Bastille Day on July 14. One event at that riotous celebration summarizes the Bora Bora attitude. In the boxing tournament I helped the Bora Bora men, for I was a Bora Boran at heart, and we had a powerful young fighter who had a good chance of winning if we could keep him under control and prevent him from flailing his arms about to no purpose. Explained our coach: ‘Our problem is to get him drunk enough so he’s brave but keep him sober enough so he has a rough idea of what he’s doing.’ I would often think of that dilemma in the weeks I worked on the island.
For I was working. I was writing an account of the amazing events that had transpired since that day in 1942 when a small American troop transport had slipped through the lone opening in the reef to land an armed contingent. Its job was to defend the island should the Japanese, whose fleet had unfettered sway over the Pacific as a result of the Pearl Harbor disaster, decide to occupy the island. Should the Japanese succeed in invading, the situation could become serious, especially since many of the leading citizens in Papeete (on Tahiti), the capital of French Polynesia, had openly proclaimed their allegiance to Vichy France, under the shameful leadership of the pro-Nazi general Pétain. In the early days of America’s war against Japan the planning had been quite open: ‘We’ll let the Vichy men hold Tahiti. We’ll hold Bora Bora and neutralize them.’
But others were writing of the delicate negotiations that prevented the Vichy forces from holding Tahiti; I was not privy to those records and had no justification in even voicing an opinion; my job was to summarize what had happened on our island of Bora Bora then and now, when our troops were on the verge of rioting if they were forced to go home.
The airstrip for the island was unique: a long, beautiful coral pathway, wide enough to accept a DC-3, built of shimmering white coral that almost blinded the eye. It was located not on the island itself, which was too hilly to permit a strip, but far out on the fringing reef. Landing at Bora Bora was the best possible introduction to the island; when I first came, as we flew in low over the dark Pacific, I saw to my left the towering basaltic pillar from the old volcano and the lime-green beauty of the lagoon, then there was a sudden drop and the crunch of tires on the packed coral. I was in the heartland of Polynesia.
No sooner had the plane come to a halt than I was greeted by two men for whom I would always feel a deep affection and about whom I would write not a favorable report but a glowing one. The first was a United States Navy lieutenant, whom I shall call Hazzard because I once promised him that I would never use his real name in view of the unusual facts he knew I would have to relate. He was about thirty-five, tall, nice-looking but not handsome, a bit overweight from good living on the island without much to do, slightly balding, with a big round face showing almost bovine contentment. Lieutenant Hazzard was a happy man and he wanted those serving under him to be the same.
He was accompanied by a slim, handsome French official a few years older than himself, M. Francis Sanford—his real name—one of the sharpest, most trustworthy and congenial colonial administrators I would ever meet. At that stage he was merely a former schoolteacher who, because he spoke English, had been appointed to serve as liaison with the Americans on this remote island. He was not well regarded, I would learn, by the Vichy partisans in Papeete, but he trod such a meticulous line between keeping both the Americans and the French happy that he was embraced by both sides. Since I shall have a good many complimentary things to say about Sanford and the reader may suspect, understandably, that I had been bedazzled by a sharp political manipulator, I must reveal that in later years this clever schoolteacher became the political leader of all French Polynesia, a task in which he proved so effective that he was elected to the Parliament in Paris as an honored member of the Senate, where he fought for a sensible colonial policy. Upon his return to the Pacific, he became governor of French Polynesia. Sanford was a born winner, and I am proud to say that I detected this at first sight.
Before the week was out I think I understood both his immediate tactic and his long-range strategy: to maintain friendship with the Americans now, but to persuade them in the future to leave behind as much heavy equipment as possible so that when peace came and the Americans were gone, they would abandon the infrastructure for a new way of life on the island; to accomplish this he would resort to imaginative strategies—mere theft was routine.
Perched in the rear of a small boat between these two superior men, I sped over the glassy waters of the lagoon and late in the afternoon stepped ashore to meet for the first time the rebellious enlisted men of Bora Bora. At first sight they seemed a decent lot, under thirty, reasonably trim, courteous in their attitude toward me, even though they knew I might do them damage if I didn’t like what I saw, and about as typical a group of young fellows as one could have found. I detected no sign of tension, no untoward fear of their commanding officer, and not a thing about which I might be suspicious. Unpacking my gear in the quarters to which I had been assigned and testing the typewriter they had been ordered to provide me with, I thought: This is going to be just a little more complex than I’d suspected. But when the yeoman assigned to help me with my paperwork while I was there came to lead me to the mess, I saw nothing unusual in his attitude nor anything suspicious in the dining area, where the food was good but not spectacular and the deportment pretty much in accordance with Navy routine. But if I was surveying the men critically, they were doing the same with me; I doubt, however, that I was revealing anything other than my general bewilderment.
When my yeoman suggested that I might like to attend the seven o’clock movie, the big event on the island, he betrayed his eagerness to see it; so as not to disappoint him, I assented. We walked to a nearby structure, part tent, part Quonset, in which nearly ninety chairs had been placed in orderly rows, and there the forty or fifty sailors who made up the cadre had gathered, each sitting primly beside an empty chair, which meant that no two sailors were seated side by side. I could not guess the reason for this. I also noticed that the first two rows contained no one.
At seven a bugle blew, all stood, and down the sloping center aisle marched Lieutenant Hazzard in a freshly pressed uniform with eyes majestically fixed straight ahead. When he was about to take his seat, he spread his arms outward and we sat down too. Then the bugle blew again and here came the miracle of Bora Bora. Into the hall marched in stately procession a group of people, including a handsome young woman, about twenty-three I judged, and rather large, who followed the path that Hazzard had taken, but she did not sit beside him. Deferentially she sat in the middle of the row behind him, while her entourage, consisting of her mother, an aunt, an uncle and her younger sister, took seats on either side of her. When that was done, the gates were thrown open, as it were, and into the hall came a flood of the liveliest young girls I had seen in a long time, who joyously took seats beside their chosen sailors, after which several dozen young men, brothers of the girls perhaps, filed in to take the rest of the empty seats. Now the Bora Bora movie could begin.
I shall never forget that show, and as you shall see, I would have good reason to remember it. Flying Down to Rio was a Dolores Del Rio fluff movie, with a story line that no one could follow, but it was saved for the islanders by a comedy trio called The Three Greeks, whose childish antics were keyed exactly to their tastes. They also cheered when hundreds of chorus girls were shown dancing on the wings of a score of airplanes that were supposed to be in fl
ight. For the American sailors there was the thrill of seeing Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing together for the first time; they were not yet stars in that early film, but even in their brief appearance they were showstoppers, floating on air and making the big hall throb with their vitality.
The effect of the show was somewhat spoiled by the tendency of the audience to anticipate comedy bits by starting to laugh, and this became so annoying that I asked my yeoman: ‘Have they seen this picture before?’ and he said: ‘About a dozen times.’ I was to see it six times, and always with the greatest delight, for there was really nothing else to do in the early part of the evening, and like the sailors I came to relish the scenes with which I was becoming familiar because I could now appreciate the clever ways in which the actors set them up. The Three Greeks knew how to use to humorous effect the old vaudeville shticks to make us all laugh as heartily on the sixth repetition as on the first. If I were asked today to list my all-time favorite movies, the test for inclusion would be this: Did I enjoy this movie as much as I did Flying Down to Rio?
We had two other films on the island, Westerns, which the islanders loved, and each played four or five times while I was in residence, but to me no horse, however handsome, could be as compelling as the new stars, Fred and Ginger, displaying their magic.
At the end of the film, the bugle blew again; Lieutenant Hazzard rose, strode up the ramp, looking sternly ahead, with the stately young woman walking behind him, and her family behind her. When they were outside, the bugle blew again and the rest of us were free to leave. It was about nine o’clock when we returned to the soft night air that made Bora Bora so delightful, and I noticed that the situation was like that at the air base in Samoa: Here almost all the enlisted men left the base accompanied by their laughing and chattering vahines.