This last week we watched the movie South Pacific. We have seen the movie before and also have seen it on Broadway. This DVD had an extra disk and as we watched it I became intrigued and downloaded a book about it. It is taken from the book Tales of the South Pacific written by James Michener. It was the first book he ever wrote and he wrote it while stationed on the island Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu. It was so fun to read about all this happening in our back yard. I had always heard about John F Kennedy being a war hero when his PT boat was shot out from under him and he got his entire crew to land. That was in the Solomon Islands in the area they called the Bottleneck in the movie and the Slot during the war. When someone told him he was a war hero and would receive a medal for it he told them that it was a totally involuntary act, they sunk his boat and he had no choice.
The small island Aoba off the coast of ES is his Bali Ha'i. (It means half of two I think.) Most of the characters in the movie are based on people that he come to know and love while living there. And they are not all from ES. He visited 40 islands during his WWII assignments. In the movie there is the lady named Bloody Mary. She was a real person and she was Tonkinese. I have found that Tonkin was the northern most part of Vietnam. In the 19th century it was protected by France and people from there were exported as indented servants and she was one of those. The coast watchers were real men who would track enemy movement in the waters around the islands and would report it to headquarters. Their live span was very short as the Japanese worked hard to find and destroy them.
Michener was not the first novelist to work from the islands. He said there were a group of men, he called them islomanes or nesomanics who are people that cannot get enough of the islands and who prefer to live here. People like Robert Louis Stevenson, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Jack London and himself. He told of an interesting experience he had.
He was going to New Caledonia to see Admire Halsey who was headquartered there. He said "the runway at Tontouta was none too long and ended at an unforgiving range of mountains. Even in good weather, landing was a challenge." He then goes on and describes landing during a thunderstorm which provoked sheer panic. He said just as they were to land on their first approach the pilot suddenly pulled up and out over the sea. A second approach was aborted like the first. On the third approach the pilot was able to sit the plane down on the slick runway and they stopped just short of the mountains. That night James could not sleep so he went back out to the runway and walked along it, wondering what he would do with the remained of his life. He loved what he was doing in the pacific as a young vagabond but he had no center, no goals. He decided: I'm going to live the rest of my life as if I were a great man...I will erase envy and cheap thoughts and tackle objectives of the moment." He said he did not say "I'm going to be a writer" but determined that he could do better with the writing he was doing on the reports and that he could write better than most of what he read.
From then on he would write every night with the goal of recording what he saw simply and honestly. He used the people he had met and the experiences he had had to form the characters and events of the book.
It was a pretty fun thing to learn that this area was such an important part of WWII. It is amazing to me also that there were great battles on some of the very smallest of islands. Kiribati is one of them.
When the war ended the US was then left with the problem of what to do with all the equipment that had been shipped over to support the efforts. They offered it to the French to purchase but the French knew that they were not going to move it all back so they had no incentive to purchase what was going to be left there anyway. Quoting from the book: "They lined up all the jeeps, bulldozers, ambulances and other heavy equipment near the Segond Channel. The line stretched for three-quarters of a mile. Ignitions were switched on. Bricks were placed on accelerators as the equipment rambled down a ramp into water forty feet deep. Desks and office furniture were also dumped there...Later the area became known as Million Dollar Point, and to this day it is a major diving attraction on Santo."
Seems like government waste has always been an issue!
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