This is the story of the Pacific and its people, of the peaceful sea and the lands and lives it touches and their meaning to us and to the generations to come. The Pacific story presented by the National Broadcasting Company as a public service and dedicated to a fuller understanding of the vast Pacific Basin. This broadcast series comes to you as another feature of the NBC Inter-American University of the Air with drama of the past and present and commentary by Owen Lathamore, authority on the Pacific and director of the School of International Relations, Johns Hopkins University. The Islands of the Pacific. Japan stands to strive the islands of the Southwest Pacific. Here, the United Nations are battering against the outer defenses of our island empire. Here, the Japanese have converted the larger islands into formidable forcelesses and the smaller islands into fortified outposts. The islands which had so long been isolated have become a part of the global war and give promise of playing an increasingly important role in the Pacific era to come. So many islands dot the Pacific that their exact number is unknown. Guests have been made that there are 30,000. First human inhabitants of the mid-Pacific islands were the Polynesians, the most daring deep sea voyagers and explorers the world has ever known. The time has come, oh Taiwan. This is a Polynesian weatherman. The gentle winds are blowing up. From the southeast. Firm, strong winds from the southeast, oh Taiwan. Are the hurricanes past? Yes, the hurricanes are safely past. So also are the variable winds of the summer, and now that autumn nears, the favorable winds from the southeast have come. We have waited long for them. The time has come to sail. The ship is ready, oh Taiwan. Well provisioned. We must have ample provisions, Captain. Food enough for 60, enough for the voyage to the island over the horizon is already stowed aboard. You have food for the children and the women as well as for the men? As much as our great ship can carry, oh Taiwan. We must prepare for any fortune. The dried and cooked food prepared these many months while the ship was building have been wrapped in bundles and stowed. There is cooked breadfruit and sweet potatoes, dried fish and shellfish, green coconuts for both food and drink, calabashes and bamboo joints filled with water. That is good. To stock the new island over the horizon, we have chickens and pigs and dogs, and these we can eat if our food runs out before we sight land. Then we will sail at dawn past the word and see that the ship is ready and nothing is forgotten so that we will... Throughout the night, the Polynesians prepared for their migration to the islands over the horizon. The captain as the overseer gave the ship a final inspection. The ship was a great double canoe, more than 100 feet long, joined by platforms and with deck houses built on top. Towering up from the canoes were masts with sails of plated pandanus fiber, and both canoes were equipped with paddles, balers and stone anchors. At dawn, without compass or charts, the Polynesians sailed into the open ocean. The clouds are descending upon us, oh Taiwan. Then we shall not have the stars to guide us tonight. Not tonight. It will be black. How long will these clouds lie upon us? We shall not see the stars to them tomorrow night, but perhaps we shall see them the night after. Captain, can we hold our course without the stars? We know the steady roll of the waves before the winds, oh Taiwan. By them we shall be guided. And when the clouds have cleared, the stars will again color our way. In two days the clouds had lifted, and leaning down on the Polynesian emigrants on the great expanse of the Pacific were the stars they knew so well. They sailed through the nights and days. Help me, help me pull in this fish. Oh it must be a big one, he is struggling. Here it comes, into the boat, get it, get it. I have it, I have it. What a fat one, what a big one. Rain, rain, we must be thankful, catch all of it, we may have use for it. Help me here, pull this water into this calabash. Ah this is a gift, we must lose none of it. The days slipped away and the experienced Polynesians sailed directly on their course. Each thing they saw had meaning to them. There, there, there is a piece of driftwood, get it. Yes sir, stand clear while I throw this line. The driftwood told them they were nearing land. Every eye scanned the sky and the sea. That bird, see it, see that bird? Yes, yes it is a plover. We have seen birds of that kind before, we cannot be far from land. Day and night they sailed. At night they studied the stars, which they had long since come to know. They knew the various constellations and their positions in the sky at different seasons. They knew the winds and the sea itself. Captain, over there on the horizon, you see that? What is it? That color on the clouds, that faint color, see it? The clouds are strangely different, yes. It is green in color, pale, pale green. A reflection? Yes, a reflection captain. I see it, I see it, they're far, far away on the horizon. Yes, I see it now. That is land, land hidden over the horizon. Land? You see land? Yes, yes, there oh high one, there, see the green reflection on those low lying clouds? Yes, yes I see it, land, that is our destination. From island to island the Polynesians spread, establishing their own society and culture. To the north they spread to Hawaii. In the east to Easter Island. In the west to New Zealand. Here the white man found them. Many of the islands were found by Magellan, the first white man to cross the Pacific. Scores were found by Captain Cook at the time of the American Revolution. American whalers put in for water and supplies that still others. The western nations came. Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France, Germany, the United States, Britain, and the islands of the Pacific were brought into the orbit of world politics, world conflict. At the time the United States was fighting its civil war over the issue of slavery, the same issue was taking form in the islands of the Pacific. Here is where we will establish our cotton plantation. This is Captain the Honorable Robert Towns, a merchant of Sydney, Australia. We will call this plantation Townsville. This will be an excellent location sir, here near Brisbane. Oh ideal for growing cotton. I was not thinking of that sir. That's all that need concern us. As foreman I must think of securing labor. The ample labor available, immigrants? The white man cannot stand to work here in tropical Australia Captain Towns, not plantation work at any rate. You can use islanders. There are not enough of them here. Well then we must get them. There are plenty of islanders available in the manor. Ships were fitted out to make calls on the islands and to bring back workers for the plantations of Australia and the Teegee Islands. They dropped anchor off the islands and waited for the islanders to come out in boats. Look at them coming out in boats Captain. There is a good lot of them Mr. Gryson. Ah and look at all those standing there on the beach watching us. We must give no sign that will make them suspicious. I've warned every last man of the crew. Everything's ready. The hatches are open. All of them sir. And the tins of biscuits are down in the holes in plain view. Make no false moves and be in no hurry. You understand Mr. Gryson? I do sir. I'll have a man here re-church. I'll give you a signal and then be answerable about it. Aye sir. With any sort of luck we should be... Where shipy comes! That's one of the islanders in that closest boat. What did he say sir? I couldn't make it out. He said something about shipy. Where shipy comes! He said where shipy come. I'll answer him. Missionary shipy! Missionary shipy! Missionary shipy! I understand. They don't watch me. Aye. They're coming up along the side in their boat. Give me a hand. Aye sir. Beloved! Not the kitchen cleaner out on their side. Both of them. Aye aye sir. Come aboard. Come aboard, missionary shipy. Missionary shipy! Now there's three. Four in that first boat. They're coming up on the boat again. Aye sir. And that first boat, they're coming up over the side. Give me a hand, folks, out there! Aye, aye, aye, sir! All right, up you come! Easy there! Easy! There's the first one coming aboard. You've warned the men to make them welcome. Aye, sir. Good-o. There's six, eight, nine folks coming alongside. Watch yourself. We want as many as we can get. They're coming up on deck, one after another. Aye. Come on, get on with it. Go on! Look, the men are instructed to make them feel at home. Ah, they've spotted the open tins of biscuits down in the old. Aye, sir. That they are, sir. Are you going to get them singing hymns this time? May not be necessary this time. They've taken our word for it with a missionary ship. They keep right on coming. Aye. And they'll follow the others right down through the edges to the biscuits like a line of ants. I guess that's about all of them, sir. Just a few stragglers. Aye. Those last two over there, they're stalling. They look suspicious. Yeah. They're not going down through the edge. They'll warn the others if they see anything. Looking at that. Will we wait? No. Betten down the edges. Aye, aye, sir. Betten down the edges! Betten down the edges! Come on, get on with it. Those two islanders on deck. Spread them! Spread those islanders, Andy! Spread them! Then let them get away. They're making for the bouts. Look out, sir. I'll fill that one with this belaying thing. Yes! You with him? Now you below there. Look down there at me and try to get over the side. I'll get him, sir! This will cut those two men below. Mr. Gleison, I think we can engage them. Aye, aye, sir. Stand by the captain to our banquets. All squad shall up. Aye, aye, sir. Give me every inch of candy share. Set the banquets under the canvassels. Aye, aye, sir. All together, mighty. The anchor's up. She's heading into the wind, sir. Get up on the melt there, you beggars. Come on! It's the islanders below deck, sir. You know what to do, Mr. Gleison. I do, sir, but it's like they could kill some of them. We can't have them screaming like this. Silence, sirs! The below deck's having! Aye, aye, sir. Hear you? Give me your hand down over the side. All right, ease him over the side. Easy. All right, come on, take it easy now. Take it easy. Off of them now. All right, you. That's well, that's well. Up a little, up. So I can reach the hole in the bulkhead. All right. Now, hand me that pistol. Give it to sir. Got it. I'll stop that squawking in there. Well, that silenced them, sir. But I'm afraid we've killed some of them, shooting into the mass of them like that. Wait ten minutes. We'll open the edges, drag out the dead ones, and throw them overboard. We've no time to waste. We've got to get back to Australia. Blackbirding. The practice of kidnapping islanders and taking them to work on plantations continued for years. The slave traffic brought reprisals from many islanders who clubbed white men to death, ate them, and sent pieces to all the many villages. Murders and atrocities multiplied until the traffic was at last brought to a halt. Through this practice, the islanders came to know the white men. The white man had his day in the islands of the South Pacific until 1914, World War I. Then the shadow of Japan fell across them. The Japanese have seized the Caroline Islands, the Mariana Islands, the Gilbert Islands, and the Marshall Islands from Germany. The Japanese have already started occupation. In the high councils of the Allies, the next Japanese step came to life. Of course, Japan came into the war against Germany through her treaty with Britain. That is true. But was it not understood that Japan would diminish the Japanese if it was not for the war against Japan? The Japanese were not the only ones who understood that Japan would limit itself to, well, certain naval actions. That was the understanding, was it not? Yes. Chasing German submarines in the Pacific. And the purpose of that was to restrict the areas of Japanese stay? But now Japan has seized the Caroline Islands, the Marianas, and the Marshalls. Japan has assured Britain that it has no territorial ambitions. Then why has Japan approached Moscow for assurances that Russia will support the claims for these islands at the peace table? Japan has asked Britain for the same assurances. And France. And Italy. It can only mean that Japan means to keep those islands. Japan has approached each of the Allied nations. It is as if she were demanding these assurances, as the Paris have remained in the war against Germany. That is precisely what she is demanding. While we are busy in Europe. Gentlemen, this problem must be resolved at the peace table. We are engaged on the continent, and at this same time... At the close of World War I, the League of Nations gave Japan only a mandate over the islands, instead of out-and-out annexation. Japan was in honor bound not to fortify them. But years later... Hello. Hello. Hello. Yeah. Did you get the name of my paper? Come on. Come on. Don't spend that phone all day. I'll go on and keep your shirt on, will you? No, no, no. I was talking to this guy behind me. Yeah. Now look. Here's the cable. Look, bud. This is the only phone available here. Step the love of Mike. Will you keep quiet? No, no, no. Now listen. Now here's the cable. Never mind about saving words. Uh... Matsuoka has torpedoed the League of Nations. Matsuoka just walked out with the entire Japanese delegation. Everybody is stunned. The Japanese made it clear that even though they are holding those South Pacific Islands under a League of Nations mandate, if the League should try to withdraw the mandate, that Japan will hold the islands by force. Get that? Yeah. Yeah. And send that cable out fast as you can. Don't stir the horn. Throughout the world, political observers were alive to the meaning of this Japanese coup. You know what it amounts to. Japan's defying the League of Nations. She's defying the world. The League took the hint and didn't even discuss the possibility of withdrawal. What could it do? Well, it did this much. It didn't commit itself to the idea that it could not withdraw the mandate. That just means that the question is still wide open and that it will crop up later. The only way anybody's ever going to get those islands away from Japan is to take them away. Why do you say that? What do you think Japan has been doing in those islands all these years since World War I? He doesn't permit anybody to go there. While the seeds of World War II were ripening, the islands of Micronesia were being transformed into as much a part of the Japanese Empire as Yokohama or Kyoto. For years, even while Japan was ostensibly at peace with the world, travelers who tried to secure visas... I'd like to get a visa to visit the Carolina Islands. Oh, so sorry. No visa for the Carolina Islands are available. Well, I'm sort of a world traveler, a globe-trotter, and I'd like to get out of there. I understand, but it is impossible. So sorry. Japan closed the door of these islands to the world. But some information about them did leak out. Truk is perhaps the biggest naval base in the Pacific outside of Pearl Harbor. It's in the Carolina Islands, and it's a natural naval base if there ever was one. It is surrounded by high, rocky islands, and it has a lagoon 40 miles wide. Here at Truk, the Japanese have built naval installations. And that is the largest of the islands. It is 410 miles east of Truk. It has a protected anchorage below a cliff 900 feet high. In this anchorage, American whalers used to put in for water from the streams and the valleys. And around this anchorage, on the north side of the island, the Japanese have built their naval installations. Japan has fortified an entire line of islands. The Japanese call this line their lifeline to the south. By this they mean the defense of Asia. And behind this line and the islands to the north, the Japanese plan to build their empires into the greatest power on earth. Japan had so well entrenched herself behind this, her great wall, that in September 1941, less than three months before Pearl Harbor, we are acting only in self-defense. This is Japanese Rear Admiral Sosa. You Americans are straitening your strategic positions in the Pacific to block Japan's seaborn trade and eventually to throttle Japan. What positions do you refer to, Admiral Sosa? Hawaii, the Abbas, Guam, and the Abbas. But it will make no difference. You don't think the United States is going to attack Japan? Japan is now defended solidly along 4,000 nautical miles by various strategic systems which would be extremely costly to break through. Then Japan has fortified the islands of Micronesia. You have advanced bases in Pearl Harbor, Manila, and Singapore. True. But in case of an emergency, all of your advanced bases would be deprived of their value before reinforcements could be sent to Japan. Reinforcements could be sent. If in spite of this, reinforcements should be sent by land or sea, the Japanese Army or Navy would only have to lie in wait to destroy them as they come. Yes, but Admiral Sosa, all this is on the assumption that Japan and America must go to war. No matter what route, the American Navy may choose the strategic position of Japan and our war of defense scattered all over the seas of East Asia enables our empire to defend or attack in any direction. Music The islands of the Pacific, the untold thousands of islands so long isolated from the world, have become a part of the global war. The thousands of islands have become fortresses of steel and promised to be stepping stones to the greater era in the Pacific that lies ahead. The importance of these numberless islands to the war effort is daily becoming more apparent. And here to discuss their significance to us is Owen Lathamore, authority on the Pacific and director of the School of International Relations, Johns Hopkins University. Mr. Lathamore. Up to now we have been talking in the Pacific story about the lands around the Pacific, the great countries with many millions of people. Today we are concerned with the islands far out in the Pacific itself, not the big islands and island groups like the Philippines and Netherlands India and Hawaii, but the thousands of little and tiny islands that have scattered across the widest waters of the vast Pacific. These islands have never been very real to Americans. Few people now remember what Robert Louis Stevenson wrote about the South Sea Islands. A generation ago, Jack London used them as the setting for some of his most romantic tales of adventure about explorers and plantation owners and mutinous plantation laborers captured from savage headhunting tribes. Martin and Oza Johnson, before they became famous for their films about big game hunting in Africa, made some of their early travel thrillers down in the islands. But all that seems very far away and unreal and different from the Pacific islands in which young Americans from your hometown and mine are fighting and dying, not for adventure and romance, but as part of the most terrible war in history, which is reaching into every home in America. What are American soldiers and sailors and marines finding down there? Besides war and japs and malaria and dysentery, what are the little Pacific islands like and the peoples of the islands? These islands have been part of the great gamble of empire building and power politics ever since the 18th century, when America consisted of 13 colonies along the Atlantic coast. But they were never the blue chips that were pushed out on the table when the big bets were laid. They were just not big enough in terms of land or people or resources. In most of them, there were not enough people to provide labor on a large scale. In many of them, the people fought savagely to escape being forced to labor on plantations. Consequently, the islands have largely been left to the enterprise of individuals from the civilized countries, without much planned development by the governments of the great powers. An island or an island group for which one country would hesitate to fight another could often provide good money-making opportunities for individuals or corporations. It only needed a handful of managers and overseers in charge of unskilled native labor to produce thousands of tons of coconut oil from plantations on hundreds of little islands that nobody ever heard of. We are proud of our superior civilization, but on the whole, the record of our civilization in the Pacific islands is something to make us pause and consider our responsibilities as well as our achievements. The white man's burden was once a romantic phrase, but there is an ugly side to it. The white man has often himself been a burden on the shoulders of the people he has conquered and exploited. In large measure, this was due to the heedless and lusty way in which men made use of new instruments of power, like cannon and steam-driven vessels. When new lands and islands were discovered and new peoples who had no power to resist, the discoverers thought first of how much they could grab and get away with, how they could get rich quick. It reminds you of the ancient gag about the Pilgrim Fathers landing and discovering the Indians in North America. They first fell on their knees and then on the Aborigines. Even religious and God-fearing men had standards for the behavior of civilized men toward other civilized men, but much lower standards for behavior toward uncivilized men. It was a long time before we began to have what you might call a collective conscience about the consequences of our actions and the responsibilities of civilized men collectively toward uncivilized societies collectively. For a long time, the peoples of the South Seas were fair game for anyone who had the power to seize and to hold. No one had, and no one in those days could be expected to have, a sense of social responsibility. Take, for example, the diseases which the white men brought to the Pacific. Many people still act as though good health or disease were nothing more than the good luck or bad luck of the individual. The social idea of health control is quite recent. A lot of diseases that we think quite unimportant, like measles or the common cold, have been deadly scourges in the Pacific Islands because they never existed before the white men came and the people had no resistance. Take just one example. According to the Smithsonian Institution, as late as 1875, an epidemic of measles killed 40,000 people in Fiji, 40% of the population. We are now on the threshold of a new time. No one can soberly doubt that Chiang Kai-shek of China spoke for the conscience of the world when he said that after the war the world must have a single standard of freedom. Some people are still not civilized enough to have full freedom, but that only puts the challenge up to us. We cannot legalize a permanent double standard of freedom and servitude. The problem is to raise the standard of those who are not free until they can undertake the responsibilities of freedom. America accomplished this in the Philippines. More recently, the Russians have accomplished it in the Arctic and in Central Asia, where in one generation primitive and semi-primitive peoples have been made literate, civilized, modern. That is our real problem for the future. Islands in the wide Pacific can be important as bases for air routes, but in the long run they are even more important as a test of whether man can make the world fit for mankind. To give a pint of milk a day to every hot and hot would be no solution for anybody's problem. The solution is to enable the hot and hot and the Solomon Islander to reach a standard of his own and for himself that includes health, education, progress, and eventually freedom. Thank you, Mr. Lattermore. Music You have just heard the tenth program of the new series, The Pacific Story. Next week at this same time over most of these stations, the eleventh will be broadcast, World War I in the Pacific, with drama of the past and present and commentary by Owen Lattermore, authority on the Pacific and director of the School of International Relations, Johns Hopkins University. You may secure an illuminating handbook of the Pacific Story with background information on each program in this series with suggested further reading. This Pacific Story manual will be sent to you for 25 cents in coin to cover cost of printing and mailing. Address the University of California Press, Berkeley, California. Music The Pacific Story is written and directed by Arnold Markwood. The musical score is composed and conducted by Thomas Peluso. Your narrator, Gaines Whitman. This program has been presented as a public service and another feature of the Inter-American University of the Air by the National Broadcasting Company and the independent radio stations associated with the NBC network. This is the National Broadcasting Company. Music
