War at the Margins: Indigenous Experiences in World War II

Indigenous Citizens as Soldiers: Ainu, Sámi, Māori

Where citizenship and service are linked, the question of who is allowed or required to enlist has been crucial to issues of Indigenous status. We begin with three groups, Ainu, Sámi, and Māori, whose citizenship was established by the time of World War II. How did their Indigenous identity intersect military service?

Ainu. Ainu are the Indigenous inhabitants of the islands of Japan. When the nation established its modern borders in the late nineteenth century, Ainu lived in the northern islands of Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kurils primarily as hunters, gatherers, and fishers, pushed to marginal areas as their lands were invaded by Japanese settlers from the south. Ainu on Hokkaido had undergone a long process of acculturation, becoming citizens by 1898, with men liable for military conscription. In the colony of Karafuto (southern Sakhalin Island), Ainu—but not the smaller Native groups, Uilta and Nivkh—gained citizenship by 1932–1933. A nascent Ainu political movement strengthened legal rights with a revised Ainu Protection Act in 1937, but activism soon withered under the strain of war.2

A dual vision of Ainu as loyal citizens, but also different, persisted in wartime. Ainu men served in imperial forces throughout the China-Pacific theater in World War II. Ainu leader and memoirist Shigeru Kayano describes how, as a young man, he was as eager as other Japanese to volunteer for sacrificial service.3 Yet even as Ainu marched as patriots, the government perpetuated images of difference and homefront tourism catered to a public eager to view them as exotic and primitive. The apparent paradox of how Ainu could be both true citizens and exotic “others” reflected a broader problem—how to create a shared identity as the empire expanded. Distinct cultures might be celebrated as art or tourist attractions, but all were expected to integrate as imperial subjects. Military service was a step along this path. For Ainu, the challenge lay in being loyal Japanese while holding to their own customs despite acculturative pressure.4

Sámi. Sámi are Indigenous people living in arctic regions of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia’s Kola Peninsula; their cross-border homeland is called Sápmi. (The older ethnic term “Lapp” is no longer used.) A flexible and mobile economy of reindeer herding, fishing, fur trapping, and some farming kept many Sámi relatively separate from the emerging Nordic nations until the nineteenth century. Whereas Ainu had been incorporated into Japan as its frontier expanded across their territory, Sámi found their homeland split by four states as northern Europe’s national borders hardened.

Though the countries in which they live had different assimilationist policies, Sámi men served in the armed forces in all of them. In 1897, Norway extended conscription to Sámi citizens. In Russia, Sámi served in the tsar’s army and in World War I, with contending forces of the Russian Revolution, and then with the Soviet Army. After Finland became independent in 1917, Sámi men were eligible for the draft but in practice were exempt until 1933.5 Because they are a cross-border population, some Sámi during World War II found themselves fighting one another, as part of Finnish, Soviet, or Norwegian armies. Sámi territory was a field of combat from the Finnish-Soviet Winter War of 1939–1940 through Germany’s surrender in May 1945. World War II did not change Sámi citizenship status, but it did change their position in national policy. Wartime evacuations and postwar reconstruction transformed the isolated region and reconfigured Sámi relations with fellow citizens and governments.

Māori. Māori had become British subjects in 1840 with the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, but they experienced ongoing discrimination and government failure to abide by the treaty’s provisions of land rights and self-rule.6 Political autonomy had been linked with military service in World War I, when some Māori opposed sending men to fight British wars overseas while grievances at home were ignored. Nonetheless, approximately three thousand enlisted, serving in Gallipoli and Europe, receiving numerous medals, and suffering nearly 15 percent casualties.7

In the Second World War, Māori leaders saw war service as a way to gain approval for greater self-government. About sixteen thousand Māori (out of a population of one hundred thousand) enlisted in New Zealand forces. Māori leaders requested a separate combat unit, and the 28th (Māori) Battalion of the New Zealand Army was announced in October 1939. Some seven thousand men served in the battalion, which saw distinguished action in North Africa, Italy, and Greece.8

Māori were exempted when conscription began in June 1940, but there was no shortage of volunteers for the Māori Battalion, which remained all-volunteer. Its four companies were organized along broadly tribal lines, acknowledging Indigenous social organization, and Māori eventually filled most command roles. The battalion’s symbolic power was tremendous, raising a positive public profile for Māori and boosting their identity and confidence. Māori goals were made clear in a 1943 pamphlet by statesman Sir Apirana Ngata, “The Price of Citizenship,” which emphasized that Māori support for the British cause would aid the struggle not only for social and economic equality, but also for political autonomy.9

Contested Citizenship and Military Service: United States, Canada, Australia

Like Sir Apirana Ngata, other Indigenous leaders saw military service as “the price of citizenship” and used it as leverage for improved status. But those in power do not always agree that service entitles people to full citizenship rights. War’s demands might simply consume all available manpower, as in the USSR. There, Indigenous Siberians, who had previously been largely exempt from conscription, were fully mobilized after 1939.10 Or minorities might find themselves—as African Americans did—“fighting on two fronts”—fighting for the nation in the military, but also for full rights at home. As to citizenship itself, while governments usually saw it as a reward or privilege, it could look different from an Indigenous point of view. Native American (Anishinaabe) scholar Duane Champagne describes Indigenous peoples as those who did not necessarily consent to be citizens but were defeated or encompassed and made citizens by fiat. The United States, Canada, and Australia all instituted military conscription in 1941, but differences in government-Indigenous relations led to different outcomes.11

Native Americans. The question of whether Native Americans could or should serve in the military had long been settled. Indians had served with—as well as fought against—US armed forces since the country first formed (and before). At the time of World War I, nearly half of Native Americans in the United States were not citizens, and so were exempt from conscription. Still, some eight to twelve thousand enlisted, and patriotic speeches and US flags became common at Indian events. Proofs of loyalty did not mean assimilation, however, as shown by the many returning veterans who took part in victory dances and purification ceremonies. In 1919, Congress allowed veterans to petition for citizenship, and in 1924, based partly on the argument that war service deserved reward, the Indian Citizenship Act extended it to all Indians born in the United States (though six states still denied them voting rights).12

The question of conscription re-emerged with the Selective Service Act of 1940 (“the draft”). Most cooperated with the law, but resisters emphasized Native autonomy. Some Seminoles claimed they had never made peace and were still technically at war with the United States. The Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy sued in court to protect their sovereignty. Iroquois men willingly volunteered, but rejected Washington’s right to conscript them, arguing that they had never consented to citizenship. Other tribes that organized resistance for different reasons included Hopi, Tohono O’odham (Papago), Ute, and Yakima. In the end, courts ruled that the Citizenship Act of 1924 and the Nationality Act of 1940 trumped treaty claims. All Native American men were required to register.13 Questions about sovereignty did not hinder patriotic support. In all, about twenty-five thousand Native American men served (along with nearly eight hundred women), a great number in proportion to the total population. On some reservations half or more of the men volunteered. As one Sioux commented, “Since when has it been necessary to conscript the Sioux as fighters?”14

The topic of separate Indian units, discussed in World War I, was revived but again rejected. Recruits were integrated into white units (African Americans were assigned to segregated units, and the 442d Regimental Combat Team was formed for American men of Japanese descent).15 Though Native Americans reported less discrimination in the armed forces than African Americans, they did not merge into the crowd. Their appearance, and often their religious customs, set them apart. As we will see in chapters 4 and 7, their identity became both a protection and a danger in combat.

As had happened in World War I, several Indigenous nations declared war on the Axis powers independently from the US government. Jemez Pueblo did so soon after Pearl Harbor; Ponca and Osage, Sioux, Chippewa, and Dakota followed suit. The Six Nations formally declared war in June 1942, even while they contested the federal government’s right to draft their men. National publicity portrayed these displays of loyalty as a sign of assimilation, but while the act of declaring war expressed sincere emotion, it also emphasized tribal sovereignty.16

First Nations. In Canada, a legal line between “treaty Indians” or “status Indians” (those living on reserves governed by historical treaties) and those considered to be regular citizens shaped conscription issues. In World War I, non-citizen Natives were exempted from service in foreign wars, though more than 3,500 volunteered with the Canadian Expeditionary force, some in all-Indian units. Their visibility on European battlefields promoted rights at home, though veterans’ programs often discriminated against them. In 1917, the Military Voters Bill extended the vote to Indian soldiers without requiring them to lose treaty status.17

In World War II, though, First Nations were included in compulsory training and home defense, a shift that surprised and angered many, especially given treaty agreements and their lack of civil rights. Canada began conscription in mid-1941. The government initially promised not to conscript anyone for overseas service, but that policy changed in November 1944 when combat losses had to be made up from home defense troops. As in the United States, some Native communities—including Iroquois—opposed conscription, especially for service abroad. Exceptions were then made for members of certain tribes (depending on treaties) who could not be compelled to serve overseas, though they could and did volunteer. Inuit in Canada were exempt from compulsory service but could enlist.

Support for the war was strong despite such disputes. “Treaty” Indian enlistments amounted to 3,090 (of an estimated 136,000 population). Mary Greyeyes (Cree, Muskeg Lake Reserve), the first Indigenous recruit in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps, received much publicity, and Oliver Milton Martin, a Mohawk World War I veteran, became the first Indian to attain the rank of general. Debate about separate all-Indian battalions extended to the start of the war, but the decision was made for integration, though some units had large proportions of First Nations recruits. Most served in the infantry; the Royal Canadian Air Force and Royal Canadian Navy began the war with racial bars, later rescinded. Despite integration, recruits experienced discrimination; for example, in how the pay and dependents’ allowances of status Indians were handled through Indian Agents. After the war, “treaty” veterans were given the right to vote in federal Canadian elections. (Other “status” Indians did not receive the federal franchise—without losing their treaty rights—until 1960.)18

Aboriginal Australians. At the time of the war, Indigenous Australians were not full citizens, but neither did they have a defined status under treaties. (Like other Australians, they were British subjects until the 1948 establishment of Dominion citizenship.) In Australia’s federated government, legal powers retained by the six states meant that conditions for Aboriginal Australians varied a great deal. Despite some efforts to improve their status, they were legally and socially marginalized in a caste system. Military service of roughly a thousand Aboriginal Australian men during World War I did not improve conditions. Most veterans were excluded from benefits and their role dropped from public memory.19

At the start of World War II, the existing Defence Act exempted non-Europeans from service. While the Act did not prohibit volunteers, regulations stipulated that only those “substantially of European origin or descent” were to be enlisted, so volunteering was not straightforward. The variety of state laws allowed some to enlist while others were turned away. Legally, a person of some Aboriginal descent was either subject to a state’s Aboriginal Protection legislation—therefore exempt from national service—or had to petition for exemption from it, abandoning Aboriginal identity. As in Canada, and in the United States before 1924, one could either be a national citizen or a member of the Indigenous community, but, legally, not both. In practice, the “substantially European” standard was hard to enforce, and manpower needs later in the war widened enlistment, though the Defence Act policy did not change until 1949.20

In all, an estimated three thousand Aboriginal and part-Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders served in regular forces, out of a total population under eighty-five thousand; an equal number were military laborers. More than a thousand fought with the Second Australian Imperial Force (the volunteer overseas service of the Australian Army) in New Guinea and North Africa.21

Aboriginal Australian servicemen and women experienced little discrimination (certainly much less than in civilian life), and enjoyed opportunities for training, travel, and mateship. As Tim Japangardi, a Walpiri man, recalled, “friends and friends. . . . Everybody was fighting, and working hard . . . good fun always.” Among the best known were Leonard Waters, the first Aboriginal Australian fighter pilot in the Royal Australian Air Force and Reginald “Reg” Saunders, MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire), the first Aboriginal Australian commissioned army officer. Saunders, who enlisted in 1941, served in the Middle East, Greece, Crete, New Guinea and (in a later war) Korea.22 The positive experiences of many enlistees highlighted persistent discrimination in civilian life and stimulated postwar political activity.

In contrast to Aboriginal Australians, most men of the Torres Strait Islands (between Australia and New Guinea) were enlisted during the war. The Torres Strait Light Infantry Battalion, formed to patrol Australia’s north coast and islands, consisted of about 740 Islanders and some fifty mainland Aboriginal men. Although the battalion was a unit of Australia’s Torres Strait Force, Islanders were paid at about one-third the regular scale. They were treated like a colonial army—the army compared their pay with that of the Royal Papuan Constabulary rather than with Australian soldiers. While the army’s idea might have been to maintain a segregated force, like colonial troops in Papua and New Guinea, in fact the men often worked alongside other Australians and Malays, making the pay disparity evident and grating, leading to a brief strike in December 1943. The next year the pay was raised, but only to two-thirds the normal rate with a small dependents’ allowance.23

When historians describe the Torres Strait battalion as being like a unit of a colonial army, they refer to colonial subjects serving in an army led by metropole officers, rather than citizens serving in a national military. But many places where the war was fought on Indigenous homelands lay beyond effective central government control, and the issue was not one of citizenship or enlistment in regular forces, but simply of survival as hostilities engulfed them. In these places, questions of identity and loyalty became matters of life and death.

Questions of Loyalty in the Japanese Empire

Conscription into imperial military forces began in Japan’s home islands, expanding to colonies as war went on. People in Okinawa, Korea, and Karafuto—including Indigenous people—were considered Japanese nationals by annexation, though without full citizenship rights. Islanders in Japanese-held Micronesian islands were Japanese subjects, but legally aliens.25

Taiwan’s Aboriginal “Takasago” enlistees. The majority population of Taiwan descends from immigrants from the Chinese mainland. The Austronesians who had lived on the island for millennia before that were in part absorbed into these newcomers, but the eastern highlands remained largely an area of Aboriginal tribes. When the Qing dynasty ceded Taiwan to Japan in 1895, Japan fought a colonial war to integrate the island’s Chinese and Aboriginal residents into the empire.

As Taiwan was pacified, commercial and military interests encroached on Indigenous lands. Forced relocation and harsh policing triggered armed resistance. The largest was the October 1930 Wushe Rebellion, when several tribes coordinated an attack killing more than 130 Japanese. The violence shocked Japanese at home; aggressive retaliation by colonial authorities—deploying overwhelming force, heavy artillery, and even poison gas, killing at least seven hundred Aborigines (including many who committed suicide)—shocked them even more and caused a shift in attitudes. Oppressive policies and exploitation did not vanish, but the goal changed to acculturation.26

With the onset of war, Japan’s overall colonial policy of assimilation hardened into intense “imperialization” (kōminka) to foster sacrificial service. In Taiwan, that meant replacing Chinese language, names, customs, and attitudes with an all-encompassing Japanese identity. For Aboriginal Taiwanese, whose identities were tribal rather than Chinese, kōminka sought to focus loyalty directly on the emperor, on Japan. From March 1942, Indigenous men were recruited for labor and later for military service in the Takasago Volunteer Corps (Takasago giyūtai) and other special units. They were included in compulsory drafts in Taiwan in late 1944 through 1945.27

Takasago enlistees were motivated by the patriotic pressure of kōminka, and enlistment was an attractive, rare path to advancement for Indigenous men. Cultural motives also played a role. Takasago service drew on young men’s identity as warriors, and many tribal values were compatible with “the Japanese spirit.” Veterans make this link explicitly; as Buyan Nawi said, “Since ancient times, Tayal men have faced death in battle resolutely, and we would never feel sad about it. When I joined the Fifth Giyutai and was ready to go to war, the whole tribe threw a big farewell party for me and the dancing continued till daybreak. I made my decision to do great deeds for Japan and the Emperor. We Tayal people have always been brave. We have never been fearful of going to war. We regard it as honorable.” Walis Piho spoke of a special motivation: to “erase the stain of treachery and regain our honor” in the wake of the Wushe Rebellion, in which one of his ancestors had participated and been executed as a rebel.28

Takasago veterans kept their commitment to the emperor and “the Japanese spirit” not only throughout the war, but for decades after, despite disappointment in the postwar Japanese government’s failure to acknowledge their service.29 When in the 1990s they spoke with Japanese researchers (in fluent Japanese), they emphatically restated that—as an Amis veteran named Yoshikawa said, “’We were Japanese at the time during the Great East Asia War! We volunteered for the war from our heart. The sufferings in battles, even death, were undertaken by us willingly!’” One author who visited the home of Pirin Suyan and his wife was amazed to find it decorated in Japanese style and that the couple spoke Japanese with each other. Pirin Suyan told him, “I am a Japanese, and will be until I die.” A late appreciation of Aboriginal Taiwanese commitment emerged from the Indonesian jungle in 1974, when the last Imperial Japanese Army straggler was found—and turned out to be a member of the Amis tribe.30

Imperial Japan’s Micronesian subjects. Japan first took control of Micronesia (apart from the US Territory of Guam, and the British-held Gilbert Islands) as a League of Nations mandate after World War I, intending to prove itself a colonial power equal to Europeans and to use the islands’ economic and strategic potential.31 Islanders benefited from basic schools, health care, and a growing economy, but faced limits on their education and civil rights. Over time, immigration by Japanese, Okinawans, and Koreans made them “strangers in their own land”—of the islands’ 1940 population of more than 132,000, about 81,000 were foreign.32

In the mid-1930s, Tokyo refocused from economic to military development, first using naval and air bases in the region to support imperial expansion, later turning them into an outer line of defense for the home islands. After thirty years of Japanese governance, Micronesians felt themselves part of the empire, despite ranking below East Asian immigrants. Support for Japan soared in the first years of war, as Islanders took part in patriotic displays, donated money, and volunteered labor. As noncitizens, Island men could not enlist in the army or navy, though two small volunteer units of military labor from Pohnpei and Palau were sent to New Guinea. Others worked in police forces or in quasi-military roles, as ship crews, harbor pilots, air raid lookouts, or other tasks.33

Construction of bases and large troop deployments stressed resources, but also brought excitement and, at first, an economic boom. But the war turned against Japan in mid-1943. American submarines cut off shipping, a long period of Allied bombing began, and overpopulated garrison islands faced starvation. As conditions grew desperate, so did forced labor, military supervision, suspicion, and mistreatment escalating to torture and executions. By the time of US invasion, starting early in 1944, Micronesians were alienated from any previous loyalty, and in several places even feared that the Japanese military intended to massacre them.

Questions of Loyalty in the British Empire

Two other regions with large Indigenous populations, the highlands of Southeast Asia and the islands of the Southwest Pacific, became key battlegrounds in the Asia-Pacific War. In both areas, people’s lives were upended by Japanese invasion and occupation, and by Allied guerrilla resistance followed by counterinvasion. British expectations of loyalty from long-time subjects were countered by Japanese claims of liberation from European rule. More immediately, people’s lives depended on how they responded to the demands of whichever army occupied their land at the moment.

Burma/India borderlands. Mainland Southeast Asia can be understood as two populations: large, dense lowland societies depending on rice cultivation along major rivers, organized as states since prehistory; and highlanders living by swidden farming (rotating small gardens cut from forest) and trade—the village-based horticultural societies called “hill tribes” or now sometimes “Zo” peoples, referring to the entire highlands region (Zomia).34 British policy formalized the upland/lowland distinction with separate bureaucracies. In Burma, the British colonial army from the late nineteenth century preferentially recruited men from the Karen minority and from hill tribes including Kachin, Kuki, and Naga, partly because they were cheaper, partly due to ideas about “martial races” and stronger pro-British feeling among these groups. This recruitment pattern affected the course of the war and Burma’s postwar politics.35

Japan invaded Burma from the south in December 1941, rapidly pushing British forces into retreat. By May 1942, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) was approaching the mountain homelands of Kachins, Chins, Nagas, Kukis, and others along Burma’s northern and western borders. In April 1942, Burma Frontier Service officer Norman Kelly met with Chin chiefs and elders to ask for their aid in raising levies to oppose the Japanese, in a meeting that reveals how they saw the situation.

In his opening speech, Kelly laid out the dangers and asked Chins to supply men and weapons to defend their homes. In response, the chiefs recounted their support of previous British requests (for example, for Labour Corps service in World War I). They were willing to defend their land with no pay beyond supplies and ammunition but did not want to serve under British Army control and wanted to stay in their home areas. In return, they asked the government to confirm their land rights, reduce taxes, guarantee they would keep or be paid for their guns after the war, offer compensation and pensions, and bring news about relatives fighting elsewhere with the Burma Rifles. By the end of the meeting, Kelly obtained commitments for hundreds of recruits—and on his part, agreed to voluntary enlistment, how and where the levies would operate, and how supplies and compensation would be distributed.36 Kelly’s effort to gain cooperation in the fight against Japan was not simple conscription, but negotiations between village chiefs and the British government. Chins were willing to work and fight, but under their own terms.

British accounts of war in the Burma/India highlands praise the loyalty of these hill tribes, but the situation was far from clear-cut.37 Some sensed advantage in aiding the Japanese or saw it as the only reasonable course of action; others simply tried to avoid the fighting. As Japan took control of the Chin Hills, British guerrilla officers had to continually monitor the “loyalty” of individuals, chiefs, and villages, since Chins were making their own decisions about dealing with incoming Japanese, retreating British, or both.38 In fact, given the area’s history of rebellions against British control, it is reasonable to ask: why did most upland people ally with them even at the risk of Japanese reprisals? Historian Pum Khan Pau argues that they feared greater suffering under Japanese rule, and even more from the nationalist Burmans who accompanied the Japanese advance. Also, Christian missionaries had over several generations built an educated, Western-oriented, English-speaking elite that played an influential role.39 Leaders valued past British support for their independence from the lowlands and had personal ties with Frontier Service officers like Norman Kelly or other Westerners who had worked in the area for decades. But British officials knew that local aid could not be taken for granted.

Across the Burma/India border, the hill tribes of Northeast India also had a history of opposing lowland control, fighting British oversight, and internecine warfare. Resistance to colonial incursion was fierce and long-lasting, including a Kuki rebellion in 1917–1918 and a Naga uprising in 1931. British officials were kept busy with persistent conflict among villages and clans, sending out punitive expeditions even during World War II.40

Ursula Graham Bower had been studying Naga culture in India’s northeastern hills since 1937 when, in mid-1942, the British military called on her to organize border surveillance for Japanese activity. Naga cooperation was essential since they knew the territory and their villages were located at strategic points. Bower found some Naga support for the plan (especially from men who had served with British forces in World War I or in the Assam Rifles), but others opposed helping the rulers who had run punitive raids against them. As in Kelly’s meeting with Chin leaders, debate centered on the history of the colonial relationship, a desire for weapons, and especially the demand that men not be taken from their homes. In one village, people recalled that porters they had sent to serve in the Lushai War had died of cholera—fifty years before, but not forgotten. Bower’s assistant, Namkiabuing, profoundly upset, said to her: “‘I was in the village today, and heard what they’re saying. They say this isn’t our war, and we ought to leave it alone—we aren’t [Japanese], we aren’t British; we’re Zemi [Nagas]. What’s it to do with us?’ There was dire trouble in his face. ‘We’ve been together now, you and I and the others, for two years now; we are like a family. How can I leave you?—What about my children? Oh, my sister, my sister, I’m being pulled in two! Which way shall I go?’”41

As we see in the next chapter, Naga played a crucial role in the Battle of Kohima, where the Japanese attack on India was repulsed. British General (later Field Marshal) William Slim lauded “the gallant Nagas whose loyalty, even in the most depressing times of the invasion, had never faltered. Despite floggings, torture, execution, and the burning of their villages, they refused to aid the Japanese in any way or to betray our troops. Their active help to us was beyond value or praise.” Reflecting this loyalty, Naga veteran Rhizotta Rino said decades later, “Why did we fight for the British? They were our protectors. They were here before the Japanese and they protected us. We had to help them!”42

But others chose to ally with the invaders. The IJA was accompanied by the Indian National Army (INA), thus linking its aims with India’s independence, the promise of self-determination, and claims of shared Asian brotherhood. Historian Jangkhomang Guite estimates that six thousand Kukis in Manipur helped the Japanese. Their goal was freedom from British rule. Dozens of villages and chiefs mobilized labor, supplies, guides, interpreters, propaganda, and intelligence for the invaders, who offered money, official appointments, and a promise not to harass cooperating villages. Guite suggests that, like nationalist leaders elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Kukis saw Japanese power as potentially liberating.43 Songs—some still sung today—give evidence of popular support, like these lines praising the sound of Japanese planes (originally published in Indian Historical Review, vol. 37.2, 2010):

From the horizon of Burma plain;

The Japanese plane floats its sweet note;

Like the sweet note of the bamboo flute;

Japanese plane hums in the sky above;

When the Japanese plane floats its sweet note;

The depressed farmer forgets the sadness;

Like the sweet melody of the watermill;

The Japanese plane floats its sweet note. 44

After the war, the British barred those Kuki known to have sided with the IJA/INA from claiming military pensions, and seventy were charged for disloyal actions. On the other hand, after Indian independence, 148 Kukis received INA pensions—that is, India recognized wartime help to the INA as freedom fighting and loyalty to the new nation.45 Who is a patriot or a traitor changes with the flow of time.

New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. The large island of New Guinea was at the time politically divided as Dutch New Guinea in the west, and in the east, Papua (an Australian territory) and New Guinea (an Australian-administered League of Nations mandate).46 New Guinea held perhaps a million people, about six thousand of them Europeans. Most Islanders lived in villages, subsisting from gardens, fishing, hunting, and cash from selling copra. Many men worked as indentured labor on plantations, in mines, at trading firms, or as domestic workers.

Japan invaded at the start of 1942, taking the town of Rabaul on the nearby island of New Britain and establishing beachheads along New Guinea’s north coast and in the Solomon Islands. Encountering little resistance at first, Japanese forces pushed inland across the Owen Stanley mountains toward Port Moresby. The advance was stopped by the end of 1942, but Japan controlled areas of northern and western New Guinea and parts of New Britain and Bougainville until the end of the war.

Throughout the Southwest Pacific campaign, Japanese and Allies (Australians, British, Americans, Dutch) vied for the assistance of Islanders for labor and supplies, knowledge of local territory, and news of enemy movements. Japan intended to make its dominion permanent and sent occupation personnel to follow victorious armies. Many Islanders, at least at the start, were neutral, more concerned with survival than with taking sides; as historian Hank Nelson said, “they had to obey whoever was present and holding a gun.”47 Villagers in the Upper Markham Valley understood Australian rule had been imposed on them and backed by force, and so was Japanese. “‘You have guns; you have aeroplanes and bombs,’ they say [to Australian anthropologist Kenneth Read]. ‘The Japanese have all these things as well. It is only we who have nothing. Is it for us to fight guns with spears? If we are told to work, we work. What else is there for us to do? We are not many, nor are we as strong as you are.’”48

The situation in the British Solomon Islands Protectorate (BSIP) was less ambiguous. Most of its population of about ninety-five thousand, who lived by fishing, gardening, and plantation wages, assisted the Allies. More than eight hundred men enlisted in the British Solomon Islands Defence Force, and the Labour Corps enrolled more than 3,700 by July 1944. Solomon Islander historian Anna Annie Kwai cites many motives for siding with the Allies, including obligations to traditional leaders, the importance of Christianity, anti-Japanese propaganda, the language barrier with the Japanese, and penalties imposed by stay-behind British officials.49

Allied records include many examples of Islanders’ loyalty to the Allies in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, even under Japanese occupation and in the face of violent reprisals—loyalty shown not only by soldiers, but also by guides and porters in combat situations, village leaders, and civilians who carried out dangerous intelligence missions or rescued downed sailors and airmen.50 While their assistance to Allied forces is beyond dispute, Islanders also saw in it a chance to improve their postwar situation, and some prominent veterans later became leaders in anticolonial movements.51

But in places where Japanese occupation extended into months and then years, the emperor’s soldiers built up local support. Indiscriminate Allied bombing and strafing of villages created more. Some Islanders fought alongside Japanese troops, supplied information, or turned in Allied servicemen to them. Individuals pragmatically assessed the shifting fortunes of war: their lives depended on predicting the victors. Once US ships began delivering tens of thousands of combat troops and mountains of equipment and supplies, Japanese found it far harder to recruit labor or other help.

What of the inverse of the “loyalty question”—were the colonial powers loyal to the people of New Guinea and the Southwest Pacific islands? Complacent Australian and British authorities had done little to prepare for invasion. The first attacks early in 1942 caused hasty European evacuation, followed by loss of effective government, confusion, wild rumors, looting, and the abandonment of plantations, leaving thousands of employees on their own.52 Local people saw this quick disappearance as desertion. Combined with an overwhelming display of Japanese strength, “white flight” tore away European claims of superiority and began the wartime transformation in attitudes toward colonial rule.

Why They Fought

Individual motives for Indigenous enlistees were as varied as for any volunteers. Describing why men from Busama Village joined the New Guinea Infantry Battalion in 1944, anthropologist Ian Hogbin found many reasons, none reflecting ideological commitment to the Allied cause: “Some men joined to carry on the warrior traditions of their fathers, some for adventure, some for the high pay, some for the glamour of a uniform, some to see the world, some because their friends had already done so, some as an escape from unhappy domesticity.”54 Personal motives, cultural attitudes, legal obligations—all intersected to shape individual responses. Certainly patriotism was among the motives, but it was patriotism informed by Indigenous identity. As Aboriginal Australian Army officer Reg Saunders said, he was fighting for Australia, not Britain. “Australia is my country. I don’t owe any allegiance or loyalty to the Queen of England. They tried to bloody destroy me, and my family, my tribe, my people . . . my loyalty was purely Australian.”55

Communities, too, engaged for various reasons. For some, military service was seen as leverage for civil rights, an argument made for Māori in “The Price of Citizenship” pamphlet and the demand for an all-Māori battalion; and in Fiji, where Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna, who led the effort to recruit Indigenous Fijians, said, “Fijians will never be recognized unless our blood is shed first.” 56 Ainu felt that war service reduced discrimination by the Japanese majority: “No one said then, ‘You are an Ainu,’ or ‘Ainu cannot serve in the Army.’ Our Ainu fought side by side with Japanese soldiers and were imprisoned in Siberia with them.”57 Indigenous people in Australia, Canada, and the United States had had limited results from their loyalty in the First World War; the Second produced better outcomes in many cases but offered no sure end to racism. In the French Pacific colonies, when Kanaks from New Caledonia and Tahitians joined European settlers in volunteering for a Pacific Battalion, colonial governors argued for citizenship for those who served with Free French forces, but this was rejected as “premature,” to be discussed after the war.58

“Loyalty” for tribal peoples might apply more to persons than abstract polities. Some responded to calls to come to the aid of King George or to fight enemies of Japan’s emperor. Others felt a duty to individuals. Chin Hills men were ready to fight under their own chiefs or the well-known Frontier Service officer Norman Kelly but did not want to be put under anonymous British Army command. Great Britain benefited from the war work of many colonial officials, businessmen, anthropologists, and missionaries with local knowledge, language skills, and family ties, giving it a crucial edge over Japan in Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific.59

Treaty obligations were a less personal but often compelling form of loyalty. Six Nations Iroquois, who served in large numbers, viewed themselves as bound by historical treaties to offer military assistance to Great Britain as allies to the Crown.60 Many Chins referred to an 1891 treaty that called on them to render aid to Great Britain in times of war. French authorities in Indochina held oath ceremonies for highland tribes in 1941, and again in 1946.61 Even without a formal treaty, Fijian chiefs pledged aid to Britain as reciprocity for government assistance, and some Solomon Islanders felt the same. Fijian scholar Asesela Ravuvu describes the obligation of Fiji’s chiefs to show loyalty for past British protection; “not to do so would have been a shameful and unforgivable breach of custom.” Men enlisted, in turn, out of respect for their chiefs: “‘The chief commanded, we acted.’”62

More immediately, those in combat zones fought to protect their homes. The government may have seen Aboriginal Australians on the north coast as ready labor, but they saw their surveillance role as self-defense.63 Hill tribes in the Philippines fought anyone entering their territory, Allied or Japanese. In the Burma highlands, resistance to British colonial intrusion became alliance to resist Japanese incursion—or, for Kuki, alliance with Japanese to oust British rule. Native Americans, too, discussed war service as defense of their land—both their tribal territory and the US homeland.64 For governments to misread loyalty to a homeland as a generic national patriotism is to miss an important element of Indigenous service.

Both Allies and Japanese rewarded loyal service and bravery. Indigenous enlisted men were eligible for regular awards (such as Aboriginal Australians Tim Hughes and Clive Upright and thirteen Papua and New Guinea soldiers, who received Military Medals as members of the Australian Army65). Foreign armies rewarded those attached to them, like the American Silver Stars awarded to Solomon Islander Jacob Vouza for bravery at Guadalcanal, and to Gilbert Islander Fred Narruhn, an interpreter for the US Army in the Tarawa invasion. Separate categories were created for those in colonial units and irregular forces. In New Guinea, hundreds of Loyal Service Medals were awarded, a category created especially for “native” service.66

Officers commanding Indigenous troops realized that their soldiers’ actions, however heroic, were less likely to receive recognition. After one action in the Chin Hills, levy commander Lieutenant Colonel Balfour Oatts recommended awards for his Haka fighters, in particular Hleh To, who had volunteered for a dangerous mission, “held his ground to the end to enable his comrades to escape, and had died in an heroic manner with all wounds in front.” Oatts wrote out a citation for the Victoria Cross. “Nothing came of it unfortunately. I would have liked the Chins to have a V.C. and what a man can do to earn one Hleh To had surely done—nor was he the only Chin to give his life heroically in the British cause.”67 A few Indigenous soldiers did receive the VC in World War II, including Te Moananui-a-Kiwa Ngarimu of the Māori Battalion and Sefanaia Sukanaivalu of the Fiji Infantry Regiment (chapter 4).

Governments may have interpreted battlefield heroism, military service, and other signs of loyalty as proof of assimilation, but war experiences actually increased many communities’ confidence in their own futures. Some of those experiences were shared with other citizens and colonial subjects, but others were unique. The next chapters focus directly on Indigenous lives during these years: in combat on their territory or far from home, when their abilities were weaponized, and when they suffered collateral damage from large-scale war. We will return to the topics of citizenship and sovereignty in the final chapters.

First, we follow the tides of war to the shores of Indigenous homelands.