War at the Margins: Indigenous Experiences in World War II

Labor under Combat Conditions: New Guinea

In the New Guinea campaigns of 1942–1945, labor demand was “insatiable”—for construction, stevedoring, farming, and most critically for porterage. With trails unsuitable for motor vehicles or pack animals, moving armies along coasts and through mountains required enormous manpower.14 As we saw in chapter 3, Japanese and Allied armies competed for carriers and commanders acknowledged their essential role in Allied victory.

The strain of such work was phenomenal, especially in the first phase of the war before airdrops were possible. The Australian Army’s Kanga Force harassing Japanese around Lae-Salamaua in September 1942 were maintained entirely by human carriers. Supplies were sent by boat and canoes from Port Moresby around the north coast, then forty men a day hauled fifty-pound loads on a seven-day trek along the rough Bulldog Road, with perhaps another four-day carry to the forward area. Warrant Officer Peter Ryan described a long patrol inland of Wau in which he, another officer, and fourteen policemen were supported by seventy carrier-loads, mostly food or trade goods used to buy more food en route. Combat troops required constant resupply. For Australians fighting on the Kokoda Trail, “to supply a relatively small force up the line, 3,000 carriers, each hauling forty pounds of supplies, required an eight-day trip.”15 After hauling ammunition and supplies to the front, the men turned stretcher-bearers on the return trip. Their compassion and skill in maneuvering the wounded along steep, muddy, almost impassible trails entered the lore of the war in the Southwest Pacific (chapter 5).16

On Peter Ryan’s patrol early in the war (1942), he paid carriers a shilling and a razor blade for each man and a strip of calico for the women: “These were substantial presents in those days of scarcity, and the natives were delighted.”17 But the scale of needs soon called for a more robust organization. Most labor was managed by ANGAU, which at its peak had a European staff of more than two thousand and employed more than forty thousand Islanders as carriers, stretcher-bearers, seamen, police, medical orderlies, and many other types of workers. Women also worked at bases and in gardens, and occasionally as porters, though this was not officially allowed. Using local labor had been part of European colonial life from its start, and ANGAU’s system built on the prewar pattern of plantation contracts.

Recruitment was voluntary at first, but in June 1942 new rules let ANGAU conscript labor. As demand escalated, recruiters’ methods became harsher. One officer ordered flogging for men who refused to reenlist. Initial contracts were for three to six months, later extended to two years, with required renewal. Monthly pay was more than plantation labor, but less than good prewar skilled wages. Camps provided housing, clothing, and food, and conditions improved with Allied success, eventually exceeding prewar standards. As war in New Guinea finally eased through 1944, demobilization began, first freeing older men, fathers of large families, and those longest employed. It took another year for construction demands to drop. Only after August 1945, as civil administration returned, did conscription end.18

The demand for labor made the purported limit of conscripting 25 percent of men in a village untenable; some villages lost 80 to 100 percent of their fit men to ANGAU.19 Papua New Guinea scholar John Waiko gives an example of how recruitment emptied a small community of Binandere villages in Oro Province (population 2,500). Of 354 adult males, 110 were recruited as laborers and carriers, and another fifty-six enlisted as police or soldiers. Such intensive recruitment concerned ANGAU officers who had worked in civil administration before the war, who knew the impact of the loss of men’s labor at home. Some officers tried to object “by reports, protests, warnings, by masterly inactivity” and in at least one case risking court martial by refusing recruitment orders.20

An Australian Army order to district officers in August 1942 declared that military needs come first, “even if a temporary sacrifice of native interests is involved.”21 To official eyes, this justified a level of recruitment and treatment that went beyond military necessity. Journalist Osmar White accompanied carriers on the Kokoda Trail and described overwork and suffering from cold and altitude, especially for men from the lowlands. The medical officer worried more about the condition of the carriers than of wounded soldiers; “sick wastage” of carriers on Kokoda peaked at 30 percent.22 On the Bulldog Road supplying Kanga Force early in the war (“passes as high as 10,000 feet and rainfall up to 200 inches a year”), a thousand men carried 22.5 kilogram loads for seven days; after eating a tin of meat on the first day to save its weight, they lived on dry biscuits and boiled rice.23 Fatigue accumulated as men toiled month after month without a break, hauling supplies to the front and wounded to the rear. Some ANGAU staff abused workers, controlling them through beatings and punishment; others tried to ameliorate conditions even if it meant bucking regulations. At least 2,024 Allied laborers are recorded as dying of various causes—certainly an incomplete figure.24

Labor demands also inflicted psychological distress, separating men from families and communities for long periods. Ian Hogbin once took a message from children in Busama village to their father working in the kitchen at the Lae Officers’ Club, who “burst into tears and, sobbing into his pots and pans, begged me to intercede for his release.”25 Loss and separation bore creative fruit in an outpouring of song and poetry. John Waiko translates a song by Gavide, a Binandere woman commemorating her son’s departure for war work. It expresses not only her grief, but as Waiko points out, awareness that his departure benefits only foreign armies, leaving her bereft:

War has come

The young men are leaving

To defend alien land.

The foreigners will be saved.

What has called

The young men away

To become enemy victims?

The conquerors will be happy.

The mother is deserted

Lonely without her son

A barren beggar

Abandoned to heartache.

The mother who lost blood

Has become a barren beggar.

The one who bore him

I am a lonely beggar.26

Certainly Allied use of labor was far less criminal than mistreatment by Japanese, especially in the last desperate months of war, but it was not without fault. Ian Hogbin in a 1944 report criticized ANGAU’s Native Labour Officers as unconcerned with Native welfare and sometimes brutal or dishonest. His report led to forming the Native War Damage Compensation Committee in October 1944. But despite the number of deaths, the 1946 decision denied compensation to families of civilian workers. Dissatisfaction over lack of compensation and wage claims by Papua New Guinea carriers continued long after the war.27

As late as the 1990s, Australian and PNG governments were still making efforts to recognize and compensate carriers. Raphael Oimbari (the Orokaiva man leading wounded Australian soldier George Whittington in George Silk’s famous photo) visited Australia in 1992 for the fiftieth anniversary commemorations and complained of feeling exploited and unappreciated. Recognition of civilian workers’ roles has grown since then. Oimbari was awarded an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in 1993, and his memory is honored in Port Moresby’s war memorial.28

Labor under Combat Conditions: Solomon Islands

In the Solomon Islands, labor service had a more definite political impact. From the start, this campaign vacuumed up labor. Coastwatchers like Martin Clemens relied on Islanders not only to keep them hidden, but also to feed them and help when they shifted their secret camps. Clemens hired 190 porters when he first moved his headquarters inland on Guadalcanal; the heavy radio alone required twelve to sixteen carriers. Meanwhile, Japanese demanded labor for airstrip construction and other tasks. When US forces landed in August 1942, Clemens came out of hiding and took charge of labor (as well as scouts and guides) for the US Marines defending the beachead, a job that grew as the number of able Americans dwindled due to casualties, malaria, and a 24/7 workload. Unloading gasoline drums was a familiar task to local men, but they also had more dangerous jobs, evacuating wounded and carrying supplies to the front line. Clemens quickly enrolled more than two hundred men, housed in tents within the camp perimeter, where their first task was to dig foxholes to protect themselves from air raids and naval shelling.29 The American beachhead soon absorbed all nearby manpower. As the campaign progressed, a formal unit was needed.

The Solomon Islands Labour Corps (SILC) was established in December 1942 and recruited nearly four thousand men by 1944. Isaac Gafu of Malaita was among the first enlistees. He was recruited, terrifyingly, into the midst of battle on Guadalcanal: “When the Americans killed Japanese soldiers they would just leave them lying in the bush. You could see heaps of the dead bodies of Japanese soldiers. And we were so afraid. We had not seen war before.” He was amazed by the scale of operations, the crowds of soldiers, ships coming and going, trucks rushing along, the fast-paced, dangerous labor. SILC men loaded and unloaded ordnance and cargo, built and repaired airfields, did laundry, constructed wharves, and guarded supply depots. They were often in active combat zones, carrying supplies for advancing troops. Despite the Marines’ care for their safety, Gafu says,

The war, however, was very intense. Evenings, morning and nights we were dumbfounded by everything that was happening. Guns and bombs were constantly exploding. Sometimes the Americans and Japanese fought very close to where we were staying. The Japanese would shoot at the Americans and the Americans would shoot back at the Japanese. We lived in constant fear.30

While working under combat conditions was overwhelming, a different aspect of SILC became more consequential: the contest between Islanders seizing new opportunities and the desire of British colonial officials to maintain the status quo. Tension arose early on, when several hundred Guadalcanal workers were dismissed in November 1942 for making what were considered “extravagant” demands about pay and conditions. (Malaitans were brought into SILC the next month to replace them.) On the other hand, British officials resisted US demands that labor be made compulsory, fearing that would create insurmountable resistance to SILC, and recruitment remained voluntary. In general, American commanders used local resources and labor as needed without concern for postwar conditions (Japanese did the same), while British kept the future in mind—insisting on maintaining markers of white superiority, but also warding off exploitation. Over time, though, British efforts to sustain the prewar racial hierarchy dissolved in the face of military necessity and the Islanders’ interactions with servicemen (chapter 5).31

Research on Maasina Rule, an anticolonial movement centered on Malaita, identifies SILC as an important stimulus to political action.32 Jonathan Fifi’i (a Maasina founder, later a legislator and cultural activist) has explained how SILC affected him. Though young, he spoke English, and so was made leader of his section. On Guadalcanal, they unloaded cargo, cut timber to build storehouses, carried supplies, guns, and ammunition for patrols, helped the wounded, and buried the dead. Good treatment by Americans sharpened their critique of British attitudes, like humiliating clothing regulations. Forbidden to wear shirts, men who earned promotion or medals had nowhere to display their awards: “We sergeants were given a piece of khaki that had three stripes painted on it” to tie onto their bare arms. “I was ashamed to wear it like that, so I would just carry it around in my hand.”33

Besides such invidious rules, British SILC officers tried to prevent the men from keeping American gifts or eating in their chow lines or visiting with them—“but when we told the Americans of this they told us not to worry about it, so we kept on going.” Fifi’i recalled the day British officers searched their tents and confiscated their possessions while they were at work: “When we arrived back at our camp we objected, but they said those things were not for us boys but were only for white men. We saved this episode in our memories.” Some men sought revenge, but Fifi’i persuaded them against violence. Yet the oppression wore on them, “It’s something that happened each day all the time.” They complained to Americans, who told them to resist. “They would encourage us and say, ‘Struggle, they may kill you, they may torture you, they may do all kinds of things to you but don’t give up. Keep going.’ That was the beginning of Maasina Rule.” Fifi’i goes on to say, “After the war we had courage, whereas prior to the war we would always just give in.”34 Maasina Rule became an important postwar political movement in the Solomons (chapter 11).

Labor under Combat Conditions: India/Burma

Carriers were also key to fighting the war in the mountainous Burma/India borderlands, at least until roads were built—and those required massive hand labor (chapter 10). The British Army had recruited labor here for a century. Naga veterans of the British Labour Corps in Europe during World War I helped form the Naga Club in 1918, to which one might trace modern political activism.35 Naga labor joined the war in Burma early on: US General Joseph Stilwell hired several Nagas when he met a group by chance near the end of his much-publicized retreat from Burma to India. Stilwell’s Shan and Kachin porters readily handed over their loads to the Nagas and headed home, saying the trail was too steep for them and they were afraid of the “headhunters.”36

Naga and other hill tribes provided aid when tens of thousands of soldiers and refugees from the Japanese invasion of Burma poured into northeastern India in the first half of 1942.37 Dolly Kikon describes how a Naga couple, Luke and Oreno Kikon, helped set up medical camps for troops. As British forces built up in Manipur, Nagas worked on tasks such as maintaining roads and erecting bamboo and thatch hospital buildings.38 They were laborers, guides, and carriers (as well as soldiers) in the battles of Imphal-Kohima. Japanese approaching those battles also needed porters and guides; they got them by pressing labor from the hill tribes. IJA Divisional War Correspondent Yukihiko Imai explains, “As soon as we reached a village we caught the women and children and locked them up. We then asked the men folk to guide us to the next village, promising to release their families as soon as they had done so. This was the only way we could get guides or labour to help with the transport.”39

Allied guerrilla units operating behind Japanese lines also needed carriers. When two Z Force officers left India for the Chin Hills in February 1943 before the Imphal-Tedim road was usable, they required forty porters and more than a week for the trip. Guerrillas in Malaya and Burma were provisioned in part by airdrops, with supplies hand-carried from airstrips to the scattered units. In Malaya, Force 136 SOE used Orang Asli to haul airdropped supplies. For example, for one job, thirty to forty Orang Asli were among the hundred porters recruited.40 With so many men gone as soldiers or laborers, women often portered in the Burma-India highlands. Fellowes-Gordon comments that, “Whenever we [Northern Kachin Levies] got coolies to help us with our loads, we found half were women. These girls, some as young as twelve or fourteen years, did a marvelous job, delivering rations and ammunition to the most forward positions, occasionally being themselves involved in ambushes.”41

British officers with the Northern Kachin Levies found it a constant chore to dragoon civilians to move rations and ammunition from airdrops, and eventually found a solution: payment in opium. Opium was a long-standing commodity in Burma, good currency where silver was heavy to carry and often useless. Guerrillas using opium for pay and to buy supplies greatly increased its availability and laid the foundation for much future violence in the region.42

New Zealand

Māori members of Parliament set up the Maori War Effort Organization (MWEO) in 1942, separate from the government’s Native Department and thus both a training ground and a showcase of Māori autonomy. The MWEO began with the task of recruiting soldiers but extended to address the Māori work force, food production, housing, and other issues. It coordinated more than three hundred tribal committees, registering workers for factories and encouraging agriculture. Māori men were not drafted for military service, though many volunteered, but from January 1942 they could be directed to essential industries. The movement of thousands of rural Māori to cities offered new experiences and brought closer association with white New Zealanders. MWEO’s management of enlistment and civilian workers impressed both government and the public, but structural change did not happen quickly despite Māori leaders’ efforts to maintain and extend the autonomy gained during wartime (chapter 12).45

North America

Canada and the United States also drew their full populations, including Native communities, into wartime production. With so many Canadian men in military service, it was easier for Indigenous civilians to get hired in construction, railroads, farming, fishing, ranching, and logging. Greater employment, servicemen’s dependents’ allowances, and higher wages improved family finances. War service and jobs drew First Nations men and women from isolated rural areas into greater contact with one another and the national community, as did the intrusion of military construction and installations into Indigenous lands in northern and western Canada (chapter 10).46

In the United States, where at least twenty-five thousand Native Americans joined the armed forces, another forty thousand left reservations to work in factories and military facilities (about twelve thousand of these were women). Those at home increased farming and livestock production, and with men gone, women took on more and more diverse duties. Federal nondiscrimination rules for new war jobs propelled employment, though prejudice persisted. New York reservation numbers dropped as people moved for work: Rochester became an urban center for Iroquois in war industries; Senecas and Tuscaroras built warplanes in Buffalo and worked in aluminum plants and gypsum mining. The army hired 1,500 Navajos to build a supply depot at Fort Wingate in 1942, then thousands more Navajo and Hopi to build and operate the Navajo Ordnance Depot in Arizona. A new Naval Supply Depot in Utah bused in hundreds of Pueblo, Navajo, Shoshone, Ute, Arapaho, and Sioux. Los Alamos Laboratories hired Indians from nearby pueblos. Thousands of Native Americans moved to the West Coast for work, forming communities in Los Angeles and San Francisco. In Alaska, the US Army contracted with two Native-owned canneries and with a Native co-op employing three hundred women and children to make cold weather clothing for construction crews—sealskin trousers and boots, reindeer parkas, moosehide moccasins.47

Overall, the war economy increased tribes’ cash income, despite federal cuts to Indian Affairs and to New Deal programs. But rationing and shortages hit the rural homefront hard. On South Dakota Sioux reservations, where nearly two thousand enlisted, those at home struggled with loss of the CCC and other aid programs.48 For Chippewa in northwestern Wisconsin, who relied on hunting and fishing along with wages from federal programs such as WPA and CCC, the shutdown of these programs was only partly compensated by men enlisting or getting defense industry jobs, and it was hard for fathers to leave or move their families for work in cities.49

This was also a time when Congress considered eliminating the federal treaty relationship with Native American nations, “terminating” tribes, a political project that began in 1937 and continued through and after the war (chapter 12). In part it was Indians’ success on the homefront as well as in military service that encouraged this idea. The desire to save money on tribal and BIA appropriations combined with a widespread belief that Indians were ready to assimilate, supported by publicity about their patriotism. In the end, the assimilation argument proved wrong. Despite claims that wartime experiences would hasten migration from reservations and merge Native Americans into the general population, in fact most workers and veterans returned home after the war, and in many ways the war years deepened tribal feeling.50

Australia

We have seen how the Australian Army’s need for manpower over the course of the war dissolved barriers to Indigenous enlistment. War-spurred industries also needed workers, drawing Aboriginal Australians along with others into cities, where many stayed, making a larger (and, eventually, more politically active) urban presence. But defensive preparations centered in the sparsely populated north, where labor was at a premium.

The north had been relatively ignored by the national government before the threat of Japanese invasion highlighted its vulnerability. Then, war brought roughly a hundred thousand servicemen to the area, who had little prior knowledge of Aboriginal Australians and no interest in maintaining the exploitative prewar pastoralist labor system. New airfields, roads, and increased coastal ship traffic, along with wartime employment, ended the isolation of Indigenous people that mission stations and government policy had maintained across the North.

From the army’s point of view, northern Australian Aboriginal labor was indispensible. For the workers, military employment offered a novel and much better experience than previous farm, ranch, or domestic work. We saw in chapter 6 how the military used Aboriginal Australian skills in reconnaissance. Beyond this, the army offered a wide range of jobs: not only general labor, but also butchering, sanitation, mechanics, stevedores, drivers, deck hands, pilots, mess stewards, welders’ assistants, hospital work—training men in fields previous barred to them. Women had opportunities too, though limited by racial and gender rules. Over time, the army became the largest employer of Aboriginal Australian labor in the Northern Territory, ran camps for workers and their families, and improved standards to the point that it became impossible to re-establish the exploitative status quo ante.

Living in supervised workers’ camps was a very different experience from prewar missions or ranch settlements. Army camps, built in Darwin and along the north-south road to Alice Springs, offered schooling, health care, organized sports and education, and sympathy for Aboriginal culture, including walkabout leave. The camps had negative impacts, too—problems from naively mixing people from different places, and increased prostitution, sexual abuse, and venereal disease, as women’s lives were less strictly supervised than in mission-run reserves. White pastoralists contested army initiatives, concerned that such treatment would interfere with their control of a cheap labor force after the war. Indeed, Aboriginal workers did not forget this experience of relative equality and good treatment, both by individual white Australians and by the army’s management, and these memories played a role in postwar political action.51

War’s voracious appetite for labor affected Indigenous peoples everywhere. As we will see in the next chapter, even those very far from combat found its demands pressing on them.