Americans in the New Hebrides

In mid-August 1942, while the Marines were holding on at Guadalcanal, the New Hebrides were turning into the most important rear base of the American offensive in the Solomon Islands. On 11 August the 7th Naval Construction Battalion arrived on the island of Espiritu Santo, and over the next two months it built a second fighter strip there, a runway for heavy bombers, a seaplane base, a motor torpedo boat base, hospitals and camps for several thousand men. A few hundred kilometres to the south, on the island of Efate, an American base with an airfield and a fleet anchorage had already been operating for several months.

Some lists state that on 12 August American forces “establish bases in the New Hebrides”. That is a simplification. The Americans had been in the archipelago since March 1942, and the first airfield on Espiritu Santo was already in use by the end of July. August, however, was the month in which both bases ceased to be forward covering outposts and began to grow into a great rear base for the front, and the arrival of the 7th Battalion on 11 August was the clearest sign of it.

A colony shared by two powers

The New Hebrides, a chain of some 80 islands north-east of New Caledonia, had been since 1906 the world’s only Anglo-French condominium. The archipelago was governed jointly by two resident commissioners, one British and one French, and everything apart from a joint court existed twice over: two police forces, two systems of schools and hospitals, two currencies and two prisons. Settlers chose under whose law they wished to live, while the several tens of thousands of indigenous inhabitants were citizens of neither state. A small white community, mostly French, lived off coconut, coffee and cocoa plantations. The capital was Vila on Efate, today Port Vila.

After the fall of France in 1940, the French side of the administration was the first of all the French colonies to declare for Charles de Gaulle: in July 1940 the Resident Commissioner, Henri Sautot, announced that the territory was joining Free France, and in September he moved to Nouméa to bring about a similar change of allegiance there. Other Pacific possessions followed the New Hebrides, joined in May 1942 by Wallis and Futuna. As a result, when after Pearl Harbor the Americans began building a chain of bases along the route from Hawaii to Australia, they could use the islands with the consent of both condominium authorities: London and the French National Committee of Fighting France. As early as December 1941 de Gaulle had placed the ports and airfields of New Caledonia, the New Hebrides and Tahiti at the Allies’ disposal, and relations between the French authorities and the American commanders in the archipelago were calmer than in Nouméa.

Efate: Operation Roses

The first objective was Efate, with its harbour at Vila and the spacious Havannah Harbour. On 20 March 1942 Admiral Ernest King approved a plan to occupy and defend the island under the code name Roses: the army was to defend it and the navy to build a base, an airfield and seaplane facilities. Fewer than five hundred soldiers from the force of General Alexander Patch, which had only just reached New Caledonia, arrived on the island in the second half of March and, together with a handful of Australians, formed the Allies’ most advanced outpost in the region. At the beginning of April the 4th Marine Defense Battalion arrived with coastal and anti-aircraft artillery, and on 4 May a detachment of Seabees, the men of the naval construction battalions. The Marines had already cleared a narrow strip of ground on a plantation near Vila; the construction men lengthened it to more than 1,800 metres and surfaced it with coral. At the same time, when the Japanese landed on Tulagi, the Australian outpost from that island had just sailed for Vila. The Efate airfield was later named Bauer Field, after Lieutenant Colonel Harold Bauer, commander of the Marine fighter squadron stationed there in the summer, who was killed over Guadalcanal in November 1942.

Espiritu Santo: Button

Efate, however, lay too far from the Solomons for bombers to strike effectively from it at the Japanese airfield that had been under construction since July on the Lunga on Guadalcanal. The choice fell on Espiritu Santo, the largest and northernmost island of the archipelago, several hundred kilometres closer to the target. A reconnaissance party arrived there on 28 June, followed on 8 July by a small Seabee detachment from Efate, an anti-aircraft battery of the 4th Defense Battalion and a company of Black soldiers from the segregated 24th Infantry Regiment. They were given twenty days to build an airfield. Working on it were 295 infantrymen, 90 Marines and 50 local labourers, clearing forest and coconut plantations day and night under floodlights. The runway, some 1,800 metres long, was ready on time. On 28 July the first fighters landed on it, the next day B-17 bombers of the 26th Bombardment Squadron, and on 30 or 31 July (sources differ) they flew their first raid on Guadalcanal. Until the landing of 7 August bombers from Espiritu Santo regularly attacked Tulagi and the airfield on the Lunga, refuelling from drums.

The base on Espiritu Santo was given the code name Button. A seaplane tender anchored in the Segond Channel, by the settlement of Luganville, and Catalina flying boats from Espiritu Santo and Efate patrolled the seas north of the archipelago. They failed, however, to detect in time the cruisers of Vice Admiral Gun’ichi Mikawa, which on the night of 8–9 August shattered the Allied screen off Savo Island.

August: from outpost to rear base

After the landing on Guadalcanal the importance of the New Hebrides rose sharply. From there the commander of land-based aircraft in the South Pacific, Rear Admiral John S. McCain, directed the bombers and reconnaissance aircraft covering the island, and aircraft and supplies for Henderson Field passed through Efate and Espiritu Santo. In sixty days the 7th Construction Battalion, which arrived on 11 August, laid a second fighter strip and a bomber runway of pierced steel planking on a coral base above Pallikulo Bay, and built a motor torpedo boat base, seaplane ramps in the Segond Channel, ten camps and more than 40 kilometres of roads. In October and the months that followed, more battalions arrived.

The war also entered the lives of the islanders. The Americans recruited some 10,000 local men to work at unloading, construction and in the hospitals, paying them in dollars and giving them access to goods the islands had never seen. The encounter with the wealth of an army in which Black soldiers also served strengthened, on the island of Tanna, the John Frum movement, one of the best-known cargo cults.

Place in the war

Espiritu Santo became the second-largest American base in the Pacific after Pearl Harbor, with floating docks able to take battleships, hospitals with thousands of beds and four airfields. In the months that followed, bombers and reinforcements for Guadalcanal set out from there, and ships damaged in the battles off the Solomons were repaired there. On 26 October 1942 the liner President Coolidge, converted into a troopship, ran onto American mines at the harbour entrance; only two men were killed, and the wreck is today one of the most famous dive sites in the world. By the end of the war, according to American figures, some half a million soldiers and sailors had passed through the New Hebrides. One of them was the naval officer James Michener, who drew on what he saw on Espiritu Santo for his collection of stories Tales of the South Pacific, which won the Pulitzer Prize and was turned into the musical South Pacific.

Japan never managed to attack the archipelago, apart from a few nuisance raids. The base on which the fate of Guadalcanal depended remained safe, and the condominium survived the war and lasted another 35 years; in 1980 the New Hebrides became independent as Vanuatu.