The Free French on Wallis and Futuna

At the end of May 1942 a small French warship, the aviso Chevreuil from Nouméa, dropped anchor in the lagoon of the island of Uvea, known to Europeans as Wallis. She landed a Free French party of a dozen or so men which, without firing a shot, arrested the resident, Léon Vrignaud, the representative of Marshal Philippe Pétain’s government. The protectorate of Wallis and Futuna, the last French territory in the Pacific to have remained loyal to Vichy, passed under the authority of General Charles de Gaulle.

Popular war chronologies record this event under 26 May. French participants’ accounts and historians’ studies give 27 May as the day on which Chevreuil entered the lagoon, with the Americans landing the following day, 28 May.

Vichy’s last outpost in the Pacific

After the defeat of France in the summer of 1940 the French possessions in the Pacific rallied to Free France one after another: the New Hebrides in July, French Polynesia and New Caledonia in September. Wallis and Futuna, two small groups of islands between Fiji and Samoa with some seven thousand Polynesian inhabitants, stayed with Vichy. This was decided by a handful of Europeans: the resident, Vrignaud, who had taken office in July 1940, and above all Bishop Alexandre Poncet, a Marist, an opponent of the Republic and an ardent supporter of Pétain. The indigenous authorities – the king of Uvea, who bore the title of Lavelua, and the chiefs of Futuna – had little say in the dispute between London and Vichy; the French historian Jean-Marc Regnault regards the later story of the Wallisians’ Gaullist fervour as a legend.

Loyalty to Vichy meant being cut off from the world. The neighbouring islands belonged to the British, the New Zealanders and the Americans, and Nouméa was Gaullist, so from January 1941, for almost a year and a half, not a single ship called at Wallis. There was a shortage of flour, petrol, medicines and money. The only link with the Vichy government was the radio station, which kept in touch with distant Indochina under Admiral Jean Decoux; from there came praise for the French on Wallis for preferring hunger to the “dissidents’” flour. In March 1941, with the consent of the resident and the bishop, the chiefs elected a new king of Uvea, although he refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the Marshal. In February 1941 de Gaulle approved a plan to recover the islands, but word of it reached Vrignaud and the expedition was postponed.

The Americans change the calculation

The outbreak of war in the Pacific gave the forgotten islets strategic importance. The Americans were building a chain of bases along the route from Hawaii to Australia: on Samoa, on Fiji, in New Caledonia and on Bora Bora. Wallis, lying between Samoa and Fiji, with a spacious lagoon and room for an airfield, was ideally suited for the purpose. At the beginning of May the commander of the South Pacific Area, Vice Admiral Robert Ghormley, informed the Free French High Commissioner for the Pacific, Rear Admiral Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu, that the United States would occupy the island.

For de Gaulle, who at the beginning of May had learned from a journalist of the British landing on Madagascar, carried out without the participation of the Free French, this was a matter of principle. He held that French territory must pass into French hands before a foreign soldier set foot on it, or the Allies would treat it as spoils. He also remembered how sharply Washington had reacted in December 1941 to the seizure of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon. This time the Americans agreed that a French ship should lead their expedition.

The Chevreuil expedition

That same May Chevreuil had carried the recalled governor of New Caledonia, Henri Sautot, from Nouméa to New Zealand, and on her return she was given a new task. Around 22–23 May (sources differ by a day) d’Argenlieu summoned Captain Molina, an artillery officer whose real name was Jean España, and ordered him to embark on the aviso within the hour. The orders were opened only at sea. Chevreuil was to meet an American force on 28 May, lead it into the Wallis lagoon and install a military doctor, Jean-Baptiste Mattei, as the new resident.

The ship’s commander, Fourlinnie, decided to act alone and a day early. No one knew whether there were Japanese on the island. Fourlinnie reasoned that if there were none, the French would manage without help, and if there were, it was better that a lone French ship be sunk than the Allied fleet she was leading. Molina agreed, since this was also the best way to ensure that the island was taken over by the French and not by the Americans. Chevreuil passed through the narrow and difficult Honikulu Pass in the reef in the south of the island and entered the lagoon.

Vrignaud was waiting for them on the beach; against the sun he could not make out whether the ship had been sent by Vichy or by Free France. Molina informed him that on the High Commissioner’s orders he had to arrest him. The resident handed over his pistol, gave his word that he would not try to escape and himself led the party to the Residency. Sailors took over the radio station and forced the operators to hand back the transmitter’s hidden crystal. Bishop Poncet received the change of authority as a catastrophe but gave assurances that he would not interfere. Molina went to the palace in Mata Utu, where he met the king and his ministers. According to the French accounts, he pinned his own Cross of Lorraine badge on the king’s chest, and the king cried “Long live France, long live General de Gaulle!”. He then signed the act of adherence to Free France, and Molina telegraphed de Gaulle and d’Argenlieu that Wallis belonged to Free France. Two days later Futuna, lying more than 200 kilometres to the south-west, also rallied to Free France.

The American base

The next day American ships carrying units of the 8th Marine Defense Battalion entered the lagoon, covered, according to French studies, by the destroyer USS O’Brien and the New Zealand cruiser HMNZS Achilles. Construction of a base began: an airfield for heavy bombers at Hihifo in the north of the island, operational from October 1942, a second runway, a seaplane base, a harbour, roads and a hospital. On average some 4,000 Americans were stationed on the island, at times more – roughly as many as there were Wallisians. Their dollars, equipment and goods overturned the island’s traditional order: ordinary islanders working for the military grew rich faster than the chiefs, and the missionaries struggled to keep watch over morals.

The change of authority was long kept secret. Vichy learned of it only in August, from letters bearing Wallis and Futuna stamps overprinted “France Libre”, which Molina had ordered to be sold to replenish the protectorate’s empty coffers.

Place in the war

The seizure of Wallis was a minor episode, but it closed a chapter: from then on all the French possessions in the Pacific belonged to Free France. It also showed that de Gaulle had learned the lessons of Madagascar and Saint-Pierre: instead of a quarrel with the Allies he obtained from them, though not without difficulty, recognition of French precedence. The base on Wallis strengthened the chain of islands which after the Battle of the Coral Sea, and especially after Midway in June 1942, became the rear base of the American offensive in the Solomon Islands. As the front moved north, the island’s importance declined: in February 1944 the Americans began to withdraw, by June only a dozen or so were left, and the last of them departed in 1946. They left behind an airfield, roads and an economy that collapsed after they had gone. The experience of the war contributed to the emigration of Wallisians to New Caledonia and to the change in the islands’ status: after a referendum in 1959 they became a French overseas territory in 1961.