Burdens and Bastions

When the Japs were masters of Angaur, in the Palau Islands, they tied noncooperative natives to trees and bashed in their heads with coconut-palm logs. This put a quietus on native dancing, which the Japanese considered a heathenish practice.

But two and a half months ago U.S. forces stormed ashore. By last week every native knew that rhythmic rotation of the pelvic girdle was legal again, was enjoying freedom of religion with muscular enthusiasm. Wrote New York Times Correspondent Sidney Shalett, after watching the Angaurese dance:

"It was a fantastic mixture of a Hollywood witch-doctor picture and the American Deep South. Fierce Yap and Woleai men [who had been imported as slave labor by the Japs] did a wild sword dance. Some wore breechclouts and danced barefoot. Others stomped proudly in G.I. shoes. Mreah, a male dancer, came out blowing a harmonica, and paced a group of women in gingham wrappers. Then out came some children who piped a Japanese love song in a tune that sounded like You Are My Sunshine. Their leader, a buxom girl, started her songs by chanting, 'Wan, two, left, right,' as a great compliment to the Americans."

Timesman Shalett dryly observed that the U.S. had "taken on a considerable moral burden in the Pacific." It had done that, and more. For the U.S. was rapidly acquiring territory in the Pacific, 6,000 miles from home, to be held at least until the war ends, and perhaps permanently. This meant, not only moral problems, but the trials of territorial administration.

Saipan had already become the bastion for attack on Japan (see WORLD BATTLEFRONTS). From Guam, 128 miles south, New York Herald Tribune Correspondent Bert Andrews cabled: "It would be helpful if the home-held picture of Guam as a tiny Pacific 'pin point' were dispelled." Through heaviest censorship he slipped a general's quote: "This will be another Pearl Harbor."

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