All aboard the U.S.S. New Zealand? Voyaging through the literary responses to the American ‘occupation,’ 1942–1944 Daniel McKay University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa e-mail:
[email protected] Abstract This article reviews and compares the literary fictions of the United States and New Zealand, as they have sought to respond to the ‘occupation,’ 1942–1944. During the period in question, approximately 100,000 United States Army and Marine Corps servicemen landed and resided in New Zealand, where they undertook final preparations for the island campaigns of the Pacific War. In the aftermath of the war, American fiction writers wrote of the social and cultural difficulties endured by New Zealand civilians, but New Zealand writers took longer to come to terms with the events. Keywords Pacific War Á New Zealand Á Ma¯ori Á Womanising Á Fistfights Á James A. Michener Á Leon Uris Á Pat Booth Á Nicholas Edlin We had felt, for the Americans of that first invasion, simply dislike – a feeling that ranged from mild to bitter according to the individual case. We had disliked them because they were foreign, because they had strange accents and chewed gum, because they flashed money about and lavished what it could buy on our women, while the best of our men were fighting and dying in the deserts of North Africa. We had disliked them because they had left their used condoms about in our parks, stamped in blue ink ‘U.S. Armed Forces. To be used for disease prevention only’ – as if our girls, and not their soldiers, carried the diseases; and as if the children they left behind them were a part of their foreign aid programme and intended to improve our bloodstock.