Acknowl edgments Above all, we thank our participants for sharing their stories and lives with us. We mention many by name in the accounts, and oth ers are ther e under pseud- onyms. We felt honored to have had your contributions and hope this book wil l help you and others to more fully know that your lives and those of your families continue to have significance. We also remember with gratitude those who have passed on during this research and the many dead who can no longer tell their stories. We commend them, the dead and the living, to God. As the “chief investigator” of this Mothers’ Darlings Proj ect, I would like to thank all the members of the team, including those who assisted initially but later left the proj ect for personal reasons. Special thanks go to Marsa Dodson, our first tireless research assistant who early in the proj ect found and interviewed so many Cook Islands’ participants, as well as a cou ple of others from other countries. Her work and sensitivity in this regard were outstanding. I also thank Phyllis Herda who assisted in several ways with the Tongan aspects of the research. I warmly thank my friend, colleague, and collaborator, Angela Wanhalla, whose even composure I can never hope to duplicate. Kate Stevens and Lucy Mackintosh supplemented Angela’s interviews with research in the New Zealand archives and in U.S. newspaper rec ords, respectively. Jacqui Leckie and Alumita Durutalo were a complementary and productive duo for research in Fiji. Saui‘a Louise Mataia- Milo’s work among the Samoan participants is a singular and cou- rageous contribution, not without cost to her among her own people where such matters are rarely discussed beyond the family. Based in San Diego, Kathryn Creely has added par tic u lar value to this collection through her sensitive case study of a New Caledonian wom an who strug gled to survive in the United States but whose family ther e and in New Caledonia have now reconnected through Kathy’s patient research. We are all the richer for this history. I am especially grateful, as we all are, to Rosemary Anderson, who worked initially as a research assistant and, when the need suddenly arose, wrote the chapter on the Cook Islands, calling on her own knowledge of war time pressures on these islands. Her per sis tence in tracking down lost connections with U.S. families has been xi xii Acknowl edgments a major strength of this proj ect and of lasting benefit to the families concerned, some of whom are mentioned in the book. The original plan for this proj ect was for the designated research team of four plus a research assistant to work among people from par tic u lar islands. One of the designated researchers had to withdraw for personal reasons, so I took her place for one of the island groups. Bec ause none of us was fluent in French we had deci ded to concentrate on islands where Engli sh was the main foreign language. Happily, I found a Wallis man, Petelo Tufale in Vanuatu. He agreed to be part of this research while Kathryn Creely, as mentioned earlier, provided a New Cale- donian case study. I was able to research Bora Bora and added that as another chapter to cover the bases in the French Pacific. The rest of the team— Wanhalla, Leckie, and I— worked on the islands we knew best from earlier research. I had planned to work in Samoa, but soon realized that my former student, Saui‘a Lou- ise Mataia- Milo, being Samoan, could do this research far more ably, so I left it in her capable hands. In 2010 when I was in Vanuatu doing research, by chance I met a former un- dergraduate student of mine. Discussion over the worst red wine Steve Talley has ever been presented with led to his interest in making a documentary related to this proj ect. Unfortunately, this discussion occurred after our funds had already been allocated according to the strict categories of the Marsden Fund, but the University of Otago did provide substantial support. With the subsequent help of Tele vi sion New Zealand (TVNZ), one of the stories of the U.S. reunion of the Beren family was broadcast on 28 August 2011 in an episode titled “Generation GI” of Channel One’s Sunday Program. Steve had to use his personal funds to capture the Michigan reunion on film. He and co- producer Peggy Holter were then contacted by TVNZ who happened to be covering Arthur Beren’s trip from the New Zealand end, and both parties agreed to share their respective footage for the Sunday Program and for the University of Otago proj ect. A follow-up doc- umentary made by Steve and Peggy about the return of the Willess family to American Samoa appeared on 26 April 2012, as the “World War Two Love Story of Homer and Vaofefe Willess” on Māori TV, New Zealand. With some reallo- cated funds from savings from the Marsden grant, Steve and Peggy have since made a film of the Gaeng sons’ search for both their U.S. father and their Māori mother. Aspects of these stories were presented in a fifty- minute documentary ti- tled “Born of Conflict,” broadcast on 25 April 2014 (Anzac Day) on Māori TV, as well as on YouTube. These programs have had a major impact on people’s lives and understanding. Even as I write this in June 2014, in the last week we have had two emails and a visit from people who believe they have a U.S. father. We are Acknowl edgments xiii grateful to TVNZ for the opportunity to bring the fruits of this research proj ect to the public. We all thank Steve and Peggy for their unique role in doi ng history through film and for their patience with book- oriented historians who have learned so much from them. We are pleased and encouraged to see that research in relation to indigenous women and children was taken up in 2014 in Australia by University of Sydney- based Victoria Grieves and associates under the auspices of the Australian Re- search Council in the proj ect, “Children of War: Australia and the War in the Pacific.” In New Zealand when the Mothers’ Darlings proj ect first received some pub- licity in late 2009 Angela Wanhalla and I were inundated by a torrent of emails and letters, primarily from children of U.S. ser vicemen, whose mothers were either from New Zealand or the Pacific Islands. There was only one email that criticized the awarding of public funds for this research. “A waste of money,” wrote the anonymous person, who went on to say that such funding would be better spent going to health and education spending in New Zealand. His was a singular negative voice, but we listened. It soon became clear from the se many communications and from what par- ticipants later told us that most wanted to find out more about their U.S. fathers and families. This had not been the initial aim of this research, but we again lis- tened. We realized that what we intended and what was needed had to be recon- ciled to reciprocate the trust and generosity of the participants in sharing their experiences, so we did a considerable amount of searching for relatives; often hours spent doing research on websites brought nothing, especially when a com- mon surname was all we had. We also knew that the terms of our funding im- posed limits on our searches. We could not become full- time professionals work- ing at reconnecting families, so Angela, with the help of Geofrey Hughes from Web Ser vices at the University of Otago, designed a webpage with information to assist any searchers to find out for themselves about pos si ble fam ily links. See http:// www . otago . ac . nz / usfathers. As this research was drawing to a close, we also received many emails of thanks from those seeking and sometimes finding relatives, as well as fromtho se who now know that they were not the only ones with such a war time legacy. From the tone of these communications and those participants we got to know person- ally, we feel that we now can ofer a defense to our first critic. Thepeo ple we have assisted (and often had assisted us) seem to have gained health benefits, if the mea sure is the holistic well- being of body, soul, and mind. As I mentioned ear- lier, we continue to receive one or two new email inquiries about U.S. fathers xiv Acknowl edgments every week or so; thus ther e still seems to be a need among many. In terms of education too, we hope that our small contribution via this book, as well as the film documentaries, will broaden understanding of the war in the South Pacific, its impact on socie ties, and how marriage between U.S. ser vicemen and South Pacific indigenous women was virtually impossible. Angela Wanhalla and Erica Buxton have calculated that about only forty such marriages occurred, mostly with part- indigenous women (by descent), with only about fourteen being from the smaller Pacific Islands and the rest from New Zealand. With this understanding of the cruel politics of race, tho se socie ties that in the postwar years so condemned their daughters may now see the wider context and remove any taint of stigma from these mothers and their children.