The Battle over Peleliu: Islander, Japanese, and American Memories of War
296
The Battle over Peleliu: Islander, Japanese, and American Memories of War
296eBook
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Overview
The expansionist Japanese empire annexed the inhabited archipelago of Palau in 1914. The airbase built on Peleliu Island became a target for attack by the United States in World War II. The Battle over Peleliu: Islander, Japanese, and American Memories of War offers an ethnographic study of how Palau and Peleliu were transformed by warring great powers and further explores how their conflict is remembered differently by the three peoples who shared that experience.
Author Stephen C. Murray uses oral histories from Peleliu’s elders to reconstruct the island’s prewar way of life, offering a fascinating explanation of the role of land and place in island culture. To Palauans, history is conceived geographically, not chronologically. Land and landmarks are both the substance of history and the mnemonic triggers that recall the past. Murray then offers a detailed account of the 1944 US invasion against entrenched Japanese forces on Peleliu, a seventy-four-day campaign that razed villages, farms, ancestral cemeteries, beaches, and forests, and with them, many of the key nodes of memory and identity.
Murray also explores how Islanders’ memories of the battle as shattering their way of life differ radically from the ways Japanese and Americans remember the engagement in their histories, memoirs, fiction, monuments, and tours of Peleliu. Determination to retrieve the remains of 11,000 Japanese soldiers from the caves of Peleliu has driven high-profile civic groups from across the Japanese political spectrum to the island. Contemporary Japan continues to debate pacifist, right-wing apologist, and other interpretations of its aggression in Asia and the Pacific. These disputes are exported to Peleliu, and subtly frame how Japanese commemoration portrays the battle in stone and ritual. Americans, victors in the battle, return to the archipelago in far fewer numbers. For them, the conflict remains controversial but is most often submerged into the narrative of “the good war.”
The Battle over Peleliu is a study of public memory, and the ways three peoples swept up in conflict struggle to create a common understanding of the tragedy they share.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817388898 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 02/15/2016 |
| Series: | War, Memory, and Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Battle Over Peleliu
Islander, Japanese, and American Memories of War
By Stephen C. Murray
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2016 University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8889-8
CHAPTER 1
History, Memory, and Island Landscapes
The ideal (although seldom-achieved) Western model of history — as truth seeking, public and accessible, unlimited in scope, nourished by open debate, and largely chronological — fits uncomfortably with the ways most Pacific Islanders approach the subject. Islander history operates primarily at the local level, relating family, clan, or village histories. Such kin-oriented stories are exclusive, not inclusive, and in societies like Palau are considered to be confidential, not public. Islander history is frequently political and tendentious. Among the most important family stories or genealogies, for example, are those that explain membership in a particular lineage or clan, or that justify a family's possession of valuable lands or chiefly titles. Because the histories are political, they remain partial, in both senses of the word. No more of a story is released than is necessary, and stories are told with bias, to support a position. Western history telling can also be highly politicized, of course, but islanders seem to take for granted that a primary function of history is to justify power and ownership.
Although growing amounts of island knowledge have been reduced to writing, either by native or outside scholars, island societies maintain their knowledge by a variety of traditional means as well. Most prominent are oral stories, but songs, dances, chants, carvings and artwork, legends and myths are all still widely used.
Palauans have created written histories, notably in a series of pamphlets from their Historic Preservation Office, based on interviews with elders on topics like traditional medicine and leadership. Palauan authors have also produced history texts for schools and compiled volumes of legends. The deepest and most important family stories, however, are still maintained and transmitted orally. As traditional bai, structures where the council of village chiefs meets, are gradually rebuilt, their gables and interior tie beams are carved and painted with important legends specific to the village, as was done in the past. Elders can then decode and explain the meaning of the artwork to the young (see figures 1 and 2). Some of the oldest knowledge is retained in the chesols, chants performed by men and women of advanced age and rank. In 2003 a segment of Peleliu's wartime history was presented at Palau's annual fair in a dance with singing performed by the island's women.
In Palau, a tightly knit, kin-based society, history is more about human relationships and individual events than about pageants of sweeping change. There are few real "national" stories. Palau was always divided into villages (beluu) and these continue to be, along with one's lineage and clan, primary loci of identity and loyalty. Most oral histories therefore focus at the local and family level. The stories I gathered on Peleliu were a mix of public ones that told versions of the prewar and wartime period known to all, and more private and personal versions of events as experienced by the speaker and his family. I did not seek, and was seldom given, deeper more sensitive stories, the kelulau (whispers) that are closely guarded. I interviewed 90 people altogether, 49 from Peleliu, of whom I considered 28 to be elders — that is, born before 1935, which placed the youngest of them in their mid-60s at the time of my primary fieldwork in 2002–3.
Stories carried in memory and related orally can readily be altered to suit changed circumstances. Palauans live comfortably with multiple versions of stories, of history. It is accepted that a tale will likely contain "spin." There may be no definitive version of any one of them, but within a locality you will be urged to identify and query the high-ranking elders who hold the key knowledge.
People do not try to distill a final consensus from these rival stories. Beches Iluches Reksid, a titled rubak from the village of Ngaraard, told me he appreciated my gathering the war stories from many different persons. This way, he said, I would have enough versions to create a composite view of the subject that would be as accurate as could be hoped for. The expectation, then, is not for agreement among competing variants; it is rather for completeness, with the understanding that ultimate harmony of opinion will remain elusive.
Palauans treat the knowledge and histories of others with circumspection. They shun direct conflict and confrontation in all aspects of their lives, and normally this discourages challenging others' stories. A group's history is their business. Consequently, the chad ra Beliliou grant Japanese and American visitors the freedom to tell their versions of the war in books, stone, and ceremony and avoid publicly judging or criticizing such versions.
The connections between history and geography are crucial. As Kathy Kesolei explained to me in an interview, Palauan history is peoples' history as structured by land, with group (not individual) identities at the center. Land and place, she went on, organize history and confer meaning on it. Karen Nero is correct in saying that "the most important dimension to a Palauan sense of history is spatial, geographical." Palauan histories or legends "recount movement through space, through particular geographical places."
It is the same for people, conceived in their group identities. "Histories of clans recount their migrations throughout Palau and ties they established while traveling." Once a group settles, then place and landscape become fixed dimensions, culturally marked space that is used as a mnemonic device for decoding the stories attached to it. The places will be given names, and a lineage or clan will take its basic identity from these named lands and features within a particular village. These may be gardens, mesei(taro patches), beachfront, burial grounds, or home plots. These lands and how the group stakes its claim to them represent the most vital portions of its history. Said Kesolei, "A mesei is treasured as an heirloom to be passed down. Stories always come with it — how it reached your hands."
Glenn Petersen says of Micronesian society in general, "Embedded in each plot of land, then, is not simply a material source of survival, but a specific history of personal relationships." Loss of such a plot is more than a threat to the group's livelihood. "It is simultaneously a threat to the group's social existence and to its status as part of the community, society, and culture."
The islanders of Palau and Micronesia are hardly unique in the way their landscape continues to be an important repository of the human past. Any settled people who derive subsistence from lands that they have occupied for centuries and who rely on oral traditions rather than written history to transmit their pasts can be expected to intimately know and name land, value it above other possessions, encode stories in it, and use landmarks as mnemonic aids.
In Palau, natural or man-made objects — stones, trees, bead money, titles, burial sites, a tridacna clam shell — frequently serve as aids to prompt recollection of important stories. These aids are called olangch. Examples of American olangch would include Plymouth Rock, the Liberty Bell, Bowdoin College's dormitory named for one of its graduates, the Civil War hero Joshua Chamberlain, and almost any statue in a public space.
Kathy Kesolei explained that there were traditionally three elements to a Palauan historical account: the story itself; a chant of it (the chesols) or perhaps a common saying; and the place where it happened, or its associated physical evidence, its olangch. Usually the meaning and importance of an olangch has to be learned from a knowledgeable elder who is qualified to explain it (a further discussion of olangch is found in Parmentier).
The rubak Masaharu Tmodrang described to me the vital connections between migrations, land, olangch, and the burial of ancestors: "Most migration stories [for villages in Koror and Babeldaob] tell how people came from Angaur or Peleliu. Our family has names of places that our ancestors went to and named; these were olangch." Among the most important of olangch are the stone burial platforms called odesongel, where kin groups buried important members (see figure 3). "With no writing system, our ancestors used olangch to describe where they first arrived. It's a much stronger story if you can name the chutem [land parcel] you landed on; and stronger still if you have an odesongel with ancestors buried there."
The subjects of land, olangch, and burials will appear frequently in this work because they structure so many of the observations and memories that the Palauans shared. For the chad ra Beliliou, land provided their subsistence, the ordering of their society, and much of their identity. The war's devastation of lands was therefore a multifaceted and incalculable loss. For the islanders prior to World War II, their lands, olangch, and memories served the functions largely performed by books, archives, and museums in societies that rely on written language. So damage to the landscape on Peleliu resulted in damage to the means of memory and, hence, to the people's grip on their past.
For foreigners, land on the island was very different. It had economic or military value, and today is sought for either recreation or for preserving wartime history. Nonetheless, for some returned war veterans or committed history buffs, particular portions of the landscape can acquire the kind of personal, historical value that they do for Palauan natives in other contexts — finding a bunker the vet had destroyed or the hill where a memorable assault occurred. Most people in Palau view memorials raised by the foreigners as a form of outsiders' olangch. Islanders spoke frequently of the bonds formed when one kin group has to bury a member in lands of another. Burials and the recovery of remains of their own dead servicemen have also motivated both Japanese and American travelers who have come to Palau and Peleliu; and they remain a source of friction to this day.
As Western historians have turned their attention to the study of public memory, examining which persons and events receive public commemoration and celebration, and how and why these emerge while others are overlooked or suppressed, they found some of their most fertile ground in the study of the great wars of the 20th century. The scale of these cataclysms, their costs in lives and treasure, and the intensity of national mobilizations gave their participants, from the nation-state down to the foot soldier, pressing reasons to want to proclaim and justify their various roles.
By the late 20th century, historians also began to shed long-standing biases against eyewitness accounts of events, recognizing instead the value of the immediacy and details that oral histories and life stories can uniquely provide. The memories of veterans of World War II and the survivors of the Holocaust came to be seen as historical repositories that would soon be gone. James E. Young argues for the joining of historical analysis with personal memory. "What seems to be missing is history-telling that includes both the voice of the historian and the memory of survivors, commentary and overt interpretation of events that deepen the historical record." He also believes that memorial forms like monuments and ceremonies can add a unique element to historic understandings. We achieve better results, he says, if we "add the study of commemorative forms to the study of history, making historical inquiry the combined study of both what happened and how it is passed down to us."
Paul Connerton reminds us that oral history offers "the possibility of rescuing from silence the history and culture of subordinate groups. Oral histories seek to give voice to what would otherwise remain voiceless even if not traceless, by reconstituting the life histories of individuals." Oral accounts from the chad ra Beliliou therefore become the best means of inserting their experiences, previously missing, into the history of the Pacific War.
There is a confluence here of academic theorizing and indigenous practice. The people of Palau have always used oral discussions to transmit personal or family histories. Oral conversation was, out of sheer necessity, the primary means I used in my field research. Each of the elders who shared stories with me could say, with the poet Virgil, "Cynthius aurem vellit": "Apollo plucked my ear." For them, as for the Romans and the blind poet Milton, the ear was the seat of memory. (Apollo, the god of poetic inspiration, would tug a mortal's ear to remind him to be attentive and remember.) The elders recalled and discussed things that they had learned in one of two ways: through personal experience or from hearing a story and committing it to memory. They were trained from childhood to observe meticulously, to listen carefully, and to remember in detail what they heard and saw. They are the last generation in Palau to learn almost everything they know using only occasional recourse to the written word or artificial images. Their memories were prodigious, and the stories they told fluent and gripping.
Recording the memories of the people of Peleliu, then comparing them against the background of American and Japanese historiography and memory, is the kind of history telling that Young advocates. This work also includes close study of the objects of commemoration — such "material leavings" as war monuments, shrines, and relics on Peleliu — to reveal memories of the Japanese and American soldiers and their countrymen and understand the politics of their representations. It considers such physical remains of Palauan life as village sites, farmlands, odesongel, and other olangch to build the background for the oral histories.
The methods employed, then, combine Palauan and Western notions of history. Source material comes from the Palauan tradition of family oral history and from personal observation. I have supplemented it with written records about Palau and with Japanese and American accounts of their colonial periods and the war. To all these I have provided additional commentary and interpretation. My hope is that reducing the islanders' stories to writing will preserve them but not ossify them, while making the history of the people of Peleliu and Palau available to a wider audience.
The Landscape of Islands
Peleliu is a small island. It has a land area of only 4.78 square miles (12.4 square kilometers). Adding the the shoreline mangrove swamps brings it to 5.73 square miles (14.8 square kilometers). Islands are distinctive for their natural environments. Their smallness and isolation have made many oceanic islands (i.e., those that were never connected to continents, which includes Palau and all of Micronesia) ideal laboratories for understanding the origin, diversification, and extinction of their biota. Those islands furthest from the sources of colonizing species will receive the fewest number of species. Vertebrates in particular disperse poorly.
The result is that the biota of oceanic islands tend to be radically different from those of continents. Oceanic islands are likely to have high rates of endemism — that is, species found nowhere else in the world. In the Hawaiian Islands 94 percent of all flowering plant species are endemic. Guam has (or had) 25 species of birds, 18 of them endemic to the island. By contrast, 852 species of birds have been recorded in Nepal, but only one of them is endemic.
In an influential essay, Raymond Fosberg points out that "isolation and limited size" are the essential traits of insularity, as opposed to continental landmasses. Islands' limited size "makes even relatively small changes capable of rather profound general effects" since the buffering effects of greater size and biological diversity are lacking. Elsewhere Fosberg writes, "Perhaps the thing that most distinguishes at least oceanic islands ... is their extreme vulnerability, or susceptibility, to disturbance. Guam's birds evolved on an island that had no tree-climbing predators to threaten their nests. But in the 70 years since the accidental introduction of the brown tree snake, this excellent tree climber has wiped out or seriously reduced most of Guam's 25 resident bird species.
This fragility of island ecosystems matters to our story for two reasons. First, we must appreciate the remarkable length of time — between 2,000 and 3,500 years — that Palauan and other natives of western Micronesia, those in Yap and the Marianas, were able to sustain their societies in these delicate environments. Second, the island's fragility is vital in helping us to comprehend the depth of the environmental disaster the people of Peleliu encountered when they returned to their island after the amphibious invasion of 1944.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Battle Over Peleliu by Stephen C. Murray. Copyright © 2016 University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Palauan and Colonial Landscapes
Chapter 1 History, Memory, and Island Landscapes
Chapter 2 Colonial Masters and Island Society
Part II. Peace, War, and a New Empire
Chapter 3 Smiling Sky, Gathering Clouds
Chapter 4 War
Chapter 5 Exile, Fear, and Hunger: Ngaraard, Babeldaob, 1944–1945
Chapter 6 An Island Desolated, a Trust Betrayed, 1946–1994
Part III. Pursuing Memory
Chapter 7 Retrieving the Dead
Chapter 8 Remembering a Painful Victory
Chapter 9 Parallel Histories: Three Peoples' Memories of War and Loss
Conclusion: The Roots of the Plant
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index