The American invasion of NZ

At any one time between June 1942 and mid-1944 there were between 15,000 and 45,000 American servicemen in camp in New Zealand. For both visitor and host it was an intriguing experience with much of the quality of a Hollywood fantasy. The American soldier found himself 'deep in the heart of the South Seas', in the words of his army-issued pocket guide. He was in a land of tree-ferns and semi-tropical 'jungle'. He usually came either before or immediately after the horror of war on a Pacific island, and he found a land of milk and honey (literally), of caring mothers and 'pretty girls'.

For the host people, just struggling out of a depression and now nearly three years into the anxieties and deprivation of war, the arrival of thousands of well-fed young Americans with smiles on their faces, charm in their hearts and money in their pockets was a Hollywood romance come briefly to life. New Zealanders too have recalled the experience in novels and a television drama.

What gave the encounter its special romance was that the two peoples were sufficiently similar to communicate, but sufficiently different to find each other intriguing. Both were a former colonial people with a frontier past. Both believed in democracy and civil liberty, and the capitalist way of life. Most people in both countries used English as their mother tongue. And from December 1941 the similarities became even stronger as the two peoples, each with a Pacific coastline, found themselves at war with Japan.

Yet in the early 1940s there were also significant differences. The United States was a large and confident society of more than 130 million people, many of whom, a generation before, had been slum-dwellers or peasants in Europe. New Zealand by contrast was a small, isolated country with 1.6 million inhabitants, about the population of Detroit, Michigan. It remained in many ways colonial in outlook, a Britain of the South which had some difficulty convincing the new arrivals that it was not ruled by Winston Churchill.

So the 'American invasion' (as New Zealanders affectionately called the event) brought a considerable clash of cultures. Though Kiwi and Yankee spoke the same language, they did so with different accents. Though they shared a fondness for owning cars, they drove on different sides of the road.

The Troops Arrive The invasion began in Auckland on 12 June 1942 when five transport ships carrying soldiers of the US army (or 'doughboys' as they were called) sailed into the harbour. Two days later marines (or 'leathernecks') landed in Wellington. They had arrived as a result of the outbreak of war in the Pacific six months before. From the New Zealand perspective the Americans strengthened New Zealand's defences against possible Japanese attack; while the Americans saw New Zealand as a valuable source of supply and a staging post for operations against the Japanese in the Pacific.

For Aucklanders, the invasion began on a wintry Friday afternoon, 12 June 1942. The skies were grey, the water the colour of steel, as five transport ships, with a cruiser in front and a destroyer in the rear, sailed into Auckland harbour unannounced. The next morning the Mayor of Auckland, J.A.C. Allum, and four military bands stood on Prince's Wharf waiting to greet the new arrivals. They played appropriate pieces -'The Stars and Stripes Forever', 'Colonel Bogey' - and were quickly answered by wide-mouthed sousaphones on board ship playing 'Roll Out the Barrel'. Local ferries blared their horns, passengers waved; the Americans, nurses in blue, soldiers in olive-green, cheered and crammed the cityside of one transport so tightly that the ship listed heavily.

As they berthed another interesting exchange occurred. The Americans threw down oranges, cigarettes and money; the waiting Kiwis picked up the gifts and threw back New Zealand coins. Some of the visitors wondered where they were, but an American on the wharf, one of the advance guard, gave them all the information they needed to know: 'No Scotch, two per cent beer, but nice folks.' Some evidently did know what country they had reached, for the first of the newcomers to land on New Zealand soil was Sergeant Nathan E. Cook, chosen in commemoration of the explorer Captain James Cook. It was some hours before all his comrades of 145 Regiment of the 37th US Army Division were marched off to the railway station and to camp.

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Why did they come? It was the dramatic spread of war to the Pacific some six months earlier which had brought about the first substantial landing of foreign troops in New Zealand since British regiments had left in the 1860s.

On 7 December 1941 Japanese bombers had crippled the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu. If New Zealanders felt vaguely thankful that the Americans were now involved in the war, their confidence was quickly shaken. Within days British naval strength, for so long New Zealand's surest bastion, was shown to be vulnerable. The warships Prince of Wales and Repulse were sunk by Japanese torpedoes. By Christmas Day Hong Kong had fallen; and then on 15 February Singapore surrendered. Four days later Darwin was bombed. Some New Zealanders became alarmed that Auckland might be next.

The Prime Minister, Peter Fraser, appealed to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill for assistance in strengthening New Zealand's defence, making the point that with war in the Pacific New Zealand could become a main base area. Churchill was in no position to help, but he was sympathetic to Fraser's plea. There was the obvious option of withdrawing the New Zealand Division from the Middle East to defend the homeland as the Australians had done. But the war in the Middle East was delicately balanced, and the New Zealand troops had been trained to fight there. To withdraw them would be time-consuming and costly in terms of shipping. So on 5 March Churchill asked Roosevelt to send a division to New Zealand on the condition that the New Zealanders remained in Egypt. Roosevelt agreed, and on 24 March cabled that 'we are straining every effort' to send forces at the earliest moment.