During WWII, Vanuatu was a major staging ground for action against the Japanese in nearby Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands. Espiritu Santo, the Vanuatu island where we are now, saw untold thousands of GIs, who built several airfields and whole cities of quonset huts. At one time, there were reportedly over thirty cinemas in operation here. No combat occurred here, but the American military had a tremendous impact on the land and people of "Santo".
At the end of the war, the U.S. decided not to repatriate all the goods and machinery that they had brought here. They offered it to the British and French administrators of the then New Hebrides (now independent Vanuatu) for pennies on the dollar. The offer was refused, though, with the greedy thought that the Americans would leave it all here, anyway. Spitefully, the Americans had other ideas. They simply bulldozed it all into the sea, and ran the bulldozers in afterwards.
It’s all still there, an immense underwater junkpile — trucks, cranes, forklifts, building materials, spare parts of every description, and zillions of Coke bottles. I can only imagine the polution at the time, but today it forms an artificial reef with huge schools of fish, some quite large.
We joined our friends Mark and Susan from the boat Erie Spirit for a snorkeling expedition out there today. The taxi driver, David, spoke no English, but the conversation flowed nicely (albeit rudimentarily) in Bislama. Parts of the shore were so littered in twisted, corroded metal and broken glass that footwear was absolutely essential.
To get underway with mask and fins, we waded in where there was some sand, sat down to don gear, then swam out over the surreal sea bottom. After the better part of a century, the sea had blurred the outlines of the debris, welding it all into a ghostly scene of coral and sponge-flecked wreckage — a tracked vehicle on it’s back, probably a bulldozer; innumerable truck chassis surrounded by piles of wheels and engines; enough quonset-hut frames and roofing to build a city, all piled densely, descending into the depths. In curious juxtaposition, huge schools of fish swam around us, the best such display I’ve seen here in Vanuatu.
After maybe an hour, we emerged, shaking our heads at the childish, spiteful response of the American authorities to the greedy, selfish scheming of the colonial powers. A few locals did take up the Americans on their fire-sale offer, though, becoming quite wealthy as a result. One man reputedly started a shipping company, exporting the machinery and goods he had purchased so cheaply. Others did well scavenging and salvaging what they could after the fact. One New Zealander hauled out some of the bulldozers after they had lain in the sea for several years. He cleaned them up, put them back in working order, and sold them to the Australian government. What a waste.
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