US forces in New Zealand

The American invasion

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'. Little wonder that in later years Leon Uris would write a novel about the experience (Battlecry) and that Hollywood itself would make a film (Until they sail) with Paul Newman as the heart-throb.

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 meeting of these two cultures - similar, yet so different - is the theme of this exhibition.