Pictorial Record of Navy

Uncle Sam's Guam Yankees

Pictorial Record of Navy Outpost

riIHE things Uncle Sam does for the X Pacific Islands under his control are pictorially set out in a glossy publi cation recently produced in Hawaii by Jeorge T. Armitage.

The subject is Guam, the “Farthest West” portion of the United States.

The Island is about 6,000 miles west of San Francisco and between the 13th and 14th degrees north latitude. There are 217 square miles of it. There are about 27,000 Guamanians and twice as many US servicemen there or a total of 85,000 altogether. Guam was in Jap occupation from a couple of days after Pearl Harbour to mid-1944—but there are few signs of war on Guam now.

Mr. Armitage’s book gives us some beautiful colour photographs of the charming little outpost both in its natural beauty‘and in the establishment America has built there.

The British observer is struck with one thing, however—the Americanisation of this island. Although some of our American friends have not been back ward in castigating us for our im perialistic notions and for the fact that ive have, in the past, owned colonies i mighty few now. unfortunately) we Eiave never planted our culture on native Deoples to the extent that the Americans aave done.

When large numbers of Englishmen vent out to India or Malaya or Kenya or it was the Englishmen who changed -adopting strange customs and snippets )f language and the Indians and Malayans ind Africans or Fijians just kept their )wn culture and wore the same clothes

and ate the same food—to a large extent, anyhow.

But when large crowds of Yanks take up their more or less permanent residence among what, for want of a better name we will call subject peoples— within a year or two there are not two peoples any more —they are all Yanks. That is certainly true of Hawaii and, according to the illustrations in Mr, Armitage’s book, it is true of Guam, The little boys wear striped sweaters and sailor caps and the youths, Aloha shirts; the little girls have little white boots and sox and short frocks and their big sisters wear peep-toed shoes and

sports dresses copied from Hollywood.

They all eat ice-cream at the corner drug store and go to the movies and attend the same sort of schools as American main land kids.

Anthropologists in our neck of the woods are fond of talking about culture-clashes, and giving the natives what is best in our culture while retaining what is best in their own. They turn thumbs down on what they call “Europeanisation.”

Maybe we are barking up the wrong tree. The Guam natives, who apparently want to be like Americans and certainly look like Americans (brown skinned type), seem happy enough.