Hawai‘i may be the most militarized of the fifty American states. With a modern history rooted in American empire building, it has served for over a century as an important nexus of American power. Broken into an introduction, five chapters, and an afterword, Ireland's book explores various facets of this militarized Hawai‘i, providing a thematic as opposed to a narrative examination of the US military in the islands.
In the first chapter, Ireland interrogates the antiseptic discourses employed by a number of historians – especially Lyndall and Daniel Landauer, who wrote a history of the United States Navy at Pearl Harbor, and the staff of the Army Museum of Hawaii at Fort DeRussy – in eliding the imperial conquest of the islands. Readers of the Landauers’ work, Ireland argues, are confronted with “a mythology about weak, defenceless islands, threatened by hostile Asian and European colonial powers,” in which an “innocent” United States is “interested only in bringing progress, democracy, and civilization to less enlightened natives.” In this way, the American military “justif[ies] its presence” (25). The same is true for visitors to the Army Museum, according to Ireland, who are presented with displays that make the military presence seem not only “inevitable” but also “necessary” (42).
Chapters 2 and 3 focus on World War I through, respectively, the Waikiki War Memorial Park and Natatorium and the remembrance of Hawai‘i's Great War dead. Ireland writes that the Waikiki memorial evokes a message of “submission to imperial forces and glorification of both war and the American military” (79), in effect consolidating the “colonial presence” (82) of the United States in Hawai‘i. In examining the burial sites of those killed in World War I, he critiques the “officially sanctioned, state-endorsed, and military-approved story of duty, honor, and sacrifice for the nation” conveyed by official cemeteries (131–32). He sees more hope in community graveyards, where, he asserts, “a different, less ordered, more personal, and more complete story of those soldiers” is offered (132).
In chapter 4, Ireland surveys numerous films to take on “Haolewood” representations of the islands and their people. Such representations, he argues, have been determined by the desires of mainland audiences, moving from early portrayals of a “primitive Pacific” to post-World War II pictures featuring a “brave site of attack on ‘American soil’” to, from the mid-1950s through the 1960s, an “enticing model of racial harmony” (138). How Ireland's analysis connects with the larger military framework of his book is not always immediately apparent, though one can certainly identify the imperial implications of the Hollywood productions he astutely addresses.
Finally, in the last chapter Ireland provides a comparative analysis of coverage of the Vietnam War era by mainstream and underground Hawai‘ian newspapers. Not surprisingly, Ireland found the mainstream press he examined (the Honolulu Advertiser and Honolulu Star-Bulletin) to be largely sympathetic to American military objectives in Southeast Asia. In the underground press, conversely, Ireland discovered evidence of a healthy and “largely forgotten” (172) antiwar movement that sought to situate its discussion of the Vietnam War within the “systems of power in which the U.S. military operates” (173). While certain of his claims left me unconvinced – for example, that the Star-Bulletin left no doubt about which side readers should sympathize with in reporting that hecklers “spat at the marchers and shouted ‘chicken, scum, cowards, commies!’” (193) during an antiwar march in 1966 – Ireland nevertheless provides a number of important insights on the history of the Hawai‘ian media.
Though it tends to read more like a series of separate essays than a cohesive and unitary analysis, The US Military in Hawai‘i is an engaging and passionately written study that should interest scholars in numerous fields.
