US Army Guide to New Caledonia - The George C. Marshall ...

donians as your personal attitude and behavior merit it .
New Caledonia has been a French colony since 1853 .
When the French Republic collapsed an 194o the Governor
of the colony wanted to string along with Vichy .
But the plain people drove him out of the colony and se t
up a government to work with General de Gaulle ,
Just Suppose . Let us suppose for a minute that New .
- Caledonia had taken the opposite course, and played th e
pliable Vichy game the way French Indochina did . Yo u
remember what happened there . Indochina opened he r
doors to the Japanese (for "protection " ) and right awa y
they began to build airports and establish garrisons .-That
surrender destroyed the balance of militant power in th e
Pacific and led to defeat in Malaya, the Philippines, an d
the Dutch East Indies .
If the same thing had happened In New Caledonia, th e
- 'results .would have been as bad or worse for us . For thi s
agar-shaped Island lies only 750 miles across the Cora l
Sea from Australia . Given possession of this key spot ,
the Japanese might have been able to knock out Australi a
before now and certainly would have blocked our presen t
route across the Southwest Pacific . The job of runnin g
the Japanese out of the East Indies, tough as at is now ,
would have been many times as difficult .
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