A faded hand-written sign in large, but faded, red letters on a yellow block house wall says: “Welcome to Million Dollar Point”.
The block house is the size of a small toilet public-toilet block. Left over from World War II, when the US used the Vanuatu island of Espiritu Santos as a major store, staging post and port in the war against Japan.
Million Dollar Point does not look a million dollars now – 60 years after the events that gave it its name.
A couple of families of Vanuatans have come in taxis (they cannot afford their own cars) for a picnic. A dive boat has arrived from Bokissa Island resort with some divers to see what is under the water at this extraordinary place.
The water is gin clear – like Bombay blue gin.
Here, 60 years ago, the Americans faced a dilemma. They had stockpiled an enormous amount of equipment – enough to make airfields and give whatever other support in what looked like a long war that would culminate in the invasion of Japan. The atomic bombs made that unnecessary.
What was the US to do with all this machinery?
The Americans offered it to the locals and a very low price. But the wily locals knew the Americans could not take it home in one go; there was not enough room on their ships. It had taken many trips to bring it here.
The locals bided their time, knowing the Americans would have to abandon the equipment. In any event, the Americans did not want to bring a lot of war surplus home lest it flood the market. That would not be good for business.
When the local refused to buy, the US let business come first. Rather than allow the locals to get the equipment for nothing they dumped it into the sea. They put each vehicle on the jetty, put a brick on the accelerator, released the hand brake and let it run itself into the sea. The shore is very steep here, plunging to 40 metres just a short way from the shore. Then the Americans wrecked the jetty to stymie any instant salvage, causing resentment and a determination to undo the wastage.
In 1946 dollars the value of the equipment was more than $US1 million at the time.
Sixty years later it provides an extraordinary dive site. And just a couple of kilometres away lies the wreck of the USS Calvin Coolidge, another extraordinary dive site.
They are symbols of the ambiguity of American power – at once idealistic, altruistic, a bastion of democracy and willing to give its enormous resources to those ends, but at the same time selfish in the pursuit of business, insensitive to local hopes and interests and in the case of the USS Calvin Coolidge and architect of its own misfortune.
At Million Dollar Point this week – 60 years after the sinking — I saw 30 metres under the surface a surreal testament to American wealth: bulldozers, forklifts, jeeps, tanks, graders, gas tanks, compressors, stacks of roofing iron, girders – piles of equipment that could make roads and airfields and build schools and hospitals. Here it is, semi-preserved in salt water going brown in a blue-green world. Occasionally, bright tropical fish swim by in contrast. You can see the tread on the tyres – tyres that should have been worn out with post-war useful work, but thrown away on good business principles – worse deliberately destroyed.
Bizarrely, our Vanuatan divemaster, Harris Moli, sat in the driver’s seat of a forklift and pretended to drive it. One of his countrymen should have been doing it on land decades ago.
Some artful Australians later salvaged quite a deal of equipment. Several years after the sinking they dragged bulldozers out of the sea, oiled them and sold them in Australia. There have always been opportunists making pickings from American presence overseas.
The USS Calvin Coolidge named after the president who said, “The business of America IS business” and who spurned a between-wars appeal from the British to relieve debts run up with the US before the Americans entered World War I with the comment: “They hired the money, didn’t they?” .
At the outbreak of the Pacific war the Coolidge was made into a troopship. It was carrying about 5000 soldiers into Espiritu Santos island in what is now Vanuatu when it struck US-laid mines. It sank on a steep seabed a short way from shore in water between 20 and 70 metres deep.
All but two of the 5000 got to shore, and their bodies were recovered.
Sometimes it seems America can’t get anything right – condemned whatever it does. America the isolationist was vilified for its late entrance into the two world wars – entering only when America itself was under direct threat or attack. It was vilified for staying so long out of the Balkans in the 1990s. America the cooperative internationalist has been slammed for trying to lead the world and for trying to re-create it in its own image. America the unilateral interventionist in Vietnam and Iraq and elsewhere has been accused of wholesale unnecessary slaughter and mayhem – the cause of the quagmire into which it sank.
Perhaps it is in the nature of leadership that foolish things will be done and good things not done. If that were not the case empires would last indefinitely. And they don’t. Nor will the American one.