Sir Jacob Vouza and the Solomon Islands Scouts

Sergeant Major Jacob Vouza of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate police, photographed by the U.S. Marine Corps on Guadalcanal. Archives Branch, USMC History Division, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Special Units · Guadalcanal, 1942–43

Sir Jacob Vouza and the Solomon Islands Scouts

A retired police sergeant major from Tasimboko, captured, tortured and left for dead by the Japanese, crawled to the Marine lines to warn them of the attack at the Ilu River, then served as chief scout for the rest of the campaign; he stood for hundreds of Islanders whose knowledge of their own island the Americans could not have done without.

The Americans who landed on Guadalcanal in August 1942 knew almost nothing about the island. They had poor maps, no knowledge of the trails, villages or rivers inland, and no way to tell where the Japanese were except by patrolling into ambushes. What they had, from the second week of the campaign, was a body of Solomon Islander scouts, police and guides, organized by the British district officer Martin Clemens, who knew the ground intimately and who chose, at great personal risk, to work for the Allies. The best known of them was Jacob Vouza.

Vouza’s ordeal on 20 August 1942, when Japanese soldiers of the Ichiki Detachment captured him, found a small American flag on him, bayoneted him and left him tied to a tree, and his escape to warn the Marines of the coming attack at the mouth of the Ilu River, made him a hero to the 1st Marine Division. He went on to serve as chief scout, guided Carlson’s Raiders on the Long Patrol, and after the war became a leader of his people on Guadalcanal, a member of the Protectorate’s Advisory Council and, in 1979, a knight. This page tells his story alongside that of the scouts and carriers he served with. The battle he warned of is in Chapter 4: The Tenaru, the Goettge Patrol and the Matanikau; the wider Islander experience of the war is in Chapter 8.

The record of Vouza’s life is less settled than its fame might suggest. American and Solomon Islands sources disagree about the year of his birth, the date of his retirement from the police, the date of his capture and even the date of his death. Those differences are set out below rather than smoothed over. The main sources are Henry I. Shaw Jr.’s Marine Corps history First Offensive (1992), which includes a biographical sidebar on Vouza; the Solomon Islands Historical Encyclopaedia 1893–1978 entry by Clive Moore; Pacific Wrecks; Jon T. Hoffman’s history of the Raiders; and Martin Clemens’s own accounts.

A policeman from Tasimboko

Jacob Charles Vouza was born at Tasimboko, on the north coast of Guadalcanal east of the Lunga plain. Shaw, Moore and Pacific Wrecks give his birth as about 1900; the Wikipedia article, citing other sources, gives about 1892. Pacific Wrecks records that he was educated at the South Seas Evangelical Mission school, part of the Protestant mission that was active on Guadalcanal and Malaita.

In 1916 he joined the Armed Native Constabulary of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, the small police force that kept order for the colonial administration. Moore records that from 1931 he was in charge of the Armed Constabulary on Malaita, the most populous island of the group, and that he received the King George VI Coronation Medal in 1938. It was on Malaita, about 1938, that he met a young British cadet officer, Martin Clemens, then on his first posting; Clemens told Pacific Wrecks that Vouza was then a sergeant in charge of about 20 policemen. Vouza retired as a sergeant major, in 1939 according to Moore, or in 1941 after 25 years’ service according to Shaw and Pacific Wrecks, and received the Colonial Police medal on leaving.

The war comes to Guadalcanal

When the Japanese occupied Tulagi in May 1942 and landed on Guadalcanal to build an airfield, most Europeans left the Protectorate. Clemens stayed on Guadalcanal as district officer and coastwatcher, moving inland with his police and a network of village informants, as told on the companion page on the Coastwatchers of the Solomons. Vouza, by then retired, returned to duty. Shaw writes that he volunteered to work with the coastwatchers; Pacific Wrecks, that he resumed police service and remained loyal to the British administration.

Vouza first met the Marines on the day of the landing. Shaw records that on 7 August 1942 he rescued a Navy pilot from the carrier Wasp who had come down in Japanese-held territory and guided him to the American lines. Clemens himself walked into the Marine perimeter on 14 August with his bodyguard of police and was attached to the 1st Marine Division’s intelligence section. His scouts, Vouza among them, began scouting for the Marines at once.

Capture and escape, 20 August 1942

On 18–19 August 1942 Japanese destroyers landed the advance echelon of Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki’s detachment, about 900 men of the 28th Infantry Regiment, at Taivu Point, east of the Marine perimeter. On 20 August Vouza was sent out on a Marine mission to locate suspected Japanese outposts east of the perimeter. He was captured by Ichiki’s men. Searching him, they found a small American flag hidden in his loincloth and accused him of spying.

The Japanese tied him to a tree and questioned him for hours about the Marine positions. He refused to answer. They beat him and then bayoneted him repeatedly, in the chest, throat and face among other places, and left him for dead as they moved west toward the Marine lines. The accounts differ on the details of his wounds, as the table above shows, but agree that they were severe; Moore writes that his voice never fully recovered. Pacific Wrecks records that he later named one of his torturers as Terushige Ishimoto, though that man appears to have been elsewhere at the time, and suggests the interrogators were more likely officers of the detachment; the question cannot now be settled.

After the Japanese left, Vouza regained consciousness, chewed through the ropes binding him and made his way toward the American lines, about three miles by the Pacific Wrecks account, losing blood the whole way. He reached the positions of Lieutenant Colonel Edwin A. Pollock’s 2d Battalion, 1st Marines, dug in on the west bank of the Ilu River, which the Marines mistakenly called the Tenaru. Pacific Wrecks names the Marine sentry who brought him in as Wilbur Bewley. Before accepting medical treatment, Vouza insisted on reporting what he knew. Shaw records that he warned Pollock and Clemens that an estimated 250 to 500 Japanese were coming; by one account in the Wikipedia article, the warning came about ten minutes before the attack.

Ichiki’s attack began at 0130 on 21 August, when his men charged across the sandbar at the river mouth into the Marines’ fire. It failed completely. At daybreak the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, crossed the river upstream and attacked the Japanese flank, and by 1700 the fighting was over. Shaw counts close to 800 Japanese dead, among them Ichiki, who is reported to have burned his regimental colors and shot himself; the Marines lost 34 killed and 75 wounded. The battle is told in full in Chapter 4.

Chief scout

Vouza received first aid and a large blood transfusion. After about twelve days in hospital he returned to duty, this time as chief scout for the Marines. Major General Alexander A. Vandegrift personally presented him with the Silver Star for refusing to give information under torture. Photographs from later in the campaign show him in Marine uniform with sergeant major’s insignia.

Vouza’s best-documented service after his recovery was with Lieutenant Colonel Evans F. Carlson’s 2d Raider Battalion on the Long Patrol of November–December 1942. He was among the scouts who left Aola Bay with Carlson on 6 November and led the columns through the interior for a month, finding the trails, campsites and Japanese positions that the Raiders attacked. Hoffman describes him at that point as “already a hero in the campaign.” Shaw records that Vouza received the U.S. Legion of Merit for outstanding service with the 2d Raider Battalion in November and December 1942. The patrol is described on Carlson’s Raiders: the Long Patrol.

Pacific Wrecks also notes a photograph taken at Henderson Field in December 1942 showing Vouza in Marine uniform holding a Japanese soldier’s severed head, which it describes as likely staged for propaganda. It is a reminder that the war on Guadalcanal was fought with great brutality on both sides, and that Islanders who had suffered at Japanese hands were drawn into that brutality too. This page does not reproduce the image.

The Solomon Islands Scouts

Vouza was the most famous of the scouts, but he was one of many. Clemens told Pacific Wrecks that he had about 300 scouts on Guadalcanal, and that around November 1942 about 150 Fijian commandos joined them. The scouts patrolled ahead of Marine and Army units, reported Japanese movements, guided reconnaissance patrols, located downed airmen, and carried messages between the perimeter and the outlying coastwatching stations. Clemens’s memoir, unusual among wartime accounts, names some of the men who served him before the landing: Daniel Pule, who drew him a detailed map of the Japanese installations at Kukum and Lunga, and Dovu, Koimate, Londoviko, Eroni and Michael. The Moore encyclopedia entry names Corporal (later Sergeant) Andrew Langabaea of Malaita among the men photographed with Clemens.

Beyond the scouts were the carriers and laborers. American units hired Islanders to carry supplies over trails no vehicle could use, to unload ships, to build roads and camps, and to bring in the wounded. On the Long Patrol, Hoffman records, Islander porters brought periodic resupply to the Raiders in the interior. In the western Solomons, the coastwatcher Donald Kennedy led about 30 Islander fighters and 60 carriers from his base at Segi on New Georgia, and Islanders operated his teleradio. Every coastwatching station needed 12 to 16 carriers to move, according to the Australian Anzac Portal history.

The Islanders’ position was not simple. Their island had become a battlefield between two foreign powers, neither of which had asked them. Villages on the coast were bombed, shelled and occupied; gardens were taken or destroyed; and people moved inland to escape the fighting. Islanders known to have helped the Allies could expect severe punishment if captured, as Vouza’s own experience showed,. That so many Solomon Islanders chose to help the Allies, and risked their lives to do it, is one of the central facts of the campaign. In June 1943 the scouts were brought into the British Solomon Islands Defence Force, and Clemens became a battalion commander and moved to Munda for the New Georgia campaign.

After the war: headman, councillor, knight

Britain awarded Vouza the George Medal in 1943 for gallant conduct and exceptional devotion to duty, and he later received the Police Long Service Medal. After the war he was made an honorary sub-inspector of the Protectorate police (Moore). He settled at his village of Roroni, near Tetere on the Guadalcanal coast, which he renamed “California” in honor of his American friends. He became a district headman in 1949 and was president of the Guadalcanal Council from 1952 to 1958, and he served on the Protectorate’s Advisory Council through the 1950s (1950–60 in Shaw, 1951–60 in Moore). In 1953 he represented the Protectorate at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in London. He was appointed MBE in 1957 for long and faithful government service.

Moore’s entry adds a side of Vouza that American accounts usually omit. He was, Moore writes, a key leader on Guadalcanal of Maasina Rule, the postwar movement for Solomon Islander self-government and against colonial controls that began on Malaita, and he was at times intensely anti-colonial. The loyal policeman of 1942 was also a man who believed his people should govern themselves, and there is no contradiction between the two. Many Islanders who served the Allies in the war came home with new expectations of what the British administration owed them.

His ties to the Marines lasted. In 1962 he sent a message to the 1st Marine Division Association that Pacific Wrecks records in part: “Tell them I love them all,” and “But me never forget.” In August 1968 he visited the United States with Clemens as the honored guest of the association, traveling to California, Philadelphia and Washington, where he met the Secretary of State. When he returned home, a feast proclaimed him malaghai, a warrior. Marine veterans afterward established the Jacob Vouza Scholarship for students in the Solomon Islands. In May 1974 the Marines placed a bronze plaque in front of his house. Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in 1979, the year after the Solomon Islands became independent, and he became Sir Jacob Vouza.

Death and memory

Vouza died in March 1984, on the 15th according to Shaw, Pacific Wrecks and other sources, or the 5th according to the Solomon Islands encyclopedia. Pacific Wrecks records that he was buried in his Marine uniform with all his medals at California village. His grave carries a brass plaque from the U.S. Marine Raiders Association honoring his “supreme intrepidity and valour in the face of the enemy.”

In 1992, during the 50th-anniversary commemorations of the landing, a statue of Vouza was erected outside the police headquarters at Rove in Honiara. Moore writes that he is the only Solomon Islander honored in this way. Pacific Wrecks describes the statue as showing him in a lap-lap holding a machete, with three bronze plaques. Solomon Islanders and Americans have continued to remember the scouts at anniversary ceremonies; at the 80th anniversary in 2022, Islanders took part in the ceremonies at Bloody Ridge and at the Guadalcanal American Memorial on Skyline Ridge.

Islanders also cared for the dead. During the campaign and after it, Solomon Islanders helped bury and tend the graves of American servicemen in the cemeteries around Lunga Point, until the remains were moved after the war.

Vouza’s name is now attached to the Solomon Islands’ wartime memory in a way few individuals’ are. The Jacob Vouza Scholarship, the statue at Rove and the plaques at his village speak for the Marines’ gratitude; the encyclopedia entry and the memories of his own people speak for the policeman, headman and leader he was before and after 1942. A memorial to the coastwatchers and the Solomon Islands scouts, unveiled in Honiara in August 2011, honors the men who served beside him and whose names are mostly forgotten.