| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Oceania and the Pacific Islands

Kim Munholland. Rock of Contention: Free French and Americans at War in New Caledonia, 1940–1945. New York: Berghahn Books. 2005. Pp. xi, 251. $60.00.

The intentional ambivalence in the subtitle of this impressive book by Kim Munholland tells it all. Were the Free French and Americans allies in war, or at war with each other? Most books on the French colony of New Caledonia contain a paradox in their titles. Often it is a variant on the concept of "a stormy paradise," and few histories of this mineral-rich South Pacific island avoid some prominent allusion to its multiple scenes of conflict. A norm, one might argue, for a colonized people struggling to free themselves from the colonizers, but added to this there was a series of flamboyant rivalries between authority figures on the island that made it "a graveyard" for colonial governors. When Jacques Tallec arrived in February 1944, he was the sixth governor since the fall of France in June 1940, and this was no departure from the prewar pattern of governance.

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