CANNIBALS HELP TO BUILD AIRFIELD
NEW YORK, September 23. The Honolulu correspondent of the "New York Times" sends on a story from an advanced airfield on a South Pacific island of how an American sergeant interrupted a cannibal feast to recruit native labour and help build the airfield.
An American captain said: "The navy and marines, working together in the rush building of an airfield,- needed native labour, but they could not get enough here, so we sent a sergeant to another island. When he reached a village there natives wearing a single wooden belt and coconut-husk loin cloth were just finishing a feast of which the main dish was ten women who' had been stolen from the chief of another tribe.
"It seems that tribe A stole • and ate a wife of the chief of tribe B; therefore, tribe B retaliated and stole the other chief's ten wives.
"When they had finished the meal
the sergeant dickered with them. They agreed to come and help us for a certain period, because they had heard that others had received* good treatment and wages from the American!.*
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Bibliographic details
Evening Post, Volume CXXXIV, Issue 75, 25 September 1942, Page 5
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186CANNIBALS HELP TO BUILD AIRFIELD Evening Post, Volume CXXXIV, Issue 75, 25 September 1942, Page 5
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