GREAT BRITAIN: By Tarawa’s Lamplight

Betio Island, white and wasted at the end of a palmy green bay, was more than ever a base of war. But elsewhere in the Tarawa Atoll the sturdy brown Gilbertese had picked up again an old, familiar thread of life.

They had been philosophically submissive during two years of Jap rule, had suffered nothing worse than occasional hunger when the conqueror took their babai (taro), pigs, chickens and catches of fish, and reduced them to sucking pandanus fruit and coconut milk. Now, back under the eye of British colonial officers (TIME, Dec. 13), some volunteered for labor battalions run by the British as reciprocal aid to U.S. forces. Others dug new babai pits, rebuilt palm-frond huts, hauled in fish beyond the coral reefs. At night, whenever they could borrow a lamp from British resident officers, they danced on the pebbled floors of their spacious, thatched meetinghouses.

Squatting on mats, the villagers watched, chanted, beat out rhythms on packing boxes, joined the stylized, immemorial South Sea steps. The tempo rose to crescendo. Then beyond the fringe of lamplight sounded whistles of applause. But these were native whistlers, not American gate-crashers. For U.S. troops the villages of British Tarawa are out of bounds.