We tell many war stories, the political more so than the private. Narratives of love and loss sit uneasily with traditional accounts of nations, units and combatants; they can be painful to acknowledge and difficult to recover. Nonetheless, affection and intimacy have been fertile ground for histories challenging dominant tales of war and conflict that all too often emphasise the bloodiest battles and the men who fought them. Judith A. Bennett and Angela Wanhalla’s edited collection, Mothers’ Darlings of the South Pacific, is an exemplar of how to shift that focus, providing hitherto untold stories by indigenous women, their children and their families, that explore a very different side to the American experience in the South Pacific during World War II.