“My people, I want to tell you today that I have made a decision that no woman has a right to do, but I have made it as Queen: we will support England in the war today until the end of the war.”

Queen Sālote's 1939 personal call for Tongan volunteers to fight for the British Empire in the Second World War; nearly every eligible Tongan man volunteered for the Tonga Defence Force in response.

— Queen Sālote Tupou III, Tonga

Source: Queen Sālote Tupou III, public address calling for WWII volunteers, 1939, quoted in Elizabeth Wood-Ellem, Queen Sālote of Tonga: The Story of an Era, 1900-1965 (University of Hawai'i Press, 1999), p.192