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Full text of "Allied Intelligence Bureau"

1 11 679 



C 2 

is 
ii 



Allied Intelligence Burean 



Also by COLONEL ALLISON IND 

BATAAN: THE JUDGMENT SEAT 
THE FIRES OF TJEPO 
AUSTRALIAN BRIDE 



Our Secret Weapon 

in the War 
Against Japan 



COLONEL ILIM ID 

ARMY OF THE UNITED STATES 



MAPS BY DONALD PITCHER 



David McKay Company, Inc. 
New York 



COPYRIGHT 1958 BY ALLISON IND 

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce 
this book, or parts thereof, in any form, except 
for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. 



Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 58-12259 

Manufactured in the United States of America 
Van Rees Press New York 



To 
"Connie" and "MJ.F." 



Foreword and 
Acknowledgment 



K 



iAPOLEON ESTIMATED THAT "A SPY IN THE 

right place is worth twenty thousand troops." 

Initially in the war against Japan, MacArthur had few troops 
because of the holocaust raging over most of the globe; it was the 
task of the newly created Allied Intelligence Bureau to get spies 
into the right places, not only amid the bewildering island network 
of the Philippine Archipelago, but in the whole vast area from 
Singapore throughout the elongated tail of the Netherlands East 
Indies into New Guinea, the Admiralties, New Britain, and down 
into the Solomons. That area could be superimposed over the 
greater part of the United States and Canada. 

The Bureau was one of the several intelligence tools originated 
and utilized by GHQ, Southwest Pacific Area, first for the collection 
of information vital to the integrity of the Command as a fighting 
machine, and then for the purposeful prosecution of the war by that 
Command. The history of each of those tools is a story in itself. 
This is "AIB's" story. But similarly, the sequences presented here 
can in fact be only highlights of a complicated picture involving at 
the end several thousand individuals performing allocated assign- 
ments. Of these a total of 164 were known to have lost their lives 
while the fate of 178 others remained a mystery. Seventy-five were 
listed as captured. A measure of the esteem in which these men, 
living and dead, have been held by the Allied governments con- 
cerned may be seen in the fact that approximately 170 decorations 
were awarded to all ranks and grades. 



viii FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENT 

Official statistics credit the Bureau with a total of 264 missions, 
exclusive of those operated into the Philippines from mid-1943 
onward under the semi-autonomous Philippine Regional Section 
springing from the original Philippine Special Section of the Bureau. 
The greatly stepped-up, purely AIB, effort mainly against the 
enemy-held Celebes islands and Borneo in the first seven months of 
1945, mostly by the Services Reconnaissance Department of the 
Bureau (SRD), alone accounted for 155 sorties, the majority by 
aircraft. More than 300,000 pounds of supplies went in to agents, 
guerrillas, and isolated civilians. While combat is not a function of 
clandestine intelligence units, commando and other para-military 
operations of the Bureau accounted for more than 7,000 enemy 
killed and 150 captured, while still another 950 enemy surrendered 
in consequence of propaganda efforts carried on largely by the 
associated Far Eastern Liaison Office (FELO). Last, but certainly 
not least, on the humanitarian side were the more than 1,000 indi- 
viduals of all services rescued by AIB units throughout the area of 
operations. 

Just as the total effort in discharging the total intelligence re- 
sponsibility is to be shared by all the intelligence organizations con- 
cerned, both those under and associated with the "G-2" of GHQ 
and those beyond SWPA, and just as the record of the specific AIB 
achievement is to be shared by all who participated in one capacity 
or another, similarly credit for the production of this single volume 
must be shared among numerous individuals, military and civilian; 
without their assistance, some over a period of more than a decade 
in the collection and analysis of data and the review of successive 
manuscripts, it is doubtful if the work could have been accom- 
plished. 

It is desired, therefore, to mention at least the following: Major 
General C. A. Willoughby, retired; Brigadier K. A. Willis, retired; 
Brigadier General Harry O. Paxon, retired; Colonel C. S. Myers, 
retired; Master Sergeant Juan Dahilig; Professor L. H. Conrad, 
Mary Jane Finke; R. C. Galang; Edith D. Johnson; Joan Corrigan; 
Anastasia Stamathis; Lila Beehler; and then, throughout, my 
patient, hard-typing wife. 



Contents 



Part 1 POINT OF NO RETREAT 1 

Part 2 THE SOLOMONS 15 

The Coast Watchers 17 

Part 3 NEW BRITAIN AND NEW GUINEA 65 

New Britain Interlude 67 
Buna 79 

New Britain Toll 87 
Gazelle Necklace 94 
Fateful Hollandia 103 

Part 4 THE PHILIPPINES 113 

"Planet" Project 115 

The "Man-Who-Walks-Like-a-Ghost" 146 

"Carabao Bo/ 7 155 

Chic Parsons, 'The Artful Dodger" 159 

Sulu Sharpshooter 189 

Philippine Snatch 198 

Mindanao Mender 205 

The Charlie Smith Way 223 

The Captured Plans 230 

Part 5 THE COMMANDOS 243 

Limpets for Singapore 245 
Tahoelandang 262 
Sultan's Ransom 274 

Part 6 FINALE 289 

The Unspoken 291 
Finale 293 

INDEX 295 

ix 



Part I 
POINT OF NO RETREAT 



A/L 



ELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA, ON THE SOUTHERN- 

most coast of the far-south continent. Beyond, only the relatively 
small dab of land known as Tasmania. And then the wilderness of 
the South Pacific Ocean congealing into the white reaches of Ant- 
arctica. . . . 

Melbourne, then, in early 1942; this far had the remnants of 
those defending the Western way of life in the Orient been driven 
from Singapore's sea-girt fortress, from the Netherlands East In- 
dies, and the Great East, and from the stricken archipelago of the 
Philippines. 

The point of no retreat. 

Northward of Australia, a broad arc over the globe's surface was 
a sinister wartime secret. Forces moved there, gathered, and moved 
again. The evil of their intent and their implacability went before 
them like an infection. They knew no barriers, certainly none that 
we in the Philippines, the Chinese on the Asia mainland, the British 
in Malaya, or the Dutch in the Indies had been able to erect against 
them. One by one the thin, uncertain lines of communication be- 
tween General MacArthur's reconstituted headquarters in Mel- 
bourne and the tortured Philippines three thousand miles to the 
north were fading into silence. 

Singapore was mute. Batavia, Bandoeng, Soerabaja. . . . Rabaul 
in New Britain. New Ireland and the Admiralties. Paralysis was 
creeping down the Solomons, too. Cryptic signals still were to be 
picked up from a handful of Australian Coast Watchers who mirac- 
ulously had survived the engulfing flood of invasion and now were 
isolated radio voices far back of the enemy lines of advance; other 

3 



4 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

brief whispers came through the ether from ghost ships that hit 
and ran and hit again far in some other direction to try to deceive 
the enemy into a belief of strength when there was no strength after 
Pearl Harbor; from the few air strips still in Allied hands young 
pilots hardly more than out of flying school, yet suddenly old in the 
ways of war, flew daring missions without escost, always at the 
ragged edge of endurance, to bomb, strafe, and fight, and to collect 
any bit of military information that would help. 

On April 18, 1942, General Douglas MacArthur had formally 
assumed his newly constituted command, Southwest Pacific Area, 
or "SWPA." This gave him military authority there over all the 
army, navy, and air elements of the Americans, the Australians, 
British, Dutch, and any other remnant of the Allied nations rolled 
back by the Japanese since the initial blows that had fallen 
simultaneously at Pearl Harbor, Hong Kong, Malaya, and the 
Philippines on December 7, 1941. The vast area of command re- 
sponsibility ran westward to Singapore, ended at the Japanese 
Ryukus north of the Philippines, and to the east shared the re- 
mainder of the South Pacific with Admiral Chester Nimitz. It was 
a tremendously impressive command on paper. There was only 
one thing wrong: the Japanese high command had not concurred 
in its planning; in the driver's seat of the most ruthless Asiatic mili- 
tary machine since Genghis Khan, they were in a superb position 
not only to contest its implementation but to smash it stillborn. 

A month before GHQ SWPA was created, war-battered Flying 
Fortresses had carried MacArthur and his staff out of the be- 
leaguered Philippines on orders from Washington and put their 
wheels down on the red, hot soil of northwestern Australia. And 
now the needs of the new command were as endless as they were 
adamant, for what MacArthur found in Australia was a monumen- 
tal inadequacy to face even a fraction of the force he knew Tokyo 
could bring against him. He needed whole convoys of troops, ship- 
loads of vehicles, radios, guns, ammunition, aircraft, and fleets of 
ships themselves. He needed parts, parts, parts. . . . But of all the 
needs, none was more immediate than that of tactical intelligence 
information about the enemy. The new Commander in Chief be- 
lieved that the enemy's strategy was clear enough; it was not a 



POINT OF NO RETREAT 5 

question of "what," but rather "when," exactly "where," and "how 
moving." 

First and foremost, as he saw the broad picture, the Japanese 
high command must see to it that at any cost Australia was not 
permitted to be developed as an American base. Unless severed at 
once, the vulnerable umbilical cord stretching thousands of miles 
across open sea to the arsenal of mainland United States would 
nourish that base into a giant's strength. Accordingly, that vital 
link had to be destroyed now. Since the loss of Malaya and the 
Indies by the Allies already had isolated the British in far-off 
Ceylon and India, the parting of the two remaining principal ob- 
stacles to Japanese control of the Pacific world would insure each 
being dealt with separately. That should not prove difficult with 
American naval power a shambles at Pearl Harbor and Allied air 
strength cut to a few riddled, disorganized squadrons to cover a 
fourth of the earth's surface. 

Severing this umbilicus, then, could be reduced to a simple tac- 
tical problem of gaining immediate control of a few key geographi- 
cal spots north and northeast of Australia. That huge southern 
continent, as large as all of mainland United States, was ringed in 
those directions and to the east by a series of islands forming a 
great, broken double chain. There was New Guinea to the north 
and its satellite islands trailing southeastward from Milne Bay. 
Beyond this was the New Ireland-Solomons-New Hebrides chain, 
also stretching southeast. Bridging the two chains at the northerly 
end was the sizable single island of New Britain. Every ship to and 
from America would have to penetrate one or both of these island 
screens, or sail far to the south to New Zealand. But if Japan con- 
trolled the island screen and based naval and air raiders there, 
even the long southern approaches would be impossibly costly to 
slow Allied convoys either totally unescorted or given such scant 
protection as the Allies could scrape together. In any case, neither 
convoy nor escort could be expected to live long. 

On the eighth floor of the tall bank building at 121 Collins 
Street in Melbourne, MacArthur conferred with his chief of in- 
telligence, tall, handsome Colonel (later Major General) Charles 
Willoughby. That personification of genius and vitriol, Prussian 



6 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

drillmaster and lecture-room academician, had just consulted his 
huge situation map, had snatched from us in the G2 Section the 
latest teletype reports, and had conned the newest estimates from 
the Allied capitals. Brief reports from those magnificent Coast 
Watchers, from the few defiant ships, and from the individual pilots 
who performed as entire squadrons, provided new information to 
strengthen the Commander in Chiefs concept of the enemy's 
strategy: already he was moving down into the Solomons, he had 
occupied Buka Passage, Faisi, and Bougainville. He had been 
sighted in the New Hebrides, farther south. Down there was the 
important French base of Noumea, on New Caledonia island. 

As the two men studied the situation it appeared increasingly 
that to control the island screen the enemy would need to anchor 
his effort at two extremes: Port Moresby on the under belly of 
New Guinea in the north, and Noumea, which lay due east of the 
upper third of Australia. 

Willoughby described the scene to us later, the general pacing 
back and forth as he talked, striding with the energy of a man 
quite unconcerned that at the end of each five paces hard walls 
compelled him to about-face and stride the other way. He leaned 
forward as he went and his chin was outthrust, his hands tightly 
interlocked behind him. It was a familiar picture to Willoughby 
and the others of us who had seen him on Corregidor where the 
restraining walls of Malinta Tunnel laterals were uncounted tons 
of solid black rock. The Commander in Chief suddenly faced Wil- 
loughby and mentioned a name that was destined shortly to imprint 
itself forever on the pages of American history: Guadalcanal. 

The enemy would seize some portion, probably the central area, 
soon; his creep down Buka Passage and Bougainville into the New 
Georgia chain presaged it. Obviously, unless he could be prevented 
from taking and developing a base in central Guadalcanal, where 
the kunai grass plains along the eastern coast would prove reward- 
ing to diligent airfield construction efforts, his air and sea raiders 
soon would be enabled to range as far north and as far south as 
they wished in order to convert the Coral Sea and the Solomons 
Sea into Japanese lakes. He would have progressed far toward the 



POINT OF NO RETREAT 7 

absolute isolation of Australia, and America would likely be com- 
pelled to fall back upon Hawaii. 

Ever associated with the threat to the communication link with 
America was the equally black possibility of the early invasion of 
Australia itself from such an occupied island screen, including New 
Guinea. Or the attack might even come sweeping down from the 
occupied Philippines, or in from the occupied Netherlands East 
Indies. (Already there had been devastating bombing attacks on 
Australia's northwest and west coasts; on the east coast an Aus- 
tralian military defense plan drawn up prior to the establishment 
of GHQ SWPA envisioned the loss of everything north of a line 
drawn across the country from some point midway between Bris- 
bane and Sydney; a tremendous stand would be made to preserve 
the steel works at New Castle, just north of Sydney, but Brisbane 
would be gone.) 

First things first. The threatened Solomons, then . . . 

GHQ had no troops to send northeastward to meet any threat, 
and very little air power. Obviously, the responsibility for meeting 
it would be up to Admiral Robert Ghormley, Nimitz's wing man 
assigned to protect the South Pacific (actually the line between 
SWPA and "COMSOUPAC" the Navy's South Pacific Com- 
mand bisected in the Solomons). Ghormley would need intelli- 
gence to know how to husband his all-too-slender naval resources 
in order to hit suddenly and crushingly and get out of it to hit 
again. After they had met and beaten back this threat, said Mac- 
Arthur, they could breathe, then they could dig their heels in and 
prepare to take that first step back to the Indies, back to the 
Philippines . . . 

". . . to win this war, Charles." 

Win the war! At a time when survival itself was a day-to-day 
goal and some of us who had come down to Melbourne from 
Bataan and Corregidor had not even unpacked the emergency 
rations in our knapsacks because well, frankly, it seemed to 
people who had been on the run since the first bombs crashed down 
December 7 that such an act of confidence would constitute a fool- 
hardy tempting of fate. 

Willoughby, who had been told to "land on your feet running" 



8 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

gave every appearance of having done so in his tremendous efforts 
to overcome the dearth of intelligence information. In rapid order 
he planned and secured approvals for half-a-dozen projects that 
were to be of great importance. One was Allied Geographical Sec- 
tion, to produce detailed terrain studies of vast tropical areas that 
had not even been names to the great mass of American officers 
and men. In an appallingly short time they would have to fight for 
them, live in them, and die in them. Another was Allied Transla- 
tor and Interpreter Section, which before the war was over would 
produce solid bales of vital information from captured enemy 
documents, diaries, and interrogations of prisoners. He created and 
instilled efficiency into organizations for processing the strategic 
information that came from all over the Allied world as well as the 
meager bits and pieces that came from the immediate tactical front. 
This tactical front was immense; fronts normally could be meas- 
ured in thousands of yards; this one extended over thousands of 
miles. Compared with the compressed areas of the European 
theater, the enormous reaches involved in even the simplest opera- 
tions in the Pacific staggered the imagination. The tactical and 
strategical areas of responsibility for GHQ SWPA could quite 
effortlessly be transposed over the whole of the United States and 
Canada with the east and west extremes well out into the Pacific 
and Atlantic oceans. With GHQ in Melbourne, the transportation 
span required to reach the area of threat discussed by the Com- 
mander in Chief and Willoughby that day can be envisioned by 
transplanting GHQ to New Orleans and considering ways and 
means of stopping an enemy expansion in the lower Hudson Bay 
region gt Canada. Or if the Indies or Singapore were under study, 
it would be necessary to think of points far off the west coast of 
Oregon. Yet these were the immediate areas of concern; to men- 
tion the Philippines from which we had been routed was to con- 
sider points in northwest Canada and the Yukon region of Alaska. 
And all this with practically no long-range air units and, at that 
time, only half-a-dozen operational submarines that would have to 
be based at a point similar to San Diego, California, on our trans- 
posed situation map. Later, submarines would work out of Bris- 



POINT OF NO RETREAT 9 

bane, Australia, or, let us say, out of Norfolk, Virginia still a 
devastating distance in hostile miles to Hudson Bay or Alaska. 

Obviously all ordinary means of reconnaissance for intelligence 
information either were hopelessly inadequate or would be consist- 
ently dependable only as the Allies won control of ever-advancing 
bases. This, then, was a job for ships and aircraft but more than 
for either at this stage, it was a job for spies on the ground, send- 
ing in their reports from far, secret places by special radio equip- 
ment taken in by them. Before this could be accomplished, a 
coordinating organization would be necessary for the training of 
new agents, for the support of those already out, for communica- 
tions, supplies, and equipment, transportation a thousand things. 

The foundation bricks for such a structure already existed or, 
more properly, the initial tools for the secret collection of intelli- 
gence in denied areas were available in Australia by the time the 
wheels of the B-17's set down there in March 1942. My own 
acquaintanceship with these developments dated from mid-May, 
when I transferred out of Air Corps intelligence and into the 
incomparable "ulcer factory" of Willoughby's G2 Section, GHQ. 

It was on a typical Melbourne winter day, cold, wet, gloomy, 
rendered the more depressing by the pale filter of light through the 
opaque windows of 121 Collins Street, that I reported to Wil- 
loughby. 

"Go through these." He handed me a bulk of top-secret files. 
His left eyebrow was raised in a characteristic manner I had first 
observed in Manila. Those close to him had learned to interpret 
and evaluate that eyebrow; it was a barometer indicative of many 
things besides storm but certainly storm. It might imply: this is 
important. It did this time. He explained that these temperamen- 
tal, unconventional tools of warfare saboteurs, secret agents, the 
Coast Watchers, commandoes, and so on comprising the burden 
of the secret files had been sources of worry and harassment to 
the Australian commander in chief, General Thomas Blarney, a 
silver-haired soldier of the orthodox school. MacArthur had agreed 
to take them all over, Australian, British, Dutch, and a few others, 
and Blarney had breathed a sigh of relief. We would have to find 
a way to operate and control them to best advantage in some plan 



10 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

to be jointly supported by the American, Australian, and Dutch 
governments. Washington had suggested to GHQ that it accept the 
services of General "Wild BUI" Donovan's OSS, or Office of 
Strategic Services, to do this clandestine work. But while Mac- 
Arthur was cordial enough to the OSS founder and chief, and 
gladly accepted his offer of the services of the brilliant late Dr. 
Joseph R. Hayden, former vice-governor of the Philippines, as a 
confidential advisor, he declined OSS. General MacArthur felt that 
the various unorthodox units he was taking over from General 
Blarney and the Dutch might submit to a certain amount of con- 
trol from him there on the spot, but he was convinced that an 
attempt at domination by or absorption into another intelligence 
unit based in Washington would prove to be unworkable. Besides, 
he required something immediately responsive to his requirements 
and command. 

As stated, the files revealed that the "tools" were not exclusively 
for gathering intelligence information. One file dealt with an outfit 
that specialized in every phase of sabotage and silent killing. "Spe- 
cial Operations Australia" was its classified name. It was a branch 
of the world organization finely culled and sharpened in England 
and called Special Operations England, or "SOE." Factories, ships, 
power plants, arsenals persons anything and anyone valuable 
to the enemy any place, were "SOE" targets. In Melbourne SOE's 
headquarters was at "Airlie," a cold gray house behind a cold gray 
stone wall in the fashionable Toorak section of the city. "Airlie" 
was security tight and was personnelled by British, Dutch, and 
Australian specialists. Singularly one-minded was its chief, Lieu- 
tenant Colonel G. S. Mott of the British forces. Moody, dark, 
saturnine, quick to anger and quick to act, he seemed to burn with 
deep inward resentment because the Japanese had routed him out 
of Burma and Java in turn. Yet his enmity was impersonal; he 
wanted only to turn his people loose against the common enemy. 
Before the end his "Services Reconnaissance Department," or SRD, 
as was its eventual open name under successors to Mott, would 
cover itself with glory, both as a sabotage unit and as a spy outfit. 

A second file dealt with another British organization. This one 
was as pedigreed as SRD was new. The antecedental line went 



POINT OF NO RETREAT IT 

back to the sixteenth century. The communication channel of this 
unit still was direct from its own radio towers in Australia to 
Number 10 Downing Street. London-born Commander Went- 
worth, we shall call him was director, and a shrewd, capable, 
imaginative dangerous man he was. When all other AIB efforts 
would founder in a prolonged welter of agent casualties in Nether- 
lands East Indies, his radio monitors at war's end would be copying 
highly revealing cryptograms from spy operators under the very 
noses of the Japanese in Java. 

The subject of a third file, Netherlands Indies Forces Intelligence 
Service headquarters, or "NEFIS," was coming into existence in 
a dark-paneled house on Domain Road, Melbourne. There was 
not much left after the rout from the Indies and Dutch New 
Guinea: a handful of loyal Indonesians, a score of Netherlands 
naval and army officers, and a lot of stubborn Dutch will. The 
Dutch government-in-exile in London sent money, some old sub- 
marines, and authority to participate in the new effort to the limit 
of their resources. This they did. 

Fourth, there was the nucleus of what was to burgeon into an 
efficient propaganda service under the direction of Lieutenant Com- 
mander J. C. R. Proud of the Australian forces. Early in the his- 
tory of the new unit, however, it would become evident that this 
specialized branch could operate more effectively under Australian 
control at Canberra, the Commonwealth capital. 

The Fifth Division was already doing a superb job. These were 
the Australian "Coast Watchers." I had encountered them first in 
a prewar survey of intelligence assets in Australia. Since the first 
fateful days they, or those that still were alive, had been reporting 
vital ship and air sightings and the movements of Japanese land 
forces in the coastal areas of the islands to the north and east. 

In June, when the Australian winter season was a damp, raw 
reality, Willoughby's executive officer summoned me. The late 
Colonel Van S. Merle-Smith of the prominent New York family 
spoke in cool, deliberate words of the need to draw up an official 
document to activate and operate what we agreed would be called 
"Allied Intelligence Bureau." The "controller" would be the cur- 
rent director of Military Intelligence for the Australian Army, 



12 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

Colonel C. G. Roberts. I would fill the slots of deputy controller 
and finance officer. The decision to make an Australian the con- 
troller was based on both diplomacy and foresight. The coopera- 
tion of the Australians would be encouraged and when the time 
should come that the United States forces would have won their 
way back well north of the equator on their way to Manila and 
Tokyo, it would facilitate returning the remaining sections of the 
organization to full Australian control in the south. With an Ameri- 
can finance officer, GHQ still had indirect but vital control: with- 
out his approval, any proposed operation would die stillborn of 
financial anemia. In Roberts GHQ had found a man of integrity, 
tremendous energy, and fearless loyalty. 

Throughout the month, Roberts and I met with Merle-Smith to 
formulate the directive establishing "AIB." It was published in 
orders July 6, 1942. The Bureau was to "obtain and report infor- 
mation of the enemy in the Southwest Pacific Area, and in 
addition, where practical . . . weaken the enemy by sabotage and 
destruction of morale, and . . . render aid and assistance to local 
efforts in the same end in enemy-occupied territories." 

It was succinct, it was ambitious. Considering the general Allied 
positions, it was in some ways a colossal presumption. 

Space on the fifth floor of 121 Collins Street was assigned to us. 
Like the G2 Section, AIB itself was to "land on its feet running." 
Furniture, files, telephones, and short-tempered demands for im- 
mediate espionage plans involving the threatened northeast area 
arrived simultaneously. One of our first and most important visitors 
was a slender individual in the neat, dark uniform and spotless 
white cap of the Royal Australian Navy. His blue-gray eyes had 
a youthful twinkle; they and his smooth, unlined face belied the 
iron gray of the hair. This was Lieutenant Commander Eric Feldt, 
charged by the Australian director of Naval Intelligence with the 
expansion and development of the Australian Coast Watcher sys- 
tem. He unlocked a brief case and spread charts, maps, and statis- 
tics on the barely dusted-off tables. There was an upward tilt to 
his lips and an upward tilt to his words, but there was no nonsense 
about him. So it was that in a surprisingly short time we had made 
a compilation of names, check marks, and neat columns of nota- 



POINT OF NO RETREAT 13 

tions that constituted Allied Intelligence Project No. 1A: the col- 
lection of all possible information about the enemy on the ground, 
in the air, and on the seas surrounding Guadalcanal. 

That was the first project. In rapid succession would be others 
to cover Bougainville and the rest of the Solomons, New Ireland, 
New Britain, and New Guinea. Other projects directed by other 
men ultimately would aim for the Indies, Singapore, the islands of 
the Great East, and the Philippines themselves until, by the time 
Japanese officials were signing away their nation's sovereignty in 
surrender ceremonies aboard an American warship in Tokyo Bay 
some three years later, more than five thousand men and women 
would have been engaged directly or indirectly in hundreds of in- 
dividual projects. Some of the efforts would prove to be tragic, 
many abortive despite the best that good men could give, some 
enormously fruitful and all laced with the challenge of high ad- 
venture. Yet there was something more: a tenuous moral connec- 
tive fiber throughout, a dedication by free men whose faith was 
made manifest in their actions during endless months of training, 
of routine grind, and in sudden action in far places. Capriciously, 
fate seemed to single out some for stellar roles. Two of these in 
the early days were W. J. "Jack" Read and Paul Edward Mason. 
On the day Lieutenant Commander Feldt spread his maps and 
charts out at AIB in Melbourne, those two Australians were at 
opposite ends of a mountainous, heat-bathed, tropical island in the 
Solomons, approximately twenty-five hundred airline miles to the 
northeast. 



Part 2 
THE SOLOMONS 



The Coast Watchers 



I T WAS NO ACCIDENT THAT AT THE MOMENT IN 

history when their services would be most critically needed, Read 
and Mason, together with a priceless handful of others of their 
daring kind, were in the right places at the right times. Against 
the unproud record of the democracies for bland unpreparedness 
in the face of unmistakable warlike trumpetings there gleam a few 
bright exceptions. One of these was the Australian Coast Watcher 
organization which was born years before the outbreak of the 
Japanese war at a time when to seek funds for military prepara- 
tions was nothing short of heretical and quite unrewarding. The> 
first suggestions that Australia organize such a system had come 
as far back as 1919 from a Captain G J. Clare of the Australian 
Navy. In consequence of World War I settlements, Australia was 
assigned mandates over the eastern half of New Guinea Papua 
and a large portion of the island screen that was to play such a 
vital role in 1942-43. The area Australia did not control was for 
the most part under the British Solomon Island Protectorate, ex- 
cept that New Caledonia was French. Not only for the sake of 
good colonial government communications but to provide an early 
warning of sea or air raiders in case of war, it seemed to Captain 
Clare advisable to establish a network composed chiefly of civil 
servants, the managers of copra plantations, and other "islanders" 
devoted to a remote way of life among the Melanesian native 
peoples, many of whom were very primitive. A genuine affection 
for the natives and a respect for their simple but solidly estab- 
lished rights were essential ingredients of the successful "islander." 
Fortunately indeed for the Coast Watchers of a later day, such 

17 



18 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

factors were pivotal in the colonial policy of the government at 
Canberra a stern but fair guardianship which in turn won the 
confidence and trust of the native. Without that, no watcher or- 
ganization could have survived more than a few weeks at best 
when the chips were down, for in its essentials this specialized 
espionage was no different from other espionage activities: the 
degree of success would be directly proportional to the receptive- 
ness of the host peoples involved. 

A civilian, Mr. Walter Brooksbank, was primarily responsible 
for molding the foundations of the embryonic watcher organiza- 
tion, and incorporating into it the office of the director of Naval 
Intelligence in Melbourne. There, Commander R. B. M. Long, 
a stocky man with a cupid's-bow mouth and a steel-trap mind, 
added his official weight and skill. But it was a labor of love; 
World War II would be casting its unmistakable shadow before 
he would be able to generate even mild interest on the loftier levels 
of the political and military. He went ahead anyway, appointing 
Lieutenant Commander Eric Feldt of the Naval Reserve to get 
the detailed field work done. 

Feldt did it in the far reaches where tropic seas creamed against 
white beaches or soughed in the mangrove swamps of lonely coasts 
with their spattering of latticed houses and atap huts amid ranked 
coconut plantations. He consulted and recruited among the civil 
servants, likely themselves "islanders" and probably also planters. 
Feldt talked their language, for he was an "islander." He was 
"right." They signed on. They heeded his suggestions of what to 
look for, how to utilize "flash codes" in reporting air and ship 
movements by radio to the net control station at Port Moresby 
all at no salary. Moresby would relay to Townsville on the Queens- 
land coast, and Townsville would push the messages farther south; 
in a short time Commander Long would add another "flag" on 
his situation map in the office on St. Kilda Road, Melbourne. It 
was this organization and these "flags" that a military mission 
from Manila, of which I was a member, studied with such interest 
in November 1941 a month before Pearl Harbor. We would 
shortly return to Manila and report that when war came as we 



THE SOLOMONS 19 

then knew was inevitable there would be some splendid ob- 
servers already in key spots. 

So it was that as the first projects were formulated that day in 
the AIB office in Melbourne, Read and Mason were in such spots 
on Bougainville at the head of the Solomon chain. I became per- 
sonally acquainted with Read and some of the others as time 
went on, and from their unadorned narratives filled out the cryptic 
reports they prepared. 

As a result of enemy action during the last days of January 
1942, Read already had become a "gypsy" without a permanent 
home. But he was within sight of what had been his home all too 
briefly at the northern tip of Bougainville. It was quite evident 
that the enemy landing parties had "taken over the lot," as he 
told me many months later. "With the glasses we could make out 
the whole of the Buka Passage area well enough, and especially 
the buildings on the little island of Sohana." Read had been colo- 
nial district officer on Sohana. He also had been a civilian Coast 
Watcher. It would be some weeks later that he would become a 
lieutenant in the Naval Reserve, a development resulting from 
Long's tireless efforts in Melbourne to give military status to Coast 
Watchers in order to prevent their being classified as civilian spies 
and shot out of hand by a capturing enemy. 

Read had developed an efficient "posi," or position, high above 
Buka Passage. The fluted column of a gigantic rain tree gave him 
flank protection while affording an unobstructed view to the north- 
west. He had arranged a support for his binoculars. On this par- 
ticular day in early 1942 he had been observing the Japanese on 
Sohana. The shore parties once more were engaged in looting and 
smashing on Sohana. 

He slowly shifted the glass so that the field of vision crept across 
the indigo blue of the Passage itself into the shallower green water, 
and then up along the hard coral ribs of Buka Island as it lay 
opposite him. 

There was no sign of activity on the shore line. Carefully he 
examined the atap fiber huts of the Melanesian natives of Buka 
village. The few huts that had been burned in the bombings prior 
to the landings by the enemy had been replaced. Everything looked 



20 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

peaceful enough there, but Read had no illusions about these 
natives; they were realists. Throughout history they always had 
been dominated by someone stronger. Until recently it had been 
Australian colonial government. Now it was the Japanese. There 
would be no real affiliation, not even a nominal one, but that vil- 
lage would serve strength and it had seen the white man run out 
by the Japanese. 

Read glanced at his own Melanesian "boys" with their glisten- 
ing black bodies partly covered by travel-stained calico lava-lavas, 
or wraparounds. Was it dangerous wishful thinking or a sound 
appraisal based on his ten years' experience with Melanesians that 
induced him to place implicit faith in the trustworthiness of this 
little group? They had seen him prepare to abandon Sohana shortly 
after the two Royal Australian Air Force Catalinas that had been 
based at Soraken, just to the south, departed one day, their crews 
taking possessions that normally they left until their return from 
routine patrols. Then news of the fall of Rabaul on the north 
tip of New Britain had come in through Read's radio receiver. 
The jungle telegraph had got it, too. Provident and calculating, 
Read previously had reconnoitered for a position on the high basalt 
upthrust country of interior Bougainville that would enable him if 
necessary to "hole up" with supplies and maintain active obser- 
vation; it simply never occurred to him to try to escape, even 
though he was convinced that the tide of invasion would sweep 
beyond him as it then was sweeping over the islands just to the 
northwest of him. Out there on Taber Island had been Coast 
Watcher C. L. Page, who shortly after the outbreak of war had 
broadcast the warning of a four-motor Japanese flying boat that 
had soared over his lonely outpost to take sights on Rabaul. Soon 
Page had been run out. Then Allen on Duke of York Island went 
silent, and Chambers on Anir abruptly stopped sending. C. C. 
Jervis of Nissan, just off to the northwest from Buka, quietly men- 
tioned that a Japanese warship had hove to off his tiny atoll, 
which he had described as being "as flat as your hand and just 
as bare of places to hide in." Silence again. . . . But there were 
others that the enemy had not found, and because of this over- 
sight, the enemy would pay. Read was wiry of build, rather than 



THE SOLOMONS 21 

big or solid, but within him was a solidness of spirit, a steely de- 
termination, and a capacity for careful planning; it was altogether 
likely that in his own way he, himself, would extract payment. 

His loyal native police sergeant, Yauwika, asked permission to 
use the field glasses. His voice was hoarse and his pidgin English 
a little hard to understand. Yauwika frowned fiercely as he put the 
glasses to his eyes and stared toward Buka village. Read thought 
he knew what Yauwika sought: through his own devious means 
and loyal native missionary workers Yauwika had instituted a 
native "pipeline" and along it detailed information flowed in a 
mysterious current; now he knew exactly which of those atap huts 
he could see with their fiber-woven roofs concealed Japanese sup- 
plies, and which were serving as barracks. Read's cryptic messages 
to the Royal Australian Air Force RAAF made good, ex- 
plicit bombing objective data. 

Read studied the stocky, black native police sergeant. He decided 
that Yauwika could be completely trusted and probably those he 
worked with. Yet power impressed Yauwika, too, and Read had 
been both disappointed and secretly amazed at the effect news of 
the Battle of the Coral Sea had had upon the natives of Bougainville. 
Read had heard of Coral Sea both from news casts and official com- 
muniques. The jungle telegraph of the natives had been almost as 
prompt. The naval collision had occurred in May in consequence of 
the Japanese attempt to clear the way for an attack against Port 
Moresby, which the Allied high command had foreseen as part of 
the strategy to control the island screen. Read was able to glean that 
the victory had been a tactical one for the Allies in that the enemy 
effort had been beaten down. But in the fight the enemy had inflicted 
more damage than he had received. Just how the native assessment 
had arrived at the truth was a puzzle which Read ascribed to the 
white man's general ignorance of native shrewdness. In any event, 
Coral Sea had been disappointing in its propaganda effects and 
Midway was too distant to have any effect at all. 

In addition, Read was apprehensive that the jungle telegraph had 
scored another local beat. A Japanese force had since landed on 
Guadalcanal and was preparing an air base on the kunai grass 
plains. What was needed urgently to avoid deterioration of general 



22 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

native support was a spectacular Allied victory in the Solomons with 
the results heaped up for all to see. If it did not come soon, he could 
foresee trouble of another sort on Bougainville. Here and there on 
the island were groups of defenseless civilians and some of the mis- 
sionary personnel, including Catholic sisters, who previously had 
declined to heed his advice and that of others who had no illusions 
either to go overseas to safer areas while they could, or at least 
head for the mountains and avoid contact with Japanese patrols led 
by cooperating coastal natives. All told there were perhaps a hun- 
dred. They had been recalcitrant but Read had no doubt they would 
be demanding a protection there would be no way of according 
them when the bulk of the coastal natives should really turn against 
them. 

Beside him Sergeant Yauwika had grunted excitedly and pointed. 
Read wiped the moisture from his brow and squinted. Sohana was 
still quiet enough. But something was stirring in Buka village. 
Yauwika fired an explosive torrent in his own dialect and his black- 
skinned comrades rolled excited eyes. Read rapped Yauwika's arm 
for the glasses and peered. 

The scene was too confused to enable him to get the exact pat- 
tern but apparently the Japanese once more were resorting to harsh- 
ness, even brutality, in enforcing demands upon the villagers. The 
Solomon Islander was not long out of the Stone Age, and from 
there he had come direct into the Steel Age. But he had brought 
with him almost intact his superstitions, his tribal customs, and his 
curiously well-developed sense of property. Of the latter, his most 
potent single symbol was his pig. Possession thereof marked him a 
man of means; possession accorded him bargaining position for all 
things in his social scheme, from food gardens or a seat in the village 
council to his fancy in a wife. Coral Sea had upset the Japanese sup- 
ply communications and here at Buka a levy was being made upon 
native resources to make up for the fish and rice that had failed to 
arrive. Not content with a diet confined to tropical yams, taro, and 
sago, the enemy soldiers and sailors demanded pigs. They refused 
to penetrate far into the unknown jungles to hunt for them; the al- 
ternate was to commandeer the native's prize possession. 

Read could see a body on the ground of the village street. Nearby 



THE SOLOMONS 23 

an enemy wiped a bayonet. Two others carried off a kicking pig. Sul- 
len natives opened a way for them, then closed in after them. A 
cloud of dust slowly subsided. This execution of a villager who had 
resisted doubtless was what Sergeant Yauwika had witnessed. 

Read felt a grim satisfaction. Word of that kind of treatment 
would get around. Of course it could terrify the native into a kind of 
cooperation that would be dangerous to him, but with some military 
development favorable to the Allies the enemy would soon know 
what it meant to alienate the natives. Read's own meticulous adher- 
ence to a code of recognition of the small rights of the native in a 
white man's world was the key to their loyalty to him. There was 
one other related item of influence: the Solomon native's apprecia- 
tion of money. Read had taken all the money from the office at 
Sohana and could and did pay the fair price for their services and 
goods. After all, it required a carrier force of from fifteen to thirty 
"boys" to carry the radio gear and all, to say nothing of essential 
scouts and runners. 

While Read was reflecting on all this, there was a sudden poising 
of weapons. Someone was moving in the giant ferns to the left. Then 
Yauwika grunted. It was one of their own lookout boys. He was 
breathing hard. He spoke fast in his own dialect. Yauwika converted 
it into mangled pidgin. Three ships, warships, were approaching 
Buka Passage from the west. Read questioned him. Apparently a 
cruiser and two destroyers. 

Read signaled and the party moved off over a barely discernible 
trail so that he could verify the report. If true, and if the ships an- 
chored, they would comprise a target worthy of any bombing mis- 
sion or if not, simply the knowledge of their exact whereabouts 
would be of importance to Allied planners moving their invaluable 
pieces on the chessboard of the South Pacific. An hour later Read 
and his natives were squelching over sodden trails to the base. Just 
in time the confirmatory sighting had been made before the rain 
streamed down into a jungle already steaming with dank heat. Read 
clumped into a hut; he hated the rains. He motioned for Tamti, a 
native who had been taught wireless signaling. Tamti warmed up the 
tubes of the Australian-built "Teleradio," a splendid piece of equip- 
ment that originally had been designed to service Australian "out- 



24 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

back" sheep stations and the "flying doctors" who administered to 
their needs in response to radio summons for help. While he worked 
over the three steel-gray cases of the combined receiver and trans- 
mitter, Read enciphered. He wondered if the signal would reach 
distant Port Moresby on New Guinea nearly seven hundred airline 
miles. It would be another eight hundred from Port Moresby to 
Townsville where the Intelligence Center was located. It was another 
fifteen hundred to Melbourne. He was considering the unpredictable 
behavior of Hertzian waves in the ether. The present saturated sky 
was certainly bad in theory for transmission, yet already Tamti had 
registered acknowledgment from Port Moresby. Another time the 
sky could be clear as crystal and Moresby might be off the planet as 
far as their capability of reaching the control station was concerned. 
Moresby confirmed receipt of the data and signaled no more traffic. 

Tamti moved aside and Read played with the vernier dial of the 
receiver. Familiar voices came to being, for now he was on the fre- 
quencies assigned to the Coast Watchers, and where distances were 
short, radio phone, or "voice," was often used. Brief, staccato barks 
for the most part, because, after all, a radio transmission was a voice 
for all to hear and the enemy missed few of them, day or night. 
For instance, he had all-too-clearly heard the enormously foolish 
newscast out of Melbourne not long ago stating that Japanese war- 
ships had landed reconnaissance forces not too far from Read's posi- 
tion. Immediately the enemy was interested. No aircraft had sighted 
that landing. A Coast Watcher, then? They knew of only one man 
that could have radioed such a report, a really harmless old chap 
named Percy Good whom they had put on parole. Two days later 
they landed again and despite his protestations of innocence for 
innocent he was, since he was not a Coast Watcher and the report 
had been filed elsewhere by one who was summarily executed him. 

In Australia prompt steps were taken to insure that henceforth 
no such revealing information would reach the air. 

Read often spent a part of the night hours this way, although he 
had always to be sensitive to the drain of his batteries. The Tele- 
radio was powered by heavy wet cells that had to be charged by a 
petrol engine charger, even heavier. Petrol itself was no small prob- 
lem. There were caches 



THE SOLOMONS 25 

Meanwhile GHQ had moved bodily from Melbourne eight hun- 
dred miles north to Brisbane, and with it the headquarters of AIB. 
In one of the big insurance buildings on Queen Street, exciting mat- 
ters concerning the Solomons were occupying the high command. 
But the cards were being held very closely to official chests and in 
general very few who had no "need to know" possessed the knowl- 
edge that soon there would be launched the first Allied attempt, not 
only to halt the enemy drive down the Solomons, but eventually to 
reverse it. It would be a combined navy, air, and land assault to an- 
nul the Japanese landings at Lunga on Guadalcanal and other stra- 
tegic points in the central Solomons. GHQ was playing a support 
role this time, for the show primarily would be one of COMSOU- 
PAC's with the American First Marine Division scheduled for the 
actual landings. The concentration was being effected in the New 
Hebrides with Noumea as the hub. 

"I didn't know anything specific," Read said later. "But I became 
properly suspicious that something was up, just by listening to the 
ear bashing over the air." 

Lieutenant (later Commander) Hugh Mackenzie was AIB's 
Coast Watcher coordinator stationed with COMSOUPAC head- 
quarters in the Solomons. Read often tuned in to see what Hugh had 
to say. It was not much. But from the same quarter came many 
broad American accents. Mackenzie had helped the Marines to or- 
ganize their own local watchers. "Not a doubt of it the Yanks were 
zealous," commented Read. "But they were too ruddy voluble on 
the air. Obviously something was up." 

Another whom Read monitored was D. S. Macfarlan. One of the 
best was Macfarlan, with a gift for accurate observation and a 
matching ability to describe what he saw. Later in Brisbane we were 
to benefit from these talents to get vivid word pictures of what oc- 
curred at Guadalcanal largely in consequence of the roles that Read 
and Mason soon were destined to play. 

Assigned to Guadalcanal to watch the Japanese at close hand, 
Macfarlan had insisted on a grandstand seat to enable him to ac- 
complish the task with aplomb. He fairly looked down into their 
rice bowls from a lofty, beautifully hidden spot on Gold Ridge. He 
reported every inch of progress on the air strip the enemy was build- 



26 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

ing below him at Lunga. Just to the east of Lunga was Tulagi, the 
former center of British colonial administration for the area. The 
enemy held that place, too. Macfarlan's boys had been reporting in 
detail defense strong points, stores, and barracks. He encoded the 
data and sent them two ways: to Mackenzie for use by appreciative 
COMSOUPAC authorities and those who were to lead the assault, 
and to AIB via Port Moresby. 

Other Coast Watchers hidden on Guadalcanal were contributing 
to this vital build-up of information. There were taciturn F. A. 
"Snowy" Rhoades and A. M. Andersen. Martin Clemens was farther 
north. And off on the dreary basalt upthrust of tiny Savo Island was 
another, frail elderly L. Schroeder. On one occasion while Read 
monitored, Macfarlan was reporting the estimated strength of a 
Japanese force north of the partly finished airfield. Read was 
amused. He knew Macfarlan's method: send in natives who would 
come back and tell him how long the mess line extended. It was as 
good as any and better than most, for natives were notoriously un- 
able to estimate numbers of men. "You'd get anything from a thou- 
sand to twenty times that number," Read would explain. "The true 
count was probably five hundred." 

Guadalcanal was a somewhat fatter island than most in the Solo- 
mons. To the north was a spattering of small islands comprising the 
New Georgia group, between it and Bougainville. Other Coast 
Watchers were there. And they were important, for while Read was 
the farthest northwest of the whole series of Watchers and therefore 
could give maximum warning of raids that he might detect coming 
south to hit American concentrations, enemy ships and aircraft 
might not touch within his eyesight. Then it would be up to Paul 
Mason, a hundred and thirty miles south of him on the opposite end 
of long, thin Bougainville, to warn. After Mason came the watch- 
ers in the New Georgia group, and finally those on Guadalcanal. 
Thus there was observer strength "in depth." 

On one night while Read monitored, Paul Mason was acknowl- 
edging receipt of a successful air drop, containing desperately needed 
supplies. Read chuckled explosively. The black boys squatting on 
their haunches in the opposite corner of the hut rolled eyes whitely 
toward him. In turn they grinned. They appreciated it when the kiap 



THE SOLOMONS 27 

was amused. He was a good kiap, stern and quick, but a proper "big 
fella." Read was thinking that poor Mason deserved a successful 
drop after all the trouble he had experienced. 

Mason had been a planter on Bougainville. He probably was less 
like the conventional picture of a conquering military hero than any- 
one Read could imagine quiet, round-faced, with a boyish com- 
plexion that went with the mild blue eyes behind round spectacles. 
But we were to learn that Mason would surprise you. When the going 
was rough, he was indeed a good man to have on your side. His de- 
termination was matched only by his unsuspected powers of endur- 
ance. The first drop that had been made to him went astray by not 
less than seventy miles! But Mason doggedly set out by bicycle and 
on foot to recover it. His reward after a bitter trek through some of 
the most uncomfortably fetid country in the South Pacific was ex- 
actly nothing. The situation was doubly distressing because, where- 
as Read had plenty of supplies cached, Mason had had no oppor- 
tunity to save much from the plantation before the Japanese landed. 
Read had expressed his concern that Mason's natives might not ap- 
preciate his straitened circumstances. The second drop would alle- 
viate the situation, at least. 

Mason had taken up a position at Malabita Hill near Buin, on 
extreme southern Bougainville. As fate would have it, the area he 
could effectively overlook would become one of the major anchor- 
ages for the Japanese Southern Operations fleet. 

The drops to Coast Watchers included more than merely the 
means to keep body and soul together. Feldt had experienced many 
years' service on isolated assignments and he knew very well the 
tremendous importance of mail from home. Great care was taken to 
insure inclusion of one or two pieces at least. So it had been that the 
last bomber to drum out of the night and lay a softly floating para- 
chute onto Read's carefully selected drop zone had brought a letter 
from his wife in Melbourne. It had been a solid, homey sort of thing, 
just what he needed most, and it had told him all about the antics of 
their little daughter, Judy. (What it did not tell him was that Mrs. 
Read had experienced a serious accident; she had not wanted to 
worry him for she was confident that the results would not be last- 
ing.) Reference to Judy had made Read smile. Doubtless both his 



28 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

wife and young Judy would be amused if they knew of the arrange- 
ment he had with Feldt that if he ever had to go on the air in plain 
language and wanted to confuse listeners other than Feldt, he was to 
sign his emergency messages "JER," Judy's initials. 

Read snapped off the Teleradio until the next schedule with Port 
Moresby. It was time for kaikai, or food, and despite the downpour 
that went on as if it never intended to stop, the boys managed their 
cooking and Read had his plate of hot tinned meat, vegetables, and 
his mug of tea. He hitched himself farther from the drifting spume 
at the propped-up atap transom over the open window space and 
savored the brew. 

In the next transmission Read reported that he had made a short 
reconnaissance to the coast. At one point he had been waited upon 
by a surly delegation of the civilians whom he had urged to take 
proper precautionary steps when the war was young and there re- 
mained time to act. They demanded that the RAAF make air drops 
of supplies to them. After all, they insisted, the government owed 
them protection and sustenance, too. Read reminded them that pro- 
tection was something they had rejected by keeping themselves be- 
yond its line of possibilities. He reminded them that there were 
exactly twenty-five Australian soldiers on Bougainville, a poorly 
equipped guard detachment of prewar days, in almost as bad a 
plight as they were themselves. As to sustenance, he imagined he 
could forecast RAAF's reception to the idea that it should risk its 
few operational bombers from their round-the-clock war responsi- 
bilities to deliver food to people who a short time ago had denounced 
the military as unnecessarily dictatorial. But that night Read relayed 
their request to Port Moresby. The next day he had confirmation of 
his forecast. The issue did not endear him to the group, nor it to 
him. Read was honest with himself; he was direct and honest with 
others. He had an idea he had not heard the end of them. He 
wondered about the Catholic nuns he knew to be still on the island 
with a Bishop Wade. 

He continued to file his observer reports from Buka Passage. 
Every significant bit about the air strip, the village, or the ships that 
came and went and what they did while they were there swelled our 
intelligence file at AIB. 



THE SOLOMONS 29 

But one day toward the end of July he got a deeply encoded mes- 
sage from Feldt at AIB. 

He was to stop reporting everything except emergency informa- 
tion of great importance. He would establish himself at the best 
point of vantage above Buka Passage and await developments. 
Meanwhile, if he did see something very important, especially in 
the air, he would report directly in plain language. His messages 
would be identified by the "JER" call sign. 

He stood in the middle of the shack, the deciphered message in 
his hands, and he knew this meant action. He was laying pounds to 
sixpence that it would be on Guadalcanal to the southeast of him. 
A few minutes later he knew that Mason had received the same in- 
structions from Feldt and that he would use the call sign "STO." 
Mason had married a girl whose family name was Stokie. 

It was fully appreciated at AIB that broadcasting in plain lan- 
guage meant shouting out the locations of the two men. But speed 
in reporting was going to be of utmost importance; conceivably the 
success of the whole operation would rest on adequate warnings 
of enemy counterblows while the landing and support ships were 
bunched without maneuver room at the beaches. Against the "give 
away" was the fact that the two men were tiny needles in a very 
large haystack. Bougainville was a hundred and thirty miles long 
by thirty wide and what was not smothered in rain forests and 
jungle growth was upended in mountains. As long as the natives 
did not turn against them. . . . Nevertheless, it was a very uncomfort- 
able decision to have to make back in the safety of headquarters. 

Read looked wryly around the shack. It had been a secure spot. 
He decided to make a cache of supplies in several places, of one or 
two of which only he would know the exact location; then, whatever 
befell him, he should have recourse to a few emergency supplies. He 
was to be thankful one day for this item of his foresight. 

The next morning he put into execution his plan for erasing signs 
of the base preparatory to moving northwestward. He was seeking a 
better position that was low enough to avoid most of the mists but 
high enough to cover most of the vital area. The rains came down 
as they departed. This time Read did not mind so much. He wanted 
their tracks to be erased. He used trails unknown to all but his little 



30 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

party, or cut new ones. On the evening of August 7, 1942, he still 
was some distance from Buka Passage. Except that it had been a 
strenuous day, for him it had not been unusual. Since his teleradio 
had been stowed in many containers slung from poles supported 
fore and aft on the shoulders of carrier boys, he had been entirely 
unaware that in reality the day had witnessed a tremendously im- 
portant military development in some respects even more signifi- 
cant than either the naval battles of the Coral Sea or Midway, be- 
cause it represented the first retaking of a land mass for a counter- 
offensive that was not to experience a major reversal until the war 
was won for the West. Read made camp where the rain forest was so 
dense that only directly above him was there open space. After a 
new downpour the stars showed there. 

Paul Mason, however, had been aware of something unusual on 
that day. He had, in fact, played a part in connection with it as vital 
as any who participated, and doubtless because he had, many still 
were alive and safe who otherwise would have been victims of the 
air attack launched by some twenty-seven Japanese warplanes from 
Rabaul. 

At dawn of that day the first massive combined-services counter- 
assault of the war had been launched by the Allies. It was against 
Guadalcanal, Tulagi, and other nearby Japanese-held targets. By 
the time Read had pitched camp for the night, the First Marine Divi- 
sion was dug in hard along the Japanese airfield at Lunga, had re- 
taken Tulagi, and had established firm beachheads elsewhere. At 
dawn that day planes from United States carriers had screamed 
down on Tulagi through a mist that hid the approaching battle and 
transport fleets from sight and had bombed it heavily. Then the ap- 
proaching warships had divided. One division had taken over from 
the bombers while another steered for Lunga and opened up on 
shore defenses there. The transports came in and released their 
battle-ready Marines. The assault boats rammed square steel snouts 
hard aground and the heavy ramps roared down. The enemy had 
been taken completely by surprise, and on Guadalcanal were unable 
to rally against the attack. The survivors fled into the jungle toward 
the mountains. It was almost the same at Tulagi, but there was de- 
termined resistance elsewhere. 



THE SOLOMONS 31 

The Allied command was under no illusions about the initial suc- 
cess. The enemy simply could not afford to allow the Allies a 
secure foothold in the South Pacific, and certainly not one they 
themselves required if they were to secure Port Moresby, already 
overdue, and cut the supply line from America. The American com- 
manders hoped that before the enemy could reorganize or call for 
help, the heavy task of getting supplies ashore to support the troops 
for a prolonged period of what was sure to come could be accom- 
plished. But manhandling thousands of tons of the materiel of 
modern war from transport to barge and barge to shore and shore to 
truck and truck to supply dump was a task to weary the stoutest 
backs, especially when the debilitating tropic heat wrapped the 
whole area in a sodden blanket. There had been little or no time to 
rehearse this phase of it. The work went slowly; the wonder of it 
was that the sweating, swearing men had managed to bully as much 
of the artillery, the ammunition, the construction materials, and 
the rations ashore as they had by the time Mason's signal reached 
the ships to the effect that over his hidden position at Malabita 
Hill on Bougainville at 1030 hours he had sighted 

TWENTY-SEVEN BOMBERS HEADED SOUTHEAST 

The message was signed "STO." Actually, the ships had not re- 
ceived it directly from Mason. He had sent originally on the "X" 
frequency for emergency traffic and had been copied at Tulagi, also 
aboard the Australian cruiser Canberra, which together with an- 
other Australian warship had cooperated with the American vessels 
that morning in the shelling of Guadalcanal. Port Moresby also had 
taken it in and immediately relayed to Townsville. Townsville re- 
layed to powerful transmitters outside Canberra which in turn, 
flashed it to Honolulu. The transoceanic station on Oahu stepped 
up to full power and sent the warning roaring back over the Pacific 
for all to hear. The whole series of relays had taken approximately 
twenty-five minutes, and the Japanese still were a considerable 
distance off, coming in under heavy bomb and fuel loads. 

Mason later said that he was barely able to contain his excitement 
and that Ms eyes "felt very hot" behind his glasses as he constantly 



32 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

fingered his receiver dials for news. The air was full of strange 
signals and he discerned both the Morse key "fists" and voices of 
Americans. He knew then that "The Yanks were fair in it now!" 

Mason could hear only confusedly, and he could see nothing. 
Macfarlan on Gold Ridge, Guadalcanal, constituted the "eyes" for 
this show, although some of the others caught thrilling episodes of 
it from their lairs. 

Macfarlan had noted the orderly deployment of the American 
carriers well out to sea. He saw the transports weigh anchor and dis- 
perse in a disciplined pattern away from the crowded beachhead. A 
low throb of scores of aircraft engines being prefiighted came from 
the distant flat tops. The drone swelled and sounded to him like 
"a far-off bullish roar." Presently he saw our planes rising, looking 
in the distance "like some kind of slow daylight tracers." In due time 
they found their proper stations and began a leisurely climb into the 
high places of the sky. The heavier American fighter planes were 
not so nimble as the Japanese Zeros who doubtless were escorting 
the bombers, but the Philippines had taught us that if the American 
planes had the advantage of height, the acrobatic superiority of the 
Zero was canceled out: our heavier armor and armament more 
than evened the score. At Guadalcanal, local warning only would 
not have enabled the American fighters to have climbed high. Mason 
gave them an hour and a half to do it. 

The Japanese pilots were unprepared for the magnitude of the 
reception awaiting them from below and were disorganized by the 
wide deployment of the targets. 

To Macfarlan the whole sky had suddenly become dappled with 
the black puifballs of ack-ack fire from the ships. Now he could see 
the Japanese bombers coming in on the final approach, but the in- 
tense fire disrupted their runs and they began to fall off. Bombs fell 
into the sea and far off to one side on the land. One bomber then an- 
other burst into flame and black smoke. Others sideslipped and the 
ack-ack from hastily erected shore guns took them under fire. The 
attack seemed to be breaking up before it was fairly launched. The 
Japanese veered more and sought to disengage. The smoke now 
made observation difficult and Macfarlan could catch only snatches 
of the big surprise. At just the time when the enemy planes could 



THE SOLOMONS 33 

least afford to take on a new menace, a whole sky full of fury 
dropped upon them from the heights. Now both bombers and Zero 
escorts alike were caught in a storm of tracers and shells. Pilots who 
remembered Pearl Harbor, Singapore, Clark Field, Bataan, let 
them have it again and again. 

Paul Mason saw only one bomber returning that afternoon. This 
was a paradox, for initial Allied claims listed only two shot down 
and two damaged. That was before the carriers deployed out to sea 
had entered their tallies. Possibly more than that single bomber 
seen by Mason got away, but history was to say that it was doubt- 
ful if it had any companions. 

The next morning, August 8, Read broke camp early. The party 
was on the trail when shortly after 0800 hours the column stopped 
as one man. The thundering roar of many aircraft engines seemed to 
burst upon them. That could mean only that they were flying low. 
Automatically his boys melted into denser jungle. Read looked 
around desperately for some point of observation. But only his boys 
were equipped by dress and nature to shinny up the boles of trees. 
Then the sound exploded directly above him. To his surprise he 
found himself reacting automatically to training even as his boys 
had done when they "melted" into the jungle. He was counting air- 
craft which, as fate would have it, were flying across the only place 
in the whole vast canopy of the sky that he could observe im- 
mediately over his head. They were no more than five hundred feet 
above him and he could discern not only that they were bombers 
but that they were torpedo bombers. 

The din receded. He shouted orders. Two of his boys were well 
toward the tops of tall trees. The others reacted quickly and began 
to break out the wireless gear. There was no time to make for a more 
suitable transmitting area. While Read knew nothing about the 
Guadalcanal show, he was certain that eighteen heavily-laden enemy 
torpedo planes were not out on an incidental early-morning training 
mission so far from Rabaul on New Britain or Kavieng on New Ire- 
land. He suspected these were from the latter place; the direction 
was right. 

He shouted to that boy, helped this one, and heaved with the 



34 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

third. The transmitter, the receiver, the batteries, heavy and dan- 
gerous to handle. Up went a jury antenna. 

Then a warning call from the treetops. More aircraft. As before, 
the sound burst upon them. This time Read counted twenty-two 
aircraft; some were Zeros. 

The sweat blinded his eyes. He dashed it out and tested the power 
couplings. Everything seemed to go maddeningly slow. But not 
really. "Just the ruddy excitement, you know," as he said later. He 
calmed himself, sobered by the thought that at this time of day it 
would be a real chore to raise Port Moresby and on "voice," too, 
for he did not have Tamti this time, worse luck. Voice had less 
range than Morse. 

He called on voice. Then listened. There was only the hissing of 
the tube filaments in his ears. He tried again, adjusting as he spoke. 
But the transmitter was putting out a maximum signal; adjusting 
would do no good. There was not even a crack of static. 

He banged his fist in exasperation. This signal had to get through. 
Right, then, send a general-attention call. 

He did, to any Coast Watcher within range or anyone else on 
X frequency. 

His quick laugh of relief was not lost on the natives. Kiap had 
done it! He had, indeed. A Coast Watcher in eastern New Guinea 
answered him at once. He had heard Read's frantic calls and was 
waiting to take a relay. Read gave it to him: 

FROM JER: FORTY BOMBERS HEADED YOURS 

He had the satisfaction of hearing the unknown Coast Watcher 
swing into the relay. Once more the whole prearranged machinery 
of warning went into action. And at Guadalcanal once more the 
whole deployment tactic found so effective on the seventh when 
only a single ship had been hit went into effect. Once more Mac- 
farlan was the star reporter. Many official records remain to testify 
to his authentic observing of the most exciting event of his life, for 
this attack paled that of the previous day in the sheer fanaticism of 
the attackers and the fury of the defenders. 

Again the flight of enemy aircraft was caught between levels of 



THE SOLOMONS 35 

fire, but even more intense fire than previously. The whole arc of 
the sky was sliced with red tracers and plumed with ack-ack. Three 
enemy planes at one time plunged smoking toward the sea far be- 
low. Another bomber erupted into a solid sheet of flame so huge 
that Macfarlan was certain that a shell had hit squarely on the war- 
head of a torpedo in its bay and the whole thing, big enough to kill 
a ship, had exploded in midair. 

Still, through the fury of the concentrated fire, Japanese bombers 
lived to level off for their torpedo runs and to launch them. Mac- 
farlan gasped in disbelief, for some of those bombers were flying at 
maximum speed between moving ships, actually below masthead 
height. 

The sea boiled with torpedo wakes. And now it seemed beyond 
credibility that the defending vessels could live with destruction on 
the loose against them from every direction. Yet only one torpedo 
connected: a destroyer was heavily damaged astern and went out 
of control. Under her own power she dragged herself away. Later, 
when Macfarlan remembered to look for her, she was no longer 
to be seen. Now his attention was jerked to another giant explosion. 
A Japanese warplane had plummeted straight into the deck of the 
transport. Her whole length quivered with flame, and fire leaped 
high where the plane had gone through her deck. 

Now it was time for the high-up fighters to come in. Once more 
the smoke of battle and the burning transport obscured Macfarlan's 
view. But he had seen enough to know that a whole enemy attack 
fleet had been all but destroyed before his eyes. 

Far to the northwestward Read's fingers had teased the essence 
of excitement from the vernier dial. At about seven megacycles he 
had come upon strange talk between "Orange Base" and aircraft 
pilots. Nothing the Australians owned answered to that. The Yanks, 
then. This was it. He listened again and heard a carrier concerned 
about getting its fighters all refueled in time to beat off an "expected 
bomber attack on the transport area." 

Read said that this time he really jumped to his feet and cheered. 
His boys cheered with him. The warning had got through! 

He waited, caressing the vernier dials. And soon it came, the in- 
tercommunication orders and shouted warnings as the battle closed. 



36 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

The distant voice said that it would go off the air during the battle, 
but the unseen American was unable to stay off the air and kept 
breaking in with his own blow-by-blow account of the sight he was 
witnessing. "Boys, they're shooting them down like flies! I can see 
one, two, three, four, six eight of them all coming down into the 
sea together!" 

Forty of them had gone over Read's spot. Eight came back. In the 
two main battles and in at least one side fight later, the enemy had 
lost more than sixty bombers and Zeros in two days. Read could not 
know it, of course, nor could anyone else except the Japanese au- 
thorities at Rabaul, but the tremendous losses had made impossible 
the mounting of another sustained attack until new elements had 
been flown in from the Carolinas some days later. 

Despite his crucial role, there was one irony for Read in con- 
nection with this victory. While both he and Mason and other de- 
serving Coast Watchers would be tendered high American decora- 
tions for their work, a British decoration for the "Forty Bombers" 
message would be accorded not to Read at all, but to an Australian 
Army officer who happened to be on duty and was concerned with 
the relay of it from the New Guinea Coast Watcher to Port Moresby 
and on to Townsville. 

In Brisbane we could hardly believe our luck. Conning the maps 
coupled Vith an analysis of the reports began to make it dazzlingly 
plain that Read and Mason were incalculably valuable positions: 
seemingly every flight that went out of Rabaul droned over Mason's 
position; all flights originating out of the satellite field at Kavieng 
went over Read's. The cream of the Japanese naval air power was 
habitually plotting its own course to its own destruction. If by chance 
either the two missed them owing to fogs or some temporary devia- 
tion in the enemy's navigation, the other Watchers spotted them. 
It was to be that way throughout the whole Guadalcanal campaign; 
captured enemy operational data after the war were to tell of the 
bloodletting there and elsewhere and of the fact that 50 per cent of 
all the best-trained Japanese air personnel was lost within the first 
three quarters of 1942. 

The solitary unknown Australians out in the islands became 
legendary figures among the Americans. Both on Guadalcanal and 



38 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

in Brisbane, if you wanted to evoke a smile, it was necessary only 
to say: "Forty bombers headed yours!" It caught on during the 
critical months when the enemy would hurl his might in his effort to 
force the Americans back into the sea, a continuous battle that was 
to see thousands of casualties on both sides and drain Allied naval 
strength to a new low before the tide finally was turned late in the 
year. 

The Japanese High Command reacted violently to the events at 
Guadalcanal. History was to show that a new and much stronger 
combined headquarters of the Japanese Eleventh Air Fleet and the 
Eighth Naval Fleet was activated that very day to "prosecute with 
all vigor the official Southern Operations Plan." As shall be seen 
presently in a sequence dealing with New Britain and New Guinea 
during this period, in addition to taking steps to bring in greater 
power to deal with the Solomons, the enemy already had imple- 
mented an alternate to the ill-fated Coral Sea plan to take Port 
Moresby. 

This new threat out of Rabaul was posing multiple headaches for 
the Allied Intelligence Bureau which certainly could have occupied 
everyone concerned full time. But we were to be permitted little 
time to take our eyes off the Solomons. The Japanese wasp's nests 
there especially at Lunga had not been more than normally dan- 
gerous as long as they were not stirred up. Lunga's violent dis- 
placement by the Allied assault of August 7 produced reactions in- 
creasingly dangerous to the Coast Watchers on Guadalcanal and 
even farther afield. Calls for help and evacuation began to filter into 
the AIB decoding center. Japanese remnants in strength were re- 
forming in the coastal areas and in the jungles and they were patrol- 
ling in strength. Furthermore, they were venting the anger of their 
defeat upon the natives. It was clear to their commanders that they 
had been betrayed by hidden observation agents who probably 
could not have survived without native permission. Savage reprisals 
against the natives were adopted to influence them to change their 
allegiance. 

In the northwest part of Guadalcanal Rhoades and Schroeder 
were in a bad fix. Especially dangerous patrols with cowed native 
guides had infested the areas of these two. They, in turn, were wor- 



THE SOLOMONS 39 

ried, not only on their own account but about the safety of mis- 
sionaries and nuns in the vicinity once they had found the stripped 
and bayoneted bodies of two missionaries and two nuns on a beach. 
It was only a matter of time before the native-led patrols would 
catch up with the rest of them. 

In a hasty conference at Brisbane it was decided to shift Hugh 
Mackenzie from the New Hebrides to Guadalcanal since, in any 
event, the forthcoming hub of the Solomons war would be there, 
and effective, mature coordination of ABB operations was requisite 
to the preservation of our precious people and to serving COM- 
SOUPAC, which now was bracing for the inevitable counter assault 
by the Japanese. 

Hugh Mackenzie, of the generous mouth and level gray eyes, 
who eventually would be brought to Brisbane to recover his health 
and amplify his modest reports, reached Guadalcanal just in time 
to effect a dramatic and unauthorized rescue. 

Mackenzie knew that the tough American general of marines 
had placed great value upon him as a coordinator of Coast 
Watchers. He strongly suspected that if he made a request to risk 
a run for it and rescue Rhoades and Schroeder, he would be 
refused. Therefore, he did not ask. 

"I told Horton that General Vandegrift would skin us alive 
when he did hear about it," Mackenzie told me later. He had 
set up AIB's Station "KEN" at the edge of the former Japanese 
air strip, now called Henderson Field, and he was talking to Lieu- 
tenant D. C. Horton of the Australian Navy. Horton was an ordi- 
nary chap with an extraordinary way of getting things done. He 
had asked for the job of rescuing Rhoades and Schroeder. "I'd 
managed to get a launch," continued Mackenzie. He hitched 
around and smiled. "Well, the resident commissioner had gone 
away and . . ." 

Apparently Horton already had anticipated the requisition in 
absentia and he had already refueled. "It'll soon be dusk, you 
know," he had said. 

They emerged from KEN's fairly snug dugout that had been 
constructed by them and occupied only a day before the earlier 



40 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

one a combination of tattered canvas and a hole of warm mud 
soup had been blown to bits by enemy marksmanship. 

Horton knew the coast; once he had been a colonial district 
officer. He piloted his little craft to take advantage of every ob- 
scure passage and every shadow and at dawn crept into an inlet 
where Rhoades and Schroeder should have been. They were there 
together with thirteen missionaries and a shot-down airman! 
Everyone turned to in order to camouflage the launch against 
early-morning air patrols friend or foe, it would make no differ- 
ence. During the night Horton repeated his delicate piece of sea- 
manship along the thoroughly hostile coast and landed sixteen 
grateful people the next dawn. 

Later in the morning the telephone rang. "An invitation to call 
upon General Vandegrift, I'll warrant," Mackenzie said quietly. 

It was, emphatically. Horton arose to accompany him. Mac- 
kenzie pushed him down. "My party, Dick." 

The interview was all he expected. The general had an ample 
vocabulary, and suffered from no inhibitions. He expressed him- 
self on the subject of discipline and those who lacked it. He 
quickly confirmed Mackenzie's earlier presumption that opera- 
tional orders would emanate from no place other than his own 
headquarters. There were other pointed allusions to this and that 
and Mackenzie found himself outside where the steaming tem- 
perature of Guadalcanal felt gratefully cool to him. 

Not long afterward Macfarlan staggered in to KEN from his 
hide on Gold Ridge. Mackenzie searched his haggard gray fea- 
tures and told him that if he could achieve as sick a look as that, 
he would put in for home leave and get it. Obviously it was 
malaria. How long had Macfarlan had it in such a severe degree? 

"About long enough, Hugh. I've clipped my coupons. Brisbane 
looks good." 

He followed Rhoades and Schroeder out by air, his job superbly 
done, another yet to do in Brisbane. MacArthur awarded him a 
Distinguished Service Cross. The same award went to Rhoades, 
and to Read and Mason all citations marked "Secret." They 
could not be publicly announced until after the war. Macfarlan 
was given long recuperation leave, then joined us at AIB head- 



THE SOLOMONS 41 

quarters. He was lucky to have gotten out. Soon afterward there 
were no aircraft to spare. Daily the situation for the American 
troops grew more critical. Despite extensive losses, the enemy had 
managed to land reinforcements on the western end of the island 
and daily the defensive perimeter was being pinched in. A series 
of violent engagements had tipped the naval strength in favor of 
the enemy. At one time three American cruisers and one Aus- 
tralian were sunk simultaneously. Carriers went, too. To add to 
the constant harassment of daytime bombing now came a new 
threat to life or sanity. Japanese naval units of the Eighth Fleet 
began shelling Lunga by night. Mackenzie and his little staff were 
grateful for their stronger dugout, but none had illusions about 
what a direct hit would do. 

Then one night, amid the endless crash of the explosions they 
had come to know so well, there was a new note. The whole 
earth rocked to tremendous concussions at regular intervals. Be- 
tween blasts Mackenzie peered up through the acrid murk and 
announced: "They've brought in the first team. Those are not 
less than fourteen-inch guns out there." 

He was right. They timed the incoming rounds. They were 
methodically deadly at twenty to the minute. Nerves went ragged. 
Heads pounded and seemed to pull apart from the incessant ham- 
mering. Once Mackenzie was deep down in another dugout when 
it was hit. He was flung violently against a wall. He crumbled up. 
"It was only concussion shock," he said later, "but I knew now 
there was a limit to what a man could take." Yet even through 
all of it Station KEN continued to handle the traffic from Read 
and Mason and the others to the northwest, especially from a 
hard, dark-miened man named D. C. Kennedy, who was holed 
up at a plantation on the southern end of New Georgia Island. 
He was the last one in the chain northwest of Guadalcanal to be 
able to give warnings; his word was the final prelude to the "red 
alert" at Lunga. 

In Brisbane, Colonel Roberts studied a radio message from 
Mackenzie. 

"Kennedy's a bloomin' one-man army, no less," he said. "Look 
at this." 



42 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

It was a request from the undefeated, undefeatable man of 
Segi plantation. He had a loyal following of natives (the natives 
were worshiping strength here, too, no doubt) and among them 
all they had slain three bargeloads of enemy soldiers who had 
ventured too close; captured twenty Japanese pilots who had 
been shot down in air flights; rescued twenty-two American pilots 
who similarly had been shot down. 

"He wants someone to evacuate his stockade and barracks," 
chuckled the controller. He picked up a pencil. "Let's see, you 
Americans estimate that it costs twenty-five thousand dollars to 
train a pilot. Now then: that's five hundred and fifty thousand 
Kennedy has saved his gallant allies!" 

"How does he rate the Japanese pilots?" someone asked, just 
as Feldt came in. 

"Same difference," explained Feldt. "He has a standing offer 
to his natives: one case of tinned meat and one bag of rice for 
every living airman brought in, Japanese or American only the 
Japanese are trussed up on poles and carried in that way." 

It was an extremely hazardous but well-paying mission for a 
Catalina a few nights later to effect the evacuation. Kennedy 
stayed on. 

It was the same night that the enemy off the Guadalcanal coast 
shifted his pattern again, and the two thousand smaller caliber 
shells that raked the Lunga area were described by Mackenzie as 
seeming to be even worse than the regular pounding of the big 
guns. KEN's dugout withstood it, but outside the land was tor- 
tured chaos. The next morning they surveyed the damage. 

Only one of the three aerials they had so carefully and scien- 
tifically constructed for utmost efficiency still stood. But the trans- 
mitting wire, in falling, had become entangled in the head of one 
of the few coconut trees still erect. It looked very much as if 
KEN would be off the air indefinitely. Still, it was decided to try 
to raise some comparatively nearby Coast Watcher and arrange 
for relays of urgent traffic. 

The operator warmed up his Teleradio and called. To his aston- 
ishment he got a response from one of the alert members of the 



THE SOLOMONS 43 

chain. He asked for a signal strength and readability report. Anx- 
iously they waited. It came. 

SEEMS IMPROVED. HAVE YOU BEEN MAKING ADJUSTMENTS? 

Mackenzie looked at his men and they looked back at him. 
Then the strain of the night and those that preceded it broke under 
their laughter until the tears came. 

Between bombings and bombardments they managed to erect 
two or more receiving aerials. In the first traffic to be snared by 
them were warnings from Read that the heaviest concentration of 
aircraft he had yet observed was now on the expanded ak strip 
at Buka village. There were more ships there, too. But why no 
friendly bombings of them? It was true that the enemy was enjoy- 
ing some immunity. Southwest Pacific Area bombers were em- 
ployed day and night trying to prevent enemy reinforcements 
from reaching the New Guinea coast and the heavy bombers of 
COMSOUPAC were based too far south to make raids profitable. 
They could not base closer; there was no fuel for them and little 
of anything else except an endless supply of wounded waiting to 
be airlifted to base hospitals. 

Read's reports were followed by grim news from Mason. Liter- 
ally scores of enemy ships of every kind were anchoring within 
his range of vision. A tremendous build-up obviously was in 
progress. Apparently everything now was awaiting the arrival of 
actual assault-troop convoys from the enemy Caroline Islands. 

Then a different kind of message came from Mason. The enemy 
was out after him and to make sure the Japanese had just landed 
at Buin crates of savage dogs trained in jungle trailing. 

In Brisbane it gave us a shiver of apprehension as nothing else 
had done. War was always dirty business, but somehow this 
seemed a new low. Mackenzie pleaded for a bombing mission. 
AIB urged it. RAAF did it superbly. Mason's next message in- 
cluded his fervent thanks to all concerned for the beautiful accu- 
racy of a direct hit on the crates. 

In a new message to Feldt, Mackenzie expressed fears that this 
was only the beginning of an enemy attempt to clean out the Coast 



44 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

Watchers. A priority reply went back. Both Read and Mason would 
get off the air and stay off until ordered to resume. They would 
hole up in the most secure places inland and avoid capture. 

On Maliata Hill, Mason needed no prod; he had it in the form 
of urgent reports from his native scouts that not fewer than one 
hundred Japanese constituted the latest punitive patrol that had 
already set out from Buin to mop up him and his handful of de- 
voted followers. 

Mason considered. If the enemy was heavily armed, his prog- 
ress would be slow in the tortuous country through which Mason 
planned to lead him. He would bury his Teleradio and travel 
light. With signs of their occupancy obliterated, Mason released 
some of his boys to return to their homes for the time being and 
with the others, he set his face toward the high, mist-shrouded 
ridges inland. Now his life was in the hands of his boys, whose 
glistening bodies worked patiently to clear passages just large 
enough for them to traverse; the jungle closed up after them. It 
was bitter, exhausting work and that night Mason felt the giddi- 
ness of exhaustion. But he was heartened by his scouts who re- 
ported that as he had foreseen the enemy had made even less 
progress. At noon the next day he got it from two observers simul- 
taneously that the Japanese had given up and turned back. He, 
too, headed back, and by the time the last Japanese had trailed 
into Buin, Mason's Teleradio was ready for eventualities. He got 
a permission to transmit if absolutely necessary. 

An almost identical experience had befallen Read, except that 
the enemy out of Buka Passage was more resolute. The second 
afternoon had found Read's party slogging through a heavy down- 
pour well up into the high interior. They moved with the heavi- 
ness of men who were approaching their limit. But there was one 
more steep ascent before they could reach their objective of a 
small village on the very top of the highest elevation in the entire 
area. The miserable trail was almost vertical and slick with black 
mud and skinned vines. The afternoon was nearly done when they 
achieved that last wretched lap. At the top they dropped in their 
tracks to rest on the comparatively open crest. 

"It was no choice of mine that we stopped at that one par- 



THE SOLOMONS 45 

ticular spot," Read said later. "We were dead beat and I was on 
the point of dropping off to nap when I happened to open my 
eyes for a moment." 

The sun had broken through a clearing and a surge of breeze 
had driven the mist away. Below, in a glorious panorama of a 
Coast Watcher's dream come true, was a convoy of no less than 
twelve huge troop transports loaded to the rails with Japanese 
soldiers and moving toward the southeast. 

Read scrambled to his feet. 

"Quick, yufelo!" he yelled. "Wairless belong dis felo, you mak 
um hurry alonga tree!" 

His weary boys were galvanized into action. They saw now 
what the kiap's quick eye had taken in. In an ordered chaos of 
their own they put their backs into the business of breaking out 
the Teleradio and running an emergency transmitting aerial. For 
Read it was a repetition of the scene of August 7 above Buka 
Passage. 

From the ridge he counted the ships again. Yes, twelve were 
in sight. There might have been more, of course. But not one of 
these was under ten thousand tons. He realized that this convoy 
was carrying enough assault impact to make bitter business of 
Guadalcanal. Without a doubt the formidable concentration of 
warships Mason had been reporting down south was to serve as 
an advance assault and as an escort for this stuff. He correctly 
assessed this as the major enemy drive to retake Guadalcanal and 
all the central Solomons with it. 

Everything now depended on the Teleradio. The connections 
were tight. Read patted the transmitter affectionately. To his grin- 
ning blacks he expressed his feelings of how good it was to have 
the faithful unit. "Wairless i gudfelo samting, dis felo tinkum!" The 
boys nodded their noisy assent. 

The milliampere needle went to maximum and he knew the 
power was radiating from the jury antenna. 

Read had not forgotten Brisbane's order for radio silence. But 
under the circumstances he was "not very ruddy likely" to ob- 
serve it. As he prepared to transmit, he said to himself, "Bougain- 
ville's a fair size. We'll just keep on the run." 



46 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

Read's warning reached KEN almost simultaneously with an- 
other from Mason that now enemy ships of every description were 
anchored below him at Buin. Mason listed more than sixty. With 
this vital intelligence and much more gathered from non-AIB 
sources, COMSOUPAC fully appreciated that the time of deci- 
sion had arrived. Nothing could save the worn-down, if now- 
reinforced., defenders of Guadalcanal unless the naval and air 
strength of the whole command could be rallied to disrupt the 
enemy attack before it could hit. 

On the night of November 10 the bombardment of Lunga by 
Japanese warships, doubtless from the concentration Mason had 
kept under observation, was particularly devastating. At dawn the 
ships moved back to let the dive bombers take over. That night the 
ships came in again for one last softening before the kill. But this 
time they were met off Savo Island by an unexpected American 
naval force. There was a short, savage fight and the Japanese 
were beaten off. More American heavy naval units arrived. Re- 
peatedly the opposing forces traded blows. Then one night the 
main Japanese escort for the transports that Read had seen were 
met head-on by powerful American naval elements. The enemy 
was taken under murderous fiat trajectory fire at close range. The 
short battle had no equal for quick, savage ferocity. 

This left the enemy transports wide open to attack. It came in 
successive assault waves from Allied air. The packed convoy was 
mauled without mercy until it was no convoy only a remnant 
that sought to beach itself before total annihilation. 

The Japanese reinforcement attempt was a failure. The cost 
had been dreadful for both sides. But the enemy effort in the Solo- 
mons never again would be so great as it had been. Even so, he 
was still utterly determined, resourceful, and very powerful. 

New Year's Eve, 1942 . . . 

In Brisbane's brown-out, dense crowds of men and women in 
the service garbs of half-a-dozen Allied nations jostled and tramped 
and cheered their way aimlessly along Queen Street, George 
Street, the City Hall Square, and all the other downtown places 



THE SOLOMONS 47 

of that overpacked garrison Queensland town. Few knew quite 
why they cheered, for the picture was grim enough. Perhaps it 
was because they were still alive, or because of Coral Sea, Mid- 
way, and Guadalcanal. And there had been another reprieve, 
too Port Moresby had been saved. 

As has been said, when the Coral Sea victory frustrated the 
Japanese in their original plan to capture Port Moresby and thus 
give them an anchor in the north for their encircling movement, 
the enemy determined upon an overland campaign to do the same 
thing. For sheer audacity in the face of stupendous natural ob- 
stacles, it was typically Japanese. He had landed troops on the 
north coast of New Guinea at Buna, dug himself in and prepared 
to assault the Owen Stanley Mountains themselves in order to 
take Port Moresby from behind. This formidable range dividing 
New Guinea north and south rose wave after green wave to heights 
that few white men ever had traversed. Despite concentrated heat, 
despite disease, despite endless trails that went up sheer, jungle- 
covered sides and went down sheer sides only to go up again the 
same way, despite ever-lengthening lines of communication under 
continuous Allied air attack, and despite constantly mounting op- 
position in front, this insidious threat had crept to within forty 
air miles of Port Moresby before it dropped in exhaustion. Then 
it had recoiled upon itself, slowly retreating back over the Kokoda 
Trail the way it had come. 

This threat, too, had originated at Rabaul, that fountainhead 
of enemy power to the north. And now not only New Britain was 
increasingly dangerous for any Allied Intelligence Bureau activity, 
but the New Guinea north coast as well. Plans MacArthur may 
have cherished for the acquisition of his own bases on the north 
coast once the Solomons were no longer in danger of Japanese 
domination would have to await the building of enough force to 
smash Buna. Then perhaps he could think of a frontal assault on 
Rabaul. Or, if he could not do that, at least he must provide warn- 
ing protection for his own flank while he tried to secure such bases 
on New Guinea as Lae, Salamoa, and Finschafen for his cam- 
paign to return northwestward to the Indies and the Philippines 
and finally, Japan itself. 



48 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

AIB had become heavily engaged in New Britain; it was per- 
forming a vital piece of work before Buna; it had even recruited, 
trained, and dispatched its first penetration agents to the Philip- 
pines by New Year's Eve of 1942. 

But with all this AIB still was tremendously occupied with the 
critical situation in the Solomons. A very powerful enemy had 
yet to be contained; he would be slowly decimated thousands 
of Allied lives, hundreds and hundreds of riddled aircraft, and 
whole divisions of Allied warships later 

New Year's Eve, 1942 . . . 

Midnight on a certain small strip of sandy beach on the north- 
east tip of Bougainville. Absolute silence except for the soft purl- 
ing of the sea on the sand that showed with pale luminescence 
under the starlight. Read studied the radium hands of his wrist 
watch. They merged, straight up. 

He raised one arm high, then pumped it up and down. On the 
beach to the right there was a spark of light. It wavered, nearly 
died, but ballooned to a bright orange flame. He turned and faced 
the other way. Already a substantial fibre was burning. In back of 
him twenty-nine silent men and women huddled in the denser 
shadows of foliage. Read took a long breath: it did things to a 
man to advertise his presence to the whole world like this after 
all those months and especially these last few weeks of hardly 
daring to stir without double checking to make certain that a 
Japanese patrol led by turncoat natives was not onto him. This 
exposure was a calculated risk of the first magnitude. But there 
simply was nothing else for it the civilians must be gotten out 
of his territory. Without them, he felt that he and his few loyal 
natives still could carry on; they could continue to radio vital in- 
formation and throw other barbs into the Japanese who now were 
stung to true fury by the Coast Watchers who had tipped their 
hand at every turn in the crucial battle for Guadalcanal. The 
enemy knew now that he could not retake Guadalcanal; the only 
thing he could do and this he would if it expended his last man, 
ship, and plane would be to seal it off. In his operational book 



THE SOLOMONS 49 

of "musts," however, was the destruction of the Coast Watchers 
on Bougainville. Every day the enemy patrols grew more numer- 
ous and more savage. There were murder, arson, rape. The natives 
were fearful and they were turning 

So all through that day there had been a stealthy gathering of 
civilians summoned by still-loyal natives to this place of rendez- 
vous. Here, if all went well, a gigantic American submarine the 
largest in any navy on this side of the world would appear and 
take them off. It had rained steadily. The trail had been a horror 
of mud and slippery leaves and entangling vines. But they had 
made it including several nuns of advanced age. 

So here the year 1943 was born to the soft sighing of palm 
fronds and the lisping of the sea. 

But wasn't there another sound? From seaward a faint hail? 

Read stared. Then he was sure that he could detect a motion- 
less shadow well out. 

"A quid they're hung up on a ruddy reef," he said to himself. 
From the foliage he pulled out a canoe. Bidding the others stay 
concealed, he launched the craft and paddled hard. His estimate 
had been correct. But with good seamanship on the part of the 
American naval personnel manning the power wherry from the 
three-thousand-ton U.S.S. Nautilus and some guidance from Read, 
the launch and its rubber raft tow were salvaged from the hidden 
coral without damage and the beach landing was effected. The 
submarine herself had to stand well out, for this underseas giant 
needed more than those dangerous shallows in which to swim 
safely. 

Read directed that the women go first. There were seventeen. 
One, a nun, whose habit was spattered with the mud of the 
soaked trail, hesitated, then turned and approached him. She ex- 
plained that she represented the others in the party when she said 
that months ago it was considered that he had been needlessly 
adamant in demanding that they evacuate the island while there 
still was time, but since then they had learned how right he had 
been. She apologized for all the trouble they had been. Read swal- 
lowed a tight feeling in his throat and muttered his appreciation 



50 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

for her words. Perhaps he had been a bit hard in his direct way; 
civilians were not such a bad lot, after all. 

Then he turned about, unbelieving. At the very last moment 
one of the women, the widow of a planter, announced in emphatic 
terms that she had changed her mind and would not go. 

"Will you go yourself, Madam?" asked Read icily, "or do you 
want to be carried aboard, for that I'll well and truly do now!" 

She went. There was no more room. The launch with its heavily 
laden tow moved out over the calm sea. Time went by and there 
was no reappearance of the launch. Anxiously Read scanned the 
hands of his watch. Dawn was not far off and he knew well that 
the Nautilus would be compelled to clear the area before first 
light. Soon he and the others would have to put back and get 
under safe cover. With civilians still to be looked after it would be 
grim. Of course there were other civilians on the island, but they 
were not in his immediate territory; things were just too hot here. 
Finally, the launch returned and just before dawn broke Read 
was able to send a message from the Teleradio hidden on the 
beach: "Mission accomplished." 

He and his natives turned back into the jungle, happily laden 
with chocolate bars, cigarettes, tinned hams, razors, mirrors, tooth 
paste, and a variety of other things supplied them by the gen- 
erous gobs of the Nautilus. Even the conviction of enemy reprisals 
to come failed to dim their New Year's party in the bush. 

It was a short respite. The enemy was implacable. His patrols 
became constant. Nor was he afraid to come inland. The key to 
his efficiency lay in his impressment of natives, now demoralized 
by a combination of propaganda that was superior to the Allied 
brand, and brutality if there was a lack of cooperation. 

There was a flurry of AIB priority messages involving Mason. 
From Guadalcanal, Mackenzie told Brisbane that reliable infor- 
mation indicated the presence of not less than four enemy patrols 
of some fifty men each converging on Mason's priceless hide above 
the Buin anchorage. There was no time to lose. Mason was or- 
dered to bury his Teleradio and anything else he could dispense 
with and go light but go fast. He would try to effect a junction 
with Read, a hundred and thirty miles of the most rugged walking 



THE SOLOMONS 51 

through the bush to say nothing of the enemy and his hoard of 
native aides. It was learned later that Mason had barely cleared 
the old site when the Japanese swept down on it from all sides; 
he never would have had a chance. 

Read knew Mason only through the medium of the Teleradio. 
But the combination of electronics and his own intuition added 
up to what he felt was a solid enough appraisal. Somehow, he 
was sure, Mason would get through. Anxious weeks later he re- 
ported that the jungle telegraph was active, and that he now was 
able to trace the progress the little safari was making along 
villainous trails made doubly hazardous by repeated traps placed 
by the enemy. Read decided to send help. 

From the beginning, as the reader will recall, there had been 
on Bougainville a detachment of twenty-five Australian soldiers 
who had been assigned to guard supplies accumulated there prior 
to the outbreak of war. Read queried their officer and got agree- 
ment that they would work southward to try to contact Mason. It 
proved to be sound tactics, for in due time he had word that the 
junction had been effected somewhere in the wild bush and that 
the combined party now was proceeding north. 

Then came a message from the soldiers that left Read disturbed: 
for reasons of his own, Mason had sent the main party forward 
while he and one police boy detoured to investigate a camp of 
refugee Chinese. If that message bothered him, the next one pro- 
duced genuine anxiety. It said that shortly after the separation 
had been effected, a strong enemy patrol had been spotted be- 
tween them and Mason and now he was cut off. The soldiers 
wanted instructions. Read considered all angles and then, examin- 
ing again his preconceived assessment of Mason's character sent: 
"Wait." 

For the next three days Read's boys squatted on their haunches 
and watched their kiap. His dark-gray eyes stared unseeing into 
the jungle and his jaw, with a strong hint of stubbornness in it, 
seemed to set even more firmly. The boys looked at each other 
and there was admiration in their glance. Here was a kiap worth 
sticking by: he was one to hold fast when action could be foolish. 



52 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

And then came the nnmer. The party was just below and com- 
ing. A kiap was with them, limping badly. 

Read and Mason met, and Read knew how accurate his ap- 
praisal had been. The signal he had been waiting to send to AIB 
was transmitted by Read just six weeks after Mason's own Tele- 
radio had gone silent at Buin. 

One of Mason's feet was in bad shape. When he had become 
separated, he had taken refuge with a white miner who had been 
successfully evading the Japanese since the beginning. A foot blis- 
ter had become infected and was suppurating. The miner tended 
him for two days, then Mason had hobbled off. Bougainville had 
beaten strong men down to defeat despite every assistance, yet 
this planter who boasted none of the physical qualities of the cam- 
paigner now proposed to make the last lap of it on only one good 
foot. 

He did it. Read and Mason measured each other and liked what 
they saw. They discussed the situation. They were in immediate 
agreement on two points as many of the remaining civilians, in- 
cluding refugee Chinese, should be evacuated at the earliest op- 
portunity, and the soldiers should also go, since they were in poor 
shape owing to prolonged exposure to a kind of rugged tropical 
life to which they were not acclimatized. They "made a signal" 
to Mackenzie, who concurred and asked Brisbane's okay. Bris- 
bane sent it, but said that the soldiers were to be replaced by 
fresh men from New Guinea who could give the Coast Watchers 
some protection. In addition, there would be three new officer 
Coast Watchers. In that case would Read and Mason come out 
for a most thoroughly earned rest? 

The two men looked at each other over mugs of tea. Outside 
the hut of bamboo stalks and fiber roof the rain drummed down 
in a gray blur. Read shivered slightly and looked into his tea mug, 
then at his faithful police boys in their jungle-stained khaki shorts. 
Their eyes were on him. He looked at Paul Mason, who smiled 
slowly and shook his head. Read put his cup down and chuckled. 
Obviously they agreed that neither they nor their black boys would 
take to the life of a "base wallah." 

He flipped the Teleradio to "on," and Brisbane got its answer. 



THE SOLOMONS 53 

The next evacuation was set for the last of March at the same 
place on the northeast coast. Then came the word that this time 
it would not be the Nautilus, but an operational submarine with 
compressed spaces that certainly were not designed for the ac- 
commodation of passengers. That drew another signal from Read. 
It was one that jolted Brisbane. He had no less than twelve women 
and twenty-seven children in addition to twelve soldiers in the first 
contingent for exchange. 

The signal that came back from Brisbane gave no hint of the 
soul searching that had gone into its making: the soldiers would 
have to wait. Read sighed. So be it. Some of the civilians had 
made the trek of a hundred miles to the rendezvous on foot. 

The next day Read supervised the concentration of his charges 
at the same spot as had sheltered the group on New Year's Eve. 
Quietly he spoke to the commander of the downcast soldiers, tell- 
ing him to have the men ready "with their kits." The other looked 
at him sharply. Read shrugged. He muttered something about 
man's inability to forecast the future accurately if at all, and said 
good-by for the moment. 

What happened that afternoon was not what Read had antici- 
pated. A short time after his conversation with the troop com- 
mander he was staring at the small Japanese ship that had come 
into the very eye of the evacuation area and dropped anchor a 
few hundred yards offshore. What a situation! Here he had 
gathered all the weak and the helpless he could sweep up and de- 
livered them straight into the hands of the enemy. And the sub- 
marine as well. 

He was everywhere at once. There were men, women, and chil- 
dren to hide in the jungle; there was a small fleet of canoes to 
conceal. There was a warning message to be sent to AJQB at 
Guadalcanal to warn the submarine not to come in. And if sheer 
mental persuasion had power, then Read bent every iota of his to 
influence the Japanese to stay aboard their ship and leave with- 
out landing. 

The day wore on, and with each measure of light that went out 
of the sky Read's hopes rose another notch; surely the enemy 
would not land in the darkness. But why were the Japanese here 



54 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

at all? Were they going to establish a base, or rendezvous with 
another ship? 

There was no sleep for him that night. 

Shortly after dawn the enemy ship hauled in her anchor chain, 
her crew sluicing off the links as they came inboard. The vessel 
slowly gathered way and left. He sent another message. It would 
be tonight. Meanwhile, they could wait and rest. 

At dusk the signal fires were lighted. Almost instantly the sub- 
marine rose out of the depths and shook the sea from her. Read 
launched a canoe and went out. 

Lieutenant Commander Foley of the U.S.S. Goto was chuckling. 
The Goto had spotted the unwelcome visitor immediately. "He 
can thank his lucky stars you and your party were there hiding on 
the beach," he had said. "Otherwise we would have blasted him 
sky high. We were practically sitting under him all the time!" 

Read cleared Ms throat. "I ... " he began, looking straight at 
Foley, "have fifty-one persons to go out." This figure, of course, 
included the weary soldiers. 

The American's eyebrows went up. Then he grinned, called his 
executive officer, and discussed it with him. He turned back. 

"If we can dog down the hatch over the head of the last one, 
we might say we're full. Bring 'em on!" 

There was a story that the last six were made comfortable in 
the torpedo tubes. 

Now on Bougainville there remained the last of the soldiers and 
a Bishop Wade and some of his people. Read sent word for them 
to be ready for the next and last evacuation party. 

It was in the interval between the second and the last evacua- 
tion that Read observed nearly one hundred Japanese Zero planes 
take off from the greatly expanded air strip at Buka village and 
strike off for the southeast. Again his famous signals preceded 
the raiders. The ensuing sky battle off Guadalcanal was one 
of the most devastating the enemy had yet experienced, for there 
was no doubt that he already had expended the cream of his ex- 
perienced pilots while the Allied fighters were just achieving their 
maximum efficiency, and with their added advantage of ample 
time and height, the issue was certain. 



THE SOLOMONS 55 

The last evacuation went off without a hitch. Now no civilians 
remained except some refugee Chinese and possibly a few white 
men fairly well able to take care of themselves. A new burden 
had been laid upon Read, however, for a RAAF Catalina in at- 
tempting a resupply drop near the high country had crashed into 
a mountain. Some crew members had been killed outright. A 
brave but futile attempt had been made to carry the critically in- 
jured survivors to the submarine evacuation spot before the ship 
left. A camp inland was established for them. On the other side 
of the scales there now were several fresh, experienced Coast 
Watchers. They included an old New Guinea friend of Read, one 
"Wobbie Wobinson" Captain E. D. Robinson of the Australian 
Army was unable to articulate the letter "r"; result: "Wobbie." 

Stories of "Wobbie" were legion. Feldt later told of the pur- 
ported initial conversation between him and Read. It had gone like 
this: 

Read: "I had it first that the 'Robbie' coming in was c Dry Rob- 
bie.' " He was referring to the only non-drinking Coast Watcher 
in the whole organization, Lieutenant H. A. F. Robertson of the 
Australian Army. 

Wobbie, emphatically: "Not I, mate. I likes me pint." (In 
peacetime he had owned a pub in Sydney,) Then he asked Read 
if he had heard how convivial indulgence in the cup that cheers 
had done no less than save the very life of still another "Robbie." 
This time he meant Flying Officer R. A. Robinson on Mackenzie's 
staff at Lunga. Read had not, and awaited elucidation. 

Wobbie: "Well, now. Y' see a wuddy Nip ai'cwaft that had 
been plaguin' th' Yanks had just come back t' pay anothah visit 
and th' Yanks was lettin' him have what-foah with all the ack-ack 
in the place. The wed wa'ning signal had been displayed all th 5 
time but ouah man was havin' none of it because th' beeah was 
on that day. So he was sittin' theah and he had just tilted his head 
back t' get the last fine twickle o' it, when a wuddy hunk o' 
shwapnel comes in and actually nicks his wuddy fo'head. Now 
then, it's plain t' be seen that if he'd been sittin' in a nondwinkin f 
position like T)wy Wobbie' would, n' doubt he'd now be flyin' 



56 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

about by means of wuddy wings of his own Let that be a 

lesson f you, Jack Wead!" 

Other things also had been occurring at Lunga. The original 
Marines had been relieved during December 1952 and had joy- 
fully pushed off for Australia. With them had gone Major General 
A. Vandegrift. Major General A. M. Patch had replaced that warm 
friend of the Coast Watchers as commander of ground forces, 
now predominantly army infantry. To Mackenzie's relief, General 
Patch was no less solid. The same could not be reported of his 
intelligence officer. Totally untrained for his job, this individual 
was described by Mackenzie as one who "did not seem able to 
absorb much knowledge of the geography of the Solomon Islands. 
His plan was based on his desire to rectify the unsymmetrical ap- 
pearance on his map of the colored flags indicating Coast Watch- 
ing stations." The G2 put his "plan" before General Patch. It is 
not known whether it was at this time that the American com- 
mander sent a message to Washington requesting the assignment 
of the most experienced Intelligence officer they could lay hands 
on (he got him in the person of Colonel E. E. Brown) but it is 
known that he sent for Mackenzie and assured him that no one 
and he meant no one would disturb the Coast Watchers except 
Mackenzie himself, and that thereafter he should consider him- 
self as having direct access to the general's command post at any 
time. 

It had been a gratifying moment. But Mackenzie found himself 
increasingly unable to rally to good luck when it did occur. The 
frightful ordeal of November and the unceasing strain, coupled 
with low-grade malaria, were taking their toll. At last he radioed 
Feldt. Feldt decided to investigate in person. He flew out. A few 
days later we were dismayed at Mackenzie's urgent message of 
critical illness not of himself but of Eric Feldt. The untiring 
chief of the Northeast Area section had collapsed while flying in 
a small military plane. He now was in capable American medical 
hands. Diagnosis: coronary thrombosis. Prognosis: fair, under con- 
ditions of absolute rest. 

Eventually he was flown back to Brisbane and hospitalized. It 



THE SOLOMONS 57 

was the end of active military service for him. Yet from his sick- 
room he eventually would compile the finest complete story of the 
Coast Watchers to come out of the war. 

The casualties of war were not restricted to the fighting fronts. 
In Brisbane devoted, dogged Colonel Merle-Smith also had passed 
the limit of physical elasticity. He was told to rest, and while re- 
luctantly complying, suifered a heart seizure. Flown back to main- 
land United States, he died in New York. 

On Guadalcanal, Mackenzie persisted through a haze of exhaus- 
tion until Commander I. D. J. Pryce Jones could take over at KEN. 
Then he was evacuated to Australia. The drain on his vitality had 
been too much and the low-grade malaria degenerated into feared 
"blackwater" fever. He was critically ill for months. Upon his 
eventual recovery he came to us at AD3 headquarters in Heindorff 
House, Brisbane, where his quiet friendliness and unassuming ef- 
ficiency would be strengthening factors at all times. 

Meanwhile a slight man with snow-white hair, frosty eyebrows 
over friendly pale blue eyes, and a granite-like jaw had taken over 
from Feldt. Commander J. C. McManus was not an "islander" but 
he was as capable as he was fair, and he was a champion of every- 
thing and everyone related to Coast Watching. It was plain that he 
would be accepted, even by the clannish, unpredictable, independent 
"islanders" themselves. 

A development that was to have far-reaching effect on Coast 
Watching had its inception at the time he took over. This was a 
plan for greatly expanding the scheme which Kennedy on Segi Island 
had been employing so successfully against the enemy the recruit- 
ment of volunteers among qualified natives to serve as trained, of- 
ficially enrolled guerrillas under the command of the Coast Watch- 
ers themselves. Eventually the plan would result in the development 
of splendid battalions that would become the terrors of the Japa- 
nese, on New Britain and New Guinea as well as the Solomons; 
they would account for the bulk of the more than fifty-four hundred 
enemy killed and nearly fifteen hundred wounded officially credited 
to the Northeast Area section. The high proportion of killed to 
wounded was significant. 

It fell on McManus, also, to implement an earlier decision to 



58 ALLIED INTELLIGENCE BUREAU 

revitalize Coast Watching on Bougainville. One of the newcomer 
Coast Watchers was Lieutenant J. H. Keenan of the Australian 
Navy. He was to take over Read's old spot in the north, while Read 
and Robinson, together with some soldiers in support, were to 
locate on the east coast in a more central area. Mason would head 
south for his old location, which seemed to be quieter now. 

Any appearance of peacefulness was wholly deceptive. Hardly 
had Read gotten into position and Mason traversed a part of his 
rugged way back when trouble was reported from every point. 
Some of it was because of the inexperience of some of the new- 
comers, but mainly it was the aggressive enemy and his host of co- 
operating natives. Mason, hemmed in and having lost one of the 
new officers to a Japanese bullet, turned in his tracks and set his 
course for a reunion with Read or the Buka force. But the latter had 
been attacked, too, and Lieutenant Keenan had escaped only by 
prompt evasive action. He later returned to his burned-out site and 
prepared to continue reporting movements at Buka. But the enemy 
in turn was watching him. 

Then the lightning hit Read. 

The observation camp he and Robinson had set up was high on 
a ridge. Some miles to the westward were the soldiers. Japanese 
were known to have been in the area and Reed, the old hand, em- 
ployed every device of his jungle wile to prevent surprise. An "outer 
guard" was established at some distance from his lookout along the 
only trail that would lead directly into it. Then came a s