A last secret - Tarawa executions

When World War Two opened in September 1939, conflict appeared distant to the South Pacific. Japan and the United States were still neutral and the new war looked decidedly European – and continental. New Zealanders and Australians in their thousands signed up to fight on the other side of the world while those are home prepared to support Britain with food. Nazi Germany’s Kriegsmarine sought to stop it, not only with U-boats in the Atlantic but also with a small and irritating, but threatening, group of raiders. Their successful mission was to disrupt shipping in the South Pacific with mines as well as direct attack on individual ships. Convoys were not practical in the vastness of the Pacific, so authorities decided one way to counter the raiders would be a network of men watching the Pacific, from the Southern Ocean islands to the doldrums of the Central Pacific. They were a mix of highly skilled civilian radio operators – who were to broadcast warnings – and unarmed soldiers to keep them company.
The coast watchers, as they were known, arrived at their posts just as the war was becoming global. While the men were trained to look for Nazi raiders, the new reality was the Japanese who already controlled a large stretch of the north Pacific and had ambitions to the south.
A last secret – Tarawa executions tells a story of a group of coast watchers who found themselves on a new frontline on the day Pearl Harbour was attacked by Japan. Within days many of them were in enemy territory, effectively abandoned by New Zealand to their fate.
Their story is little known; it was effectively covered up during the war by censorship, and then lost in the tales of New Zealand soldiers who fought around the world.
The men found themselves prisoners of Japan. Several, in an arbitrary fashion, survived, but this book is about the men who did not, and the barbaric way in which they were murdered by the Japanese.
It is a tale of several twists; soon after the New Zealanders were murdered, a New Zealander murdered Japanese prisoners in New Zealand.
And then there are the children fathered by the New Zealanders with girlfriends and lovers in the Gilbert Islands. They served as coast watchers but never got to see the children they had fathered.