The Coastwatchers of the Solomons: Ferdinand, Mason, Read, Kennedy and Clemens

Martin Clemens, district officer of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate and coastwatcher on Guadalcanal, with a young Solomon Islander. Archives Branch, USMC History Division, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Special Units · Guadalcanal, 1942–43

The Coastwatchers of the Solomons: Ferdinand, Mason, Read, Kennedy and Clemens

A few dozen planters, officials and missionaries, kept alive and hidden by Solomon Islanders, watched the Japanese from the hills with radios they could barely carry, and gave the defenders of Guadalcanal the warnings that let them fight.

Every Japanese air raid on Guadalcanal flew down the chain of the Solomons from Rabaul, and every Japanese convoy came the same way, through the passage that the Americans called the Slot. Along that route, on Bougainville, New Georgia, Santa Isabel and Guadalcanal itself, men of the Royal Australian Navy’s coastwatching organization sat in jungle hideouts with teleradios, counting aircraft and ships and reporting them by voice or Morse. The warnings gave the fighters at Henderson Field time to take off and climb above the bombers. Admiral William F. Halsey’s verdict, recorded by the Marine Corps historian Henry Shaw, was that “the Coastwatchers saved Guadalcanal, and Guadalcanal saved the Pacific.”

The coastwatchers were never a large force. In the Solomons, the historian Clive Moore counts 24, including two on Bougainville. They were planters, colonial officers, a few missionaries and traders, most of them Australians and New Zealanders, enlisted into the Royal Australian Naval Volunteer Reserve so that they might be treated as soldiers rather than spies if caught. They survived only because Solomon Islanders carried their radios and batteries, fed them, guided them, warned them of Japanese patrols and, often at great risk, refused to betray them. This page tells their story and the Islanders’ part in it. The scouts who fought with the Marines are covered on the companion page Sir Jacob Vouza and the Solomon Islands Scouts, and the air war the warnings made possible on The Cactus Air Force.

The sources are Australian and Solomon Islands as well as American: the Australian Department of Veterans’ Affairs’ Anzac Portal history, the Australian Dictionary of Biography, the Australian War Memorial, the Solomon Islands Historical Encyclopaedia 1893–1978, Martin Clemens’s memoir Alone on Guadalcanal, and Eric Feldt’s own book, The Coast Watchers (1946). Figures for the size of the organization vary widely depending on what is counted, and they are given below with their sources.

Ferdinand: origins of the organization

The idea of a coastwatching service went back to the years after the First World War, when Captain Chapman James Clare of the Royal Australian Navy set up a network to watch the remote coast of Western Australia. Shaw dates the original proposal to 1919. By the mid-1920s the system had been extended to the Australian-administered territories, including the Bismarck Archipelago, using district officers, planters and missionaries who already lived in remote places and already had radios or could be given them.

The man who turned it into a wartime intelligence service was Eric Augustas Feldt. Born in Cardwell, Queensland, in 1899, he had entered the Royal Australian Naval College in its 1913 intake, resigned from the Navy in 1922, and spent the interwar years in the New Guinea administration as a patrol officer and district officer. In September 1939 the Director of Naval Intelligence, Commander Rupert Long, mobilized him as staff intelligence officer at Port Moresby to organize coastwatching in the northeastern approaches to Australia. Feldt traveled through New Guinea and the Solomons recruiting watchers and distributing radio sets, and from May 1941 he was supervising intelligence officer for the North Eastern Area, based at Townsville.

Feldt chose the code name “Ferdinand,” after the bull in Munro Leaf’s 1936 children’s book The Story of Ferdinand, who preferred to sit under a tree and smell the flowers. The Anzac Portal history explains the point: the coastwatchers were to observe quietly rather than fight, though they could fight if stung. Their equipment was the teleradio, most of them the Type 3B (superseded by the 3BZ in 1942), packed in three metal boxes each about 60 by 30 by 30 centimeters. By 1942, the same history counts more than 100 teleradios in the network, linked to receiving stations at Port Moresby, Rabaul, Tulagi and Vila. Messages were at first sent in the Playfair code, later in 1942 in a higher-grade naval code.

After Japan entered the war, the civilians among the coastwatchers were enlisted in the Royal Australian Naval Volunteer Reserve, in the hope that rank and uniform would protect them if captured. The hope was not always realized; several coastwatchers captured in New Ireland and New Britain in 1942 were executed. In 1942 the organization came under the Allied Intelligence Bureau, created after General Douglas MacArthur became Supreme Commander in the Southwest Pacific, but in the Solomons, which lay in Admiral Nimitz’s South Pacific Area, it remained under Australian naval intelligence.

The watchers in place: the Solomons before Watchtower

When the Japanese occupied Tulagi in May 1942, the Protectorate administration withdrew to Malaita, and most European residents were evacuated. A handful stayed. Mackenzie Gregory, writing in the Naval Historical Review, lists coastwatchers in place by early August 1942 at Segi on New Georgia, on southern Santa Isabel, on Guadalcanal, on Malaita and on San Cristobal. On Bougainville, the northern end of the chain, Paul Mason watched from the hills above Buin in the south and Jack Read from the north, near Buka Passage.

On Guadalcanal the district officer, Martin Clemens, stayed at his post. When the Japanese landed in July to build the airfield on the Lunga plain, he moved inland and kept watch with a teleradio, his police and a network of village scouts. His memoir, excerpted in Naval History in 1998, describes the last days before the American landing from his camp at Matanga and the lookout at Vungana, which gave the best view of the Lunga area. A scout named Daniel Pule sent him a letter with a detailed map of Japanese installations at Kukum and Lunga; on 5 August a patrol led by a scout named Koimate confirmed that the runway, red clay and gravel, was ready for aircraft. Food was nearly gone, villagers were afraid to sell what they had, and Clemens walked barefoot over the track to Vungana, wishing, he wrote, that the authorities would send him shoes instead of messages. Two other coastwatchers, Lieutenant Donald Macfarlan and Sub-Lieutenant Rhoades, a plantation manager, also watched from Guadalcanal.

Clemens’s and the other watchers’ reports of the airfield were part of what made the Allied high command move. The airfield’s near-completion turned a planned attack on Tulagi into an assault on Guadalcanal too, and gave Operation Watchtower its urgency; the decision is described in Chapter 1.

“Twenty-four bombers headed yours”: August 1942

On the morning of 7 August 1942, as the Marines landed, Japanese bombers took off from Rabaul to attack the invasion fleet. Their route passed over southern Bougainville. Paul Mason saw them and sent the signal, recorded in his Australian Dictionary of Biography entry: “Twenty-four bombers headed yours.” The message was relayed to the fleet off Guadalcanal, which had time to prepare. Gregory, then a junior officer in the Australian cruiser Canberra, remembered the ship’s broadcast that “all hands will go to dinner at 1100 as we expect a Japanese air attack.” Carrier fighters met the raid; Gregory gives 16 Japanese aircraft shot down for the loss of 12 carrier aircraft, and the destroyer Mugford was hit, with 20 of her crew killed.

The next day, 8 August, Jack Read on northern Bougainville reported “forty Japanese bombers flying South East,” as Gregory quotes the warning. Shaw gives the raid as 40 bombers, of which 36 were destroyed. Gregory’s account credits the fleet’s guns with 17 Betty bombers that day. The figures differ in what they count, but on both days the Japanese lost heavily against forewarned defenders. The destroyer Jarvis was torpedoed, and the transport George F. Elliott, struck by a burning aircraft, was abandoned and lost. Clemens, listening on his radio in the hills, noted Read’s later report that only nine of 27 Bettys had returned.

For the rest of the campaign the Bougainville stations were the first link in the warning chain for raids from Rabaul and the airfields at Buka and Buin. The fighters at Henderson Field needed time to get their Wildcats up to the altitude of the incoming bombers; without warning, they would have been caught on the ground or climbing. Coastwatchers on New Georgia and Santa Isabel added a second warning as the raids passed. On 10 November, Mason reported 61 Japanese ships from southern Bougainville, part of the gathering of the force that would fight the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal. The air war that depended on these reports is told in Chapter 3.

Clemens and the Marines

Clemens had watched the landing from the hills south of the airfield. On 14 August, Shaw records, he walked out of the jungle into the Marine lines with his bodyguard of Islander police. He was attached to the 1st Marine Division’s intelligence section, and his scouts, who already knew the island and its people, became the Marines’ guides and patrol leaders. Clemens told Pacific Wrecks in 1998 that he had about 300 scouts on Guadalcanal, and that around November 1942 about 150 Fijian commandos joined him. In June 1943 the scouts became part of the British Solomon Islands Defence Force, and Clemens, with the Fijians added, became a battalion commander and moved to Munda.

Among the men who came in with Clemens or joined him afterward was Jacob Vouza, a retired sergeant major of the Protectorate police whom Clemens had known on Malaita. Vouza’s capture and torture by the Japanese on 20 August, and his escape to warn the Marines before the Battle of the Tenaru, made him the best-known Islander of the campaign; his story is told on the Vouza page and in Chapter 4. The Moore encyclopedia entry also names Daniel Pule and Corporal (later Sergeant) Andrew Langabaea among the men photographed with Clemens.

After the landing a coastwatching headquarters was set up near Henderson Field under Lieutenant Commander Hugh Mackenzie, RAN, the deputy supervising intelligence officer, who received the outlying stations’ reports and passed them to the Americans. Before that, messages had gone to Townsville and been relayed onward. Feldt himself visited Guadalcanal in March 1943 and suffered a coronary thrombosis there. He was appointed OBE in 1944.

Mason and Read on Bougainville

Bougainville was Japanese-occupied territory from early 1942 and the site of their forward air bases, so the two coastwatchers there lived under constant threat. Paul Mason, a planter who had managed Inus plantation since 1925, was told by Feldt to set up observation posts behind Kieta and then inland from Buin in the south. Jack Read, assistant district officer on Buka since November 1941, worked from the north. Read, according to the Anzac Portal history, dynamited the safe in the Kieta administration office to get funds for his work. Both men depended on Bougainvillean helpers to carry, feed and hide them, and Japanese patrols hunted both stations through late 1942 and 1943.

Read also organized the evacuation of civilians, including missionaries, from Bougainville by American submarine. Shaw’s sidebar describes the submarine Nautilus taking off four nuns and 25 civilians; James Griffin’s obituary of Read records 29 civilians evacuated in early 1943 and the final pickup of the coastwatchers by the submarine Guardfish in July 1943. Mason, the ADB notes, was among the last to leave. Admiral Halsey presented the U.S. Distinguished Service Cross to both men. Read, Griffin writes, was never honored by Australia, though he was later mentioned in dispatches.

Kennedy at Segi

Donald Gilbert Kennedy, a New Zealander, was the most active and the most controversial of the Solomons coastwatchers. A former teacher who had spent many years in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony, he had been district officer for Nggela (the Florida group) since 1940 and was commissioned a captain in the British Solomon Islands Defence Force after Pearl Harbor. He set up a station at Mahanga on Santa Isabel on 20 April 1942, then in July 1942 moved his headquarters to Segi (Seghe) Point at the southeastern tip of New Georgia, under the Japanese air route to Guadalcanal. Moore describes his command as roving over Nggela, Isabel, the Russell Islands, New Georgia and the Shortlands.

From Segi, Kennedy radioed warnings of aircraft and reported ships in New Georgia Sound. Unlike most coastwatchers, he did not simply hide. With a force of about 30 Islander fighters and 60 or so carriers, and a government sloop, the Wai-ai, and later the schooner Dadavata, he rescued downed American airmen, ambushed Japanese patrols and attacked barges. The teleradio at Segi was operated by Sergeant William (Bill) Bennett, a Solomon Islander of mixed descent from New Georgia, and Geoffrey Kuper, from Santa Ana, who had trained at the Fiji medical school, joined him with his wife. On 20 December 1942 a Navy PBY of VP-91 landed at Segi and took off Merle Farland, 13 Solomon Islands police and 14 Japanese prisoners.

On the night of 19 May 1943, Kennedy and the crew of the Dadavata fought a Japanese whaleboat patrol in Marovo Lagoon, and he was wounded in the thigh. A month later, on 21 June 1943, as a Japanese advance from Viru Harbor threatened his base, the destroyer-transports Dent and Waters landed the 4th Marine Raider Battalion at Segi to protect it, the opening move of the New Georgia campaign. An airfield was later built there. Kennedy received the Distinguished Service Order and the U.S. Navy Cross, whose summary credits him with rescuing many downed American airmen and with numerous skirmishes in which Japanese troops, guns and barges were destroyed or captured.

Kennedy’s biographers, including Hugh Laracy and Mike Butcher, also record a harsher side: he was known for severe discipline, including flogging, toward subordinates and Islanders who crossed him. Later accounts have also questioned the circumstances in which he was wounded in May 1943. The record of the coastwatchers includes such facts along with the courage.

The Islanders who carried the war

Every coastwatching station depended on local people. The Anzac Portal history says each station needed 12 to 16 carriers, usually local men, to move it; a teleradio, its batteries, charging engine and fuel could not be carried by one or two Europeans. Islanders brought food from their gardens, kept watch on the trails, carried messages, and guided the watchers when the Japanese came close. They also rescued downed airmen and sailors, paddling them to coastwatcher stations or hiding them in villages until they could be picked up. Shaw puts the number of Allied pilots rescued and sheltered by the coastwatchers at 118, a figure that rests largely on Islander work.

The risk was real. Islanders suspected of helping the Allies could be beaten, imprisoned or killed, and villages near coastwatcher stations were sometimes punished. The Anzac Portal history names, among many, Sergeant Yauwiga of the Solomon Islands Native Constabulary, who worked behind Japanese lines on Bougainville for 17 months, helped destroy a Japanese spy network there, and was badly injured in June 1945. Most of the men and women who served the coastwatchers are known only by first names in the watchers’ reports, if at all. Clemens’s memoir is unusual in naming his scouts, among them Dovu, Koimate, Londoviko, Eroni and Michael as well as Daniel Pule.

Epilogue: PT-109, August 1943

The best-known coastwatcher rescue came after the Guadalcanal campaign, during the fighting for New Georgia. In the early hours of 2 August 1943, in Blackett Strait off Kolombangara, the Japanese destroyer Amagiri rammed and cut in two the motor torpedo boat PT-109, commanded by Lieutenant (junior grade) John F. Kennedy. Two of the crew were killed. The survivors swam to a small island and then to others, living on coconuts.

Sub-Lieutenant Arthur Reginald (Reg) Evans, RANVR, the coastwatcher on Kolombangara, was on his way to a better lookout on Gomu Island when he saw wreckage burning in the strait, and he sent out scouts. Two of them, Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, young Solomon Islanders paddling a dugout canoe, found the Americans. Gasa showed Kennedy how to scratch a message into the husk of a green coconut, which Kumana had picked from a nearby tree. The Australian War Memorial gives its text as “Nauro Isl. Commander … Native knows pos’it … He can pilot … 11 alive … need small boat … Kennedy.” The two men carried it by canoe through Japanese-patrolled waters, some 35 miles overnight, according to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, to the nearest Allied base. On the night of 7 August, rescue boats met Kennedy at the rendezvous and picked up the crew.

Kennedy kept the coconut husk, which is now in the museum of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. Evans’s part was not publicly known until 1961, and the two men met in the Oval Office on 1 May 1961. Gasa died on 23 November 2005. In 2008 Kumana asked that a piece of shell money, the traditional currency of the western Solomons, be placed on the grave of his “chief”; it was laid at Kennedy’s grave at Arlington and then put on display beside the coconut at the Kennedy Library.

Honors and memory

Many coastwatchers received American and British decorations, often presented by Halsey. Others, especially Islanders, received little or nothing at the time. Feldt’s own book, The Coast Watchers (1946), made the organization famous in Australia; Walter Lord’s Lonely Vigil: Coastwatchers of the Solomons (1977) brought it to an American readership. A memorial to the coastwatchers and the Solomon Islands scouts was unveiled in Honiara in August 2011.

The coastwatchers’ importance lay less in any single report than in the steady flow of them. For six months, from the day the Marines landed, most Japanese air raids on Guadalcanal were reported before they arrived, and the Americans knew in general terms when the Tokyo Express was on its way. That knowledge, given by a few dozen Europeans and many hundreds of Islanders, was one of the reasons the airfield survived.