This article discusses NZPO support to coast-watching operations in the Pacific Theater during the Second World War.
Pacific Coast-watching
[NZCW] The New Zealand Naval Board controlled the coast-watching stations established in the eastern Pacific. The screen of stations directly protected our ports and coasts and interlocked with the coast-watching systems to the west for which Australia was responsible.
[NZCW] The political control of the eastern Pacific was, for practical purposes, vested in Britain and New Zealand.
Coast-watching Sites
[NZCW] The coast-watching system set up in early 1941 included:
- the mandated territory of Western Samoa;
- the Cook Islands;
- the Crown Colony of Fiji;
- the monarchy of Tonga;
- many islands in the widely scattered domain of the High Commissioner for the Western Pacific; and
- some islands not continuously inhabited.
[Mostly NZCW] In 1941, when the system was first in full operation, the stations were:
- ten in the Gilbert Islands [now Kiribati];
- seven in the Ellice Islands [now Tuvalu];
- four in the Phoenix Islands [now part of Kiribati and mostly uninhabited];
- three in the Tokelau Islands;
- five in the Western Samoa area;
- three in the Fanning Island region;
- eleven in the Cook Islands;
- six in Tongan territory; and
- nine in the Fiji Islands.
Generally, more stations were added in 1942 and 1943, or were closed or reduced in function between 1944 and 1945.
A coast-watching station means a site with a radio or other means of communicating with headquarters. Each station might have various numbers of lookout posts feeding it information.
Coverage Area
The coast-watching stations were mere pinpoints in the immensity of the Pacific Ocean and were spread between Fanning Island north of the equator to Campbell Island in the sub-Antarctic southern ocean. The division line between Australian and New Zealand responsibility seems to have been about longitude 165 East vertically from the Auckland Islands, being slightly further west than the Fiordland coast. To the east the NZ Coast-watching limit seems to have been Pitcairn Island at about 128 West. These borders set a coast-watching area of some ten million square miles [twenty-six million square kilometers.]
Post Office Aspects
Equipment
[NZCW] The operational control of this wide network of coast-watching stations was centered in New Zealand, but our responsibility for maintaining them was limited. The Post and Telegraph Department [later named New Zealand Post Office - NZPO] supplied radio equipment for many stations, both in our own dependencies and on islands governed by Britain. The fullest use was made of existing facilities, and wherever a Government or a private individual had already installed any type of radio transmitter a coast-watching station was established, even if arrangements for keeping the watch were not always entirely satisfactory.
Communicators
New Zealanders, private settlers (missionaries or planters) and local islanders all provided coast-watching communications reports. At sites with Government radio stations such as Rarotonga, Niue and Tarawa the civilian Government operators made the coast-watching reports.
[NZCW] In the first months at least (and often for longer) these native operators had to be helped by skilled European operators supplied by the New Zealand Post and Telegraph Department, and in some places native operators had to be replaced by New Zealanders. The men sent were all volunteers.
[NZCW] The sub-Antarctic islands were manned at first wholly by men recruited by the Public Works Department, and both Raoul (or Sunday) Island in the Kermadecs and Suvarov (or Suwarrow) Island had, to begin with, Public Works survey parties which also acted as coast-watchers. The radio operators in each case were recruited from the Post and Telegraph Department.
[NZCW] In agreement with the Governer of Fiji ... the New Zealand Government set up a unified communications system centred in Suva under the direction of a civiian official supplied by the Post and Telegraph Department. ... Suva had a number of advantages as a control centre. It was geographically near the centre of the area, it already had a powerful radio station, and it was linked by cable to Australia and New Zealand and, by Fanning Island, to Canada.
[NZCW] In each island group a parent station passed to Suva any messages received by it from individual coast-watching stations. The parent stations were Ocean Island (later Beru) in the Gilberts, Funafuti in the Ellice Group, Canton Island in the Phoenix Group, Apia in Samoa, Fanning Island, Rarotonga in the Cook Group, Nukualofa in Tonga, and Suva itself in the Fiji Group. Raoul Island and the Chatham Islands had Wellington as their parent station. Norfolk Island had Wellington or Auckland, and the sub-Antarctic islands had Awarua.
Gilbert Islands Occupation
[NZCW] The Gilbert Islands were so close to the Japanese mandated territory in the Marshalls that they were placed in a position of immediate danger by Japan's entry into the war. In December 1941 the Japanese occupied the northern islands of the Group (Makin, Little Makin, and Abaiang), apparently to secure the Marshalls bases against Allied observation or attack. The Japanese also visited Tarawa, placed the European inhabitants on parole, and left again.
On 25 August 1942 the Japanese shelled Ocean Island following which Post Office radio operator (later attested to the rank of Sergeant) R Third was captured, remained a prisoner on the island, and later died in captivity in late 1942. Ronald Third was previously an Awarua Radio Operator.
[NZCW] Seventeen New Zealand coast-watchers - seven wireless operators and ten soldiers - were taken prisoner in the completion of the Japanese occupation of the Gilberts. Five civilians, including the Government wireless operator at Tarawa, were imprisoned with them. The prisoners were brought to Tarawa immediately after their capture. In the early afternoon on 15 October 1942, United States forces bombed and shelled Tarawa. In the late afternoon, when most of the native population was gathered at the wharf out of sight, the Japanese killed all the prisoners.
[NZCW] The civilian status of some of the coast-watchers, men seconded from the Post and Telegraph Department as radio operators or Public Works Department employees, had caused anxiety in New Zealand after the capture by the enemy of the first civilian wireless operators in the northern Gilberts. It was decided in January 1944 that these men should be given military rank retrospectively to the date of capture. The other civilian coast-watchers were enrolled in the Army from 1 December 1942, when those who had been captured in the southern Gilberts were already dead.
Memorials
Tarawa Coast watchers memorial
In 1944 US Marines erected a cross made of coconut wood in memory of those who were killed on Tarawa.
Monument to Coast Watchers Unveiled - RNZ
In October 2014 a memorial wall to the seventeen men killed on Tarawa was unveiled in Wellington.
The Pan Expedition
At the far-eastern side of the New Zealand coast-watching zone of control was Pitcairn Island, one of the few islands close to the route between Panama and New Zealand.
Early in the war, Nelson Dyett, a man with a good knowledge of radio who had personal links with Pitcairn, volunteered to establish and operate a radio station there with his own equipment. The New Zealand Naval Board accepted this offer and the station was opened on 20 December 1939.
In 1943 the United States requested that New Zealand establish a more comprehensive station there. The Pan expedition (as the establishing party was called) departed Auckland on 15 December 1943, drawing members from the Public Works and Post and Telegraph Departments. Four operators, who had been enlisted in the New Zealand Army for this task, and Mr Dyett - newly enlisted, operated the station until October 1945. On the New Zealanders withdrawal in November 1945 the station was handed over to the Western Pacific High Commission, Mr Dyett being taken into its service.