A Last Secret
Killing New Zealand Coast Watchers
Long forgotten story of murdered coast watchers as told by families
New Zealand placed a 17 strong group of civilians and soldiers on the Gilbert Islands - now Kiribati - in the South Pacific during World War Two.
And then left them there, to be seized by Imperial Japanese forces. One afternoon they were all murdered and while New Zealand was, for a time, outraged, the murdered men were forgotten. No search was made for their bodies. But a brother of one of the murdered men took his own revenge. And that was at a prisoner of war camp in New Zealand.
That afternoon, 22 young New Zealand men and three others died in accordance with the Japanese military code of Bushido, by the sword. It was a ritual slaughter that went unnoticed and unknown for decades, but for one of the victims. A shy man with a speech impediment, soldier Charles Owen, should not really have been there. His older brothers had been in the Great War and they always looked after young Charles. Nineteen weeks after that afternoon on Betio, one of Charles’ brothers, Corporal Jack Owen, was confronting Japanese prisoners-of-war in a camp at Featherston, north of Wellington in New Zealand. What happened has slipped into history as a riot; a lie used to cover-up what really happened. Jack Owen, a guard at the camp, had simply turned his sub-machine gun on a group of Japanese in front of him. Other guards opened fire too, but most of the 48 unarmed Japanese fell to bullets fired by Owen. ‘There had been no order given to fire and no order to cease fire,’ Second Lieutenant Keith Robertson said. ‘It was all over in a moment except that one soldier with a lust for blood searched in among the huts for any Japanese who may have been hiding. He found one poor scared individual hiding in his hut and promptly blew his brains out.’
Contents
Prologue
1.Raiders
2. Secret mission
3. Sailing through the Gilberts
4. Settling into posts
5. Atoll life
6. Love and war
7. Japan moves in
8. Japanese occupation
9. Americans arrive
10. Moving against coastwatchers
11. Slaughter
12. Featherston POW ‘riot’
13. Battle of Tarawa
14. Where are the men?
15. Families told
16. Carrying the memory
17. Another massacre
18. Forgotten secret
ALSO BY MICHAEL FIELD
Mau: Sāmoa’s Struggle Against New Zealand Oppression
Speight of Violence: Inside Fiji’s 2000 coup
Swimming with Sharks: Tales from the South Pacific Frontline
The Catch: How fishing companies reinvented slavery and plunge the ocean
The right of Michael Field to be identified as the author of this work in terms of Section 96 of the Copyright Act 1994 is hereby asserted.