Hearing of Pearl Harbour

A Last Secret 7

On the morning of Monday 8 December 1941 Jones wrote out his weather data and put it into a semi-coded form to send. He pulled the Morse key in front of him and despatched it. As he sat there radio checks were made around the coast watcher network. They were all connected in a sequence of dots-and-dashes that even in the simple act of sending told the recipient much about how the sender was. With this done, Jones tuned his radio to listen to what else was going on in the world. He could not pick up his usual Honolulu radio station, 3700 kilometres to the north east, across the International Dateline. A swing of the dial, and he was on a big CBS station in Los Angeles, KNX, across the other side of the International Dateline. A mostly news station, they were broadcasting confused reports of an attack on the Honolulu naval base – Pearl Harbour. Jones knew what it meant. His soldier companions, the Menzies brothers, were dispatched quickly around the small island to warn others, while an islander headed south across the lagoon to ensure the main village got the news.

‘We doubled the watch and we knew we were in trouble,’ Jones said.