A Last Secret 2

Secret work, that was all that was said

As German raiders sank more ships, authorities in Australia and New Zealand began expanding their coast watching services.

Men were wanted to serve from the Equator to the Antarctic Circle, from New Guinea to Pitcairn Island. In Nassau in the Cook Islands the lookouts were hired at £2 a month (around $200 in 2021), a decent wage given they did not have to pay for anything. In Tonga they were given rations, clothing, kerosene and exemption from poll tax. Most did not have radio so a variety of ways were developed to get messages out, including smoke signals. In British ruled Fiji local people were hired. 

It took some imagination and foresight in those early war years to believe that the British Crown Colony of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands was going to matter in any way. How could it be important in a world of hundreds of millions; the Gilberts half was home to just 26,000 people, spread across 16 inhabited atolls, each just poking above high-tide; Phoenix, Christmas, Fanning and Washington among them. Less than imaginatively named Ocean Island – now known by its original name Banaba - was the odd one out; a phosphate rich island rising high above the tide. The colonists were on it, strip mining its topsoil and sending it by shipload to make farmers in Australia and New Zealand rich. Banaba, and Nauru to the west, were the strategic prizes of the central Pacific. 

They had been German until the beginning of World War One, not least because phosphate was important to agriculture, and explosive manufacture. Nauru had been so important that among the earliest orders issued from London as war followed the assassination of an archduke in some obscure part of Europe, was a cable to Australia asking it to seize the place. They would have, but New Zealand queue jumped and was en route to German Sāmoa first. The Ellice Island part of the Crown Colony equation had just 4000 people on nine atolls. They were self-contained, cut off from the world and had no use in any kind of global strategy, at least that conceived in the middle of the 20th century. But there was another important play for the scattered atolls. Trans-Pacific telegraph cables passed through the area, landing on Fanning Island, and then being moved on. In its day, Canton Island was as important as Singapore, a place that made aviation possible as a stopover for international clipper seaplanes crossing the Pacific. 

Japan was not fighting at this time, but many people in the West believed it had military ambitions across the ocean. The more informed saw what was happening in China. Immediately to the north of the Gilberts were the Marshall Islands, German up until 1914, under Japanese League of Nations mandated rule since. The Japanese had closed the atolls off to the world. Loose speculation, backed with a scattering of facts, suggested the Japanese had built a military base at Jaluit and another naval base at Truk (now Chuuk) in the Caroline Islands (now, mostly, the Federated States of Micronesia) under Japanese control.