A Last Secret - prologue

‘They are going to kill us all, be brave lads’

It was around 5pm Thursday in 1942 on Betio, an islet of an obscure Pacific atoll called Tarawa.

It was intolerably hot and oppressive that day, as it was most days in that part of the Pacific labelled the Doldrums. Several hundred people, ‘Gilbertese’ to their earlier colonial master, lived under the new rule of Dai Nippon Teikoku, the Empire of Japan. The locals lived off fish caught in Tarawa’s 400 square kilometre lagoon. Japanese soldiers and Korean labourers were building a runway on Betio and fortifying the islet.

Mikaera –like most locals he needed no second name – looked across the flat, mostly sand ground to where there were white men, standing in a line. One was an old man, sea captain Isaac Handley.

‘They are going to kill us all, be brave lads,’ Mikaera heard Handley say to the others with him.

‘One Japanese stepped forward to the first European in the line and cut his head off. Then I saw a second European have his head cut off and I could not see the third one because I fainted.’