'Two warships visiting...'

A Last Secret 10

Fifteen days after Carlson's raid, on 3 September 1942, the 1509 men of the Yokosuka 6th Special Naval Landing Force under Commander Keisuke Matsuo landed on Tarawa. They had come to stay this time. Reg Morgan and two other white men, hospital dispenser Basil Cleary and retired mariner Captain Isaac Handley, were taken prisoner. Cleary, a member of a big Fijian Catholic family, was offered a place on the original Tarawa escape boat, but preferred to stay on the atoll. Morgan had been operating behind the lines.

No attribution but said to be a capture of Japanese forces heading to Gilbert Islands.

‘Mr. Morgan must have passed a lonely and difficult time after his companions left him with his radio in Tarawa,’ writer R G Brown said in a booklet on KGV School. ‘He must have known he could not avoid capture forever, but he managed to keep operating right up to September 1942. He continued teaching at KGV all the time and was looked after by Teroron Batiara who cooked his breakfast everyday before going to class with Morgan for radio lessons.’

Handley featured in the best seller Tarawa: The Story of a battle by Robert Sherrod (New York, 1944). A Time-Life correspondent, Sherrod was on one of the troop carriers moving toward the US landings on Tarawa when he interviewed James Forbes, a Scotsman who before the war had commanded a British Government inter-island trader. Forbes refers to the "old man" Handley.