The cost of victory on Guadalcanal would have been far higher but for an organization with the unwarlike code name of Ferdinand. Ferdinand’s contribution was military intelligence, collected under the noses of the Japanese by British and Australian coast-watchers.
Coastwatching was the brain child of the Royal Australian Navy. The Bismarck and Solomon archipelagoes and New Guinea were the logical stepping stones for an enemy intent on attacking Australia, so after war broke out in Europe in 1939, Commander Eric Feldt, R.A.N., set out to expand and supervise an intelligence network in these islands. By December of 1941, Feldt had too strategically placed observers reporting to him, by radio.
The coastwatchers were a varied lot—naval and colonial officers, copra planters, traders, missionaries—but they all knew the island natives and the jungle, and how to get the best out of both. They lived by their wits and their experience. If captured by the Japanese they faced torture and execution. All a coast-watcher had, wrote Commander Feldt, was “the promise of certain peril.” Nevertheless, these men rendered invaluable service in the Solomons campaign: rescuing Allied personnel (among them, John F. Kennedy), reporting Japanese strength, and robbing enemy attacks of the element of surprise.
