Having read some fiction about the South Pacific, I decided to switch up to some history. Lord is one of the titans of popular history, having written a widely read history of the Titanic sinking in the 50s, as well as an account of the Pearl Harbor attack. Like is says on the title, this is about the Coastwatchers in the Solomon Islands.

In 1942, with Japan on the advance everywhere, the last vestiges of British colonial authority in the Solomons were a handful of men attached to Australian Naval Intelligence. They were equipped with "portable" radios weighing 300 kg, plus batteries, generators, and fuel, and had little other support beyond that which they could wring from personal connections with the natives. Their mission was to elude Japanese patrols and report on naval and air activity. When the Americans landed on Guadalcanal, this mission became critical. The geography of the Slot between Rabaul and Guadalcanal constrained the Japanese to one strike a day at about noon, but the Coastwatchers could report how big the strike was and the exact timing, enabling the defenders of the Cactus Airforce to reach interception altitude and disperse their own bombers. In the long attritional campaign, this defensive intelligence advantage proved key. The Americans lost something like 120 aircraft, the Japanese 250 (fuzzy numbers from memory). As the tide turned, and the Americans began advancing, the Coastwatchers and their native allies turned into a vital resuce service, saving over one hundred pilots, and even more sailors. Americans knew that if they were forced to bail out or abandon ship, there were decent odds they would be found by friends, rather than the Japanese or fabled cannibal headhunters.

Lord wrote his book in the 70s, which has the advantage that many of the Coastwatchers were still alive. There's a vivid quality to the anecdotes which purely textual histories fail to capture. However, this comes at the expense of thematic unity or a real thesis.