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4.5
I have now read four books about the coastwatchers: Lonely Vigil (by Walter Lord), Alone on Guadalcanal (by Martin Clemens), The Coast Watchers (by Eric Feldt), and Coast Watching in WWII (A.B. Feur).If you want to get a feeling for what life as a coastwatcher was really like, Alone on Guadalcanal is the book for you, as it is a first-person account put together by a single author. The author, Martin Clemens, was a government official before the invasion by Japan, and so the book offers not only the perspective of a coastwatcher but also that of a (thoughtful) British colonial official who was trying to manage things on that end as well. As a government official, Martin Clemens kept a diary all during his time in the Solomon Islands and so he was able to do a great job recounting his days as a coastwatcher.Seeing that Alone on Guadalcanal was first published in 1998, one might well wonder just how much Martin Clemens could remember. In fact, as the author explains in the book's preface, the first draft of the book was written in the early 1950 but a final book never materialized because by that time there was already a great abundance of military books on the market and publishers did not have much interest in his story. It was only decades latter that a chance meeting between Martin Clemens and a US Marine veteran got the ball rolling again and eventually lead to the publication of the book by the Naval Institute Press. To make a long story short, even though the book wasn't published until 1998, the author actually did most of the writing in the early 1950s, when his memories were still relatively fresh.If you would like to learn about how the coastwatcher organization aided the fight against Japan in the South Pacific, the most comprehensive book is The Coast Watchers. This book was written by the man who set up and managed the coastwatcher organization (codename Ferdinand) from 1939 until early 1943 (when he stepped down after suffering a heart attack), and was the first book on the coastwatchers published after WWII (the first edition coming out in 1946).Lonely Vigil covers much but not all of the same ground as The Coast Watchers, but goes into greater detail and is a more enjoyable read. This does not mean The Coast Watchers was a bad read, just not as enjoyable as Lonely Vigil. This should not be surprising, since the author of Lonely Vigil (Walter Lord) is a highly accomplished author.Coast Watching in WWII (subtitle: Operations against the Japanese on the Solomon Islands, 1941-43) sounds as though it would offer a comprehensive review of coast watching operations during those year. In fact, this book covers only the coastwatching operations on Bougainville and neighboring Buka Island. This book is primarily the edited memories of two coastwatchers on Bougainville: Jack Read and Paul Mason). That should be interesting, but these accounts are stylistically dull by comparison with the Alone on Guadalcanal (discussed below) and Lonely Vigil, which is based on both written records and numerous interviews and recounts the same coastwatching tales on Bougainville in a more interesting fashion. In short, if a person has read Lonely Vigil (which was published about 20 years before this book), he could skip reading this book and miss little or nothing.I'm very glad I read three out of these four books about the coastwatchers. As explained above, since I had read other books on the coastwatchers, I found Coast Watching in WWII was not a worthwhile read in terms of content or style (but I read it to the end so I could be fair). In terms of good reading, I enjoyed the first-person perspective of Alone on Guadalcanal the most. Lonely Vigil was also a compelling read.
