Cape Expedition

Cape Expedition
Part of World War II
Map of New Zealand's subantarctic outlying islands
Location	New Zealand's subantarctic outlying islands
Objective	Coastwatching and scientific work
Date	1941–1945
Executed by	Public Works Department
Outcome	No enemy ships sighted, valuable meteorological and other scientific data collected

The Cape Expedition was the deliberately misleading name given to a secret five-year wartime program of establishing coastwatching stations on New Zealand’s more distant uninhabited subantarctic islands. The decision to do so was made by the New Zealand Government's War Cabinet in December 1940, with the program terminating at the end of the Pacific War in 1945.^[1]