Wake Island

• 1. Introduction

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  Wake Island is a ring of coral in the middle of the Pacific, and almost nobody has ever managed to live there for long. It is an atoll made of three small islets that surround a lagoon, all of it enclosed by a reef. The nearest inhabited land is Utirik Atoll in the Marshall Islands, 592 miles to the southeast. Today the island has no permanent residents. Even so, about 300 people are there at any given moment, mostly military personnel and contractors. The Marshall Islands claim the atoll. The United States administers it as an unorganized and unincorporated territory, with the Department of the Interior in charge on paper and the Air Force managing it day to day. Ships have wrecked on its reef, an airline built a hotel on it, and armies have fought and starved on it. How did a place with no fresh water and almost no height above the sea become worth so much trouble? And who has actually left their mark on it?

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• 2. Names and Wrecks

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  Long before any European chart showed it, Marshallese storytellers knew the atoll as Ānen Kio, the island of the orange flower. In oral tradition, men traveled there to collect albatross bones for tattooing rituals. The researcher Dwight Heine speculated that the Marshallese treated it like a hunting and gathering preserve where nobody stayed year-round. The Polynesian rat also hints at early visitors, since it probably arrived with Polynesian or Micronesian voyagers. Yet no ancient artifacts have ever been found.

  On the 2nd of October 1568, the Spanish navigator Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira made the first recorded sighting. He had sailed from Callao, Peru, in 1567 with two ships, Los Reyes and Todos los Santos. His goal was a gold-rich land mentioned in Inca tradition. His crew was suffering from scurvy and badly needed water, but the atoll offered none. In the expedition's words, there was "nothing on it but sea-birds, and sandy places covered with bushes." Because the date was the eve of the feast of Saint Francis of Assisi, Mendaña named it St Francis Island. Centuries later, James Cook first reached the Hawaiian Islands while trying to relocate this atoll from Mendaña's description of its position.

  In 1796, Captain Samuel Wake of the merchant ship Prince William Henry came upon the atoll and named it after himself. Soon afterward, the 80-ton fur trading brig Halcyon arrived under Charles William Barkley. Unaware of earlier visitors, Barkley called it Halcyon Island. Some accounts credit the name instead to a Captain William Wake, who is said to have found it from the same ship in 1792.

  On the 20th of December 1841, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes of the United States Exploring Expedition reached the atoll aboard USS Vincennes and sent boats to survey it. He found a low coral formation with a lagoon full of fish, including fine mullet. He also guessed that the sea must sometimes wash completely over it. His naturalist, Titian Peale, wrote that the only remarkable feature was "the enormous blocks of coral that have been thrown up by the violence of the sea." Peale took an egg from a short-tailed albatross and a Polynesian rat for the expedition's collections.

  On the night of the 4th of March 1866, the 650-ton iron-hulled barque Libelle of Bremen struck the eastern reef in a gale. Captain Anton Tobias was carrying about 1,000 flasks of mercury from San Francisco to Hong Kong. The crew dug for water for three days and recovered a 200-gallon tank from the wreck. They also buried coins, precious stones, and some of the mercury. After three weeks of dwindling water, they split between two boats to reach Guam. First Mate Rudolf Kausch led 22 passengers and some crew in a 22-foot longboat. It reached Guam on the 8th of April after 13 days of squalls, short rations, and tropical sun. Captain Tobias and the rest sailed a 20-foot gig that was lost at sea. Guam's Spanish governor, Francisco Moscoso y Lara, then sent the schooner Ana, owned by his son-in-law George H. Johnston, with Kausch aboard. After two days at the atoll, they dug up the buried coins and stones.

  On the 31st of August 1870, the British tea clipper Dashing Wave struck the same reef at 10:30 at night. Captain Henry Vandervord had left Fuzhou for Sydney a month earlier. As the ship broke apart, he saved a chart and instruments but no compass. The crew loaded a case of wine, some bread, and two buckets, but no drinking water. Believing the island held neither food nor water, the captain and his 12-man crew rigged a blanket to an oar as a sail and left at once. Each man received a glass of wine a day until rain fell on the sixth day. After 31 days of drifting west, they reached Kosrae in the Caroline Islands. Vandervord blamed the wreck on faulty charts, writing that the atoll "is very low, and not easily seen even on a clear night." By then, a rising naval power was starting to look at the Pacific map with new interest.

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• 3. Flags and Feathers

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  In 1898, the annexation of Hawaii and the acquisition of Guam and the Philippines changed how Washington saw the empty atoll. It lay roughly halfway between Honolulu and Manila, which suggested a telegraph cable station or a coaling stop for warships. On the 4th of July 1898, Brigadier General Francis V. Greene raised the American flag there while sailing to the Philippines aboard the liner SS China. On the 17th of January 1899, Commander Edward D. Taussig of USS Bennington landed under orders from President William McKinley. After a 21-gun salute, he formally took possession for the United States.

  The cable never came. A route through Wake would have been 137 miles shorter, but the Commercial Pacific Cable Company chose the Midway Islands instead. Rear Admiral Royal Bird Bradford told a House committee on the 17th of January 1902 that Wake "seems at times to be swept by the sea." He added that it had no harbor, while Midway had a fair one for vessels drawing 18 feet.

  On the 23rd of June 1902, the transport USAT Buford, commanded by Captain Alfred Croskey, spotted a boat on the beach. Japanese men launched it and sailed out to meet the ship. They said a schooner from Yokohama had left them to gather guano and dry fish. Croskey suspected pearl hunting. One man seemed to have beriberi, so the Americans gave medical supplies and tobacco. The Japanese declined a ride to Manila. The transport Sheridan had a similar encounter. The matter reached Assistant Secretary of the Navy Charles Darling, who alerted the State Department. In August 1902, Japanese Minister Takahira Kogorō replied with a note stating that his government had "no claim whatever to make on the sovereignty of the island." In December 1906, General John J. Pershing stopped there aboard USAT Thomas and raised a 45-star flag improvised from sail canvas.

  On the 6th of February 1904, Rear Admiral Robley D. Evans arrived on USS Adams and watched Japanese crews collecting feathers and catching sharks for their fins. Hat makers and European fashion drove the global demand for plumage, and bedding makers wanted feathers too. The trade targeted Laysan and black-footed albatross, boobies, frigatebirds, and terns. Crews of USS Beaver in 1922 and USS Tanager in 1923 found abandoned poaching camps. Such plumage collecting was illegal in American territory, yet no enforcement action at Wake is on record.

  In January 1908, a storm disabled the Japanese ship Toyoshima Maru on its way from Tateyama to the South Pacific. The captain and five crew members were swept overboard. The 36 survivors landed on Wake and endured five months of hardship, disease, and starvation. In May 1908, the Brazilian Navy training ship Benjamin Constant, on a voyage around the world, spotted a tattered red distress flag. Unable to land a boat, her crew spent three days using rope and cable to bring 20 survivors aboard and carried them to Yokohama.

  In his 1921 book Sea-Power in the Pacific, Hector C. Bywater proposed a fortified fueling station at Wake for a future war with Japan. On the 19th of June 1922, USS Beaver landed a party to test the idea. Lieutenant Commander Sherwood Picking reported that the lagoon was too shallow for warships, with a channel choked by coral heads. He still praised the location, noting that Wake and Midway divided the Honolulu to Guam passage "into almost exact thirds." He recommended an aircraft base and wrote, "If the long heralded trans-Pacific flight ever takes place, Wake Island should certainly be occupied and used as an intermediate resting and fueling port."

  On the 27th of July 1923, USS Tanager delivered a scientific party led by ornithologist Alexander Wetmore. They camped on the eastern end of Wilkes and worked until the 5th of August. Lieutenant Commander Samuel Wilder King's crew took soundings offshore. The scientists charted the atoll, inspected three abandoned poaching camps, and studied the Wake Island rail, a bird later extinct. They also confirmed the place was a true atoll. Wetmore named the southwest islet for Charles Wilkes and the northwest islet for Titian Peale. Picking's prediction was about to find its champion in a New York airline executive.

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• 4. Pan Am's Stepping Stone

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  Juan Trippe, president of Pan American Airways, then the world's largest airline, wanted to fly passengers to China. His planes would have to island-hop to refuel. When he plotted the route on a globe, he saw only open sea between Midway and Guam. So he went to the New York Public Library and studied nineteenth-century clipper ship logs and charts. There he found a little-known coral atoll called Wake.

  The Navy and State Department had their own reasons to pay attention. After World War I, the League of Nations had granted Japan the South Seas Mandate, covering Micronesian islands north of the equator. Japan restricted access to them and built harbors and airfields throughout the region, despite the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922. That treaty barred both Japan and the United States from expanding Pacific fortifications. Pan Am's route offered a way to extend American air power under a commercial cover.

  On the 3rd of October 1934, Trippe wrote to the Secretary of the Navy asking for a five-year lease with four renewal options. On the 13th of November, Admiral William H. Standley ordered a survey by USS Nitro. On the 29th of December, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6935, which placed Wake, Johnston, Sand Island at Midway, and Kingman Reef under Navy control. Rear Admiral Harry E. Yarnell declared Wake a bird sanctuary to disguise the Navy's intentions. Nitro arrived on the 8th of March 1935 and spent two days photographing and surveying. On the 12th of March, Secretary of the Navy Claude A. Swanson gave Pan Am permission to build.

  On the 9th of May 1935, the 6,700-ton freighter SS North Haven arrived with workers and materials. The reef kept the ship out of the lagoon, so everything had to be lightered ashore. Wilkes was the only practical landing place. Chief engineer Charles R. Russell judged it too low and prone to flooding, so he chose Peale for the facilities. Cargo crossed Wilkes and then went by barge across the lagoon. Someone had loaded railroad track onto the ship on a hunch, and the crew used it to build a narrow-gauge line with a tractor-drawn flatbed. North Haven left for Guam on the 12th of June.

  Bill Mullahey, a swimmer and free diver from Columbia University, took on the lagoon. He placed dynamite to blast hundreds of coral heads from a landing area for flying boats, 1 mile long, 300 yards wide, and 6 feet deep. Over three months the crew used about 5 short tons of explosives. On the 17th of August 1935, a Pan Am flying boat made the first aircraft landing at Wake on a survey flight from Midway.

  On the 5th of February 1936, North Haven returned to finish the job. A five-ton diesel locomotive for the Wilkes Island Railroad came ashore, and the track was extended from dock to dock. On Peale, workers assembled the Pan American Hotel, a prefabricated building with 48 rooms and wide porches. Two wings extended from a central lobby, and every room had a bathroom with a hot-water shower. Chamorro men from Guam worked as kitchen helpers, hotel attendants, and laborers. The village on Peale was nicknamed "PAAville."

  By October 1936, Pan Am had three Martin M-130 Flying Clippers ready. On the 11th of October, the China Clipper landed with ten journalists aboard. A week later, Trippe arrived on the Philippine Clipper with VIP guests. On the 25th of October, the Hawaii Clipper brought the first paying airline passengers ever to cross the Pacific. In 1937, Wake became a regular stop, with one westbound and one eastbound flight each week. Boeing 314 Clippers soon joined the Martin M-130s. The island had no natural soil, and flying in fresh vegetables was costly. Pan Am turned to hydroponics, making Wake an early success story for the method. That routine held until December 1941.

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• 5. The Battle

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  In January 1941, the Navy began building a military base on the atoll. On the 19th of August 1941, the first permanent garrison arrived. It was 449 officers and men of the First Marine Defense Battalion, commanded by Navy Commander Winfield Scott Cunningham. Also present were 68 Navy personnel and about 1,221 civilian workers from the firm Morrison-Knudsen. The base was unfinished, with hangars and bunkers incomplete, which made repairing damaged aircraft hard. In November, the Marine squadron VMF-211 loaded 12 of its 24 F4F-3 Wildcats onto USS Enterprise, and the fighters flew in on the 3rd of December.

  On the 8th of December 1941, which was still the 7th in Hawaii, at least 27 Japanese Mitsubishi G3M "Nell" bombers struck from Kwajalein. They destroyed eight of the 12 Wildcats on the ground. The Marines' gun emplacements survived intact. Raids on the 9th and 10th cost the Japanese two bombers, but bombs on Wilkes set off an ammunition dump and destroyed the hospital. That morning, a Pan Am Martin M-130 had just taken off for Guam when a radio call about Pearl Harbor turned it back. It had survived the raid with light damage and two wounded crew. Stripped of seats and loaded with 40 people, it needed three takeoff attempts to leave. It flew to Midway, then Pearl Harbor. One passenger, one employee, and 35 Guam staff stayed behind.

  On the 11th of December, a Japanese naval landing force sailed from Roi in the Marshall Islands and tried to land. The garrison's artillery turned the invasion back, and the action was widely reported as the first American battlefield success of the war. The night before, the submarine USS Triton had fired the first American torpedoes of the Pacific War at a destroyer near Wake. Neither vessel was sunk. Japan did lose a submarine in that operation, but through an accident. On the 17th of December, Ro-62 rammed Ro-66 in a predawn squall, killing 63 men and leaving three survivors.

  A legend grew from that first victory. An American journalist reported that when the commander was asked what he needed, the reply was "Send us more Japs!" Major James Devereux later denied it. "As far as I know, it wasn't sent at all. None of us was that much of a damn fool. We already had more Japs than we could handle." He also noted that Commander Cunningham, not himself, was in charge. According to the source account, a junior officer had added those words to the start and end of a coded message at Pearl Harbor to confuse Japanese code breakers.

  Raids went on through December. On the 12th, a Wildcat shot down a four-engined flying boat and later sank a Japanese submarine. Thirty Nells attacked on the 14th, and a raid on the 15th killed one civilian worker. On the 16th, 33 Nells struck, and on the 19th a bomber was shot down by anti-aircraft fire. A sailor from USS Triton had been left on Wake on the 1st of December because of illness. He became a prisoner of war and survived the war. On the 20th, a PBY Catalina brought mail and took Lieutenant Colonel Bayler to Midway. On the 21st, 49 aircraft from a Japanese carrier group attacked.

  A Navy relief force was due to reach Wake on the 24th of December. It was too late. On the 23rd, a much larger and reinforced Japanese force overwhelmed the garrison. The Navy had lost heavily at Pearl Harbor, and bad weather had slowed the relief fleet. When it heard the news, it turned back. The defenders had sunk two fast transports, P32 and P33, and one submarine, and had shot down 24 aircraft. American dead numbered 52 military personnel and about 70 civilians. Japanese dead exceeded 700, with some estimates as high as 1,000. Of the 1,603 people captured, 1,150 were civilians. Three weeks later, all but roughly 350 to 360 were shipped to prison camps in Asia aboard the Nita Maru.

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• 6. Occupation and Starvation

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  Those who stayed on Wake after the Nita Maru sailed were mostly the badly wounded and civilians who knew how to run the island's machinery. In September 1942, another 265 men left, including the prisoner commanders Wilcox and Russel, whose logs are a major source on daily prisoner life. That left 98 Americans. With the officers gone, the logs ended.

  Captain Shigematsu Sakaibara commanded the Japanese garrison, which included the 2,000 men of the Imperial Japanese Navy's 65th Guard Unit. The army's 13th Independent Mixed Regiment, with 1,939 men, came under Colonel Shigeji Chikamori. Expecting an invasion, they ordered the American captives to build bunkers and fortifications. They also installed an 8-inch naval gun, which is often wrongly said to have come from Singapore. Because of its shape, the Japanese called the island Ōtorishima, meaning Big Bird Island.

  American aircraft bombed it repeatedly. One raid was the first mission flown by the future president George H. W. Bush. Planes also dropped leaflets and even small rubber rafts, in case someone might escape by sea. On the 23rd of February 1942, a raid sank two patrol boats and the Americans recovered four seamen. From June 1942 to July 1943, B-24 bombers flew from Midway, often fighting Zeros. On the 15th of May 1943, seven B-24s met 22 Zeros and lost one bomber. In March 1943, the submarine USS Tunny torpedoed the transport Suwa Maru, which crews then beached on the reef to keep it from sinking. The Navy chose a submarine blockade rather than an amphibious invasion.

  On the 10th of May 1942, one prisoner was executed for breaking into a store and getting drunk. In July 1943, another was executed for stealing food on Sakaibara's order, and his identity is unknown. After a successful American air raid on the 5th of October 1943, Sakaibara ordered the remaining 97 prisoners killed. They were taken to the northern end of the island, blindfolded, and machine-gunned. One man escaped and carved "98 US PW 5-10-43" on a large coral rock. He was recaptured and beheaded. The escape created a problem for the Japanese, who had buried the bodies beneath the runway's coral sand. They had to dig them up and count, confirming one was missing. In August 1945, the remains were moved to Peacock Point and later to the National Cemetery of the Pacific.

  In January 1944, the Allies captured the Japanese base to the south that had been supplying Wake. By May 1944, the garrison was rationing food, and the limits tightened steadily. The soldiers fished, grew vegetables among the coral rubble, and ate bird eggs and rats. Sometimes tens of thousands of rats were killed in one day. The sooty tern colony got some protection as a source of eggs, but the starving men hunted the Wake Island rail to extinction. About three-quarters of the Japanese garrison died. In June 1945, the hospital ship Takasago Maru was allowed to visit and left with 974 patients. American destroyers stopped it on both legs of the trip. USS McDermut II reported that about 15 percent of the evacuees were extremely sick.

  On the 2nd of September 1945, the Pacific War formally ended. In late August, Camp 12-B at Hirahata in Japan passed from Japanese to American control. About 300 Wake prisoners were freed there. On the 4th of September, the Japanese garrison surrendered to Marines under Brigadier General Lawson H. M. Sanderson. Interrogators first heard that an American bombing raid had killed most of the prisoners. Then Japanese officers began taking their own lives, leaving notes that blamed Sakaibara. Two did so aboard a ship heading for the American base atoll. Sakaibara admitted the order. He was hanged on Guam on the 18th of June 1947. His subordinate Tachibana was sentenced to death, but the sentence was reduced to life in prison. Most remaining Japanese troops were repatriated aboard the Hikawa Maru by the 1st of November 1945. A year after Wake's killings, Captain Nagayoshi Kojima ordered the execution of 150 prisoners at Palawan. Eleven escaped and 139 died. After Palawan, the Allies began special missions to liberate prison camps. On Wake, identifying the exhumed dead proved too difficult. They were buried together beneath a memorial listing their names, dedicated at a ceremony in 1953.

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• 7. Runways and Storms

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  In October 1945, 400 Seabees from the 85th Naval Construction Battalion arrived to clear away the war's wreckage. They finished a Navy air base in March 1946. On the 24th of September 1946, Pan Am resumed regular passenger service. The flying boat era was nearly over, so the airline switched to faster planes that used Wake's new coral runway. British Overseas Airways Corporation, Japan Airlines, Philippine Airlines, and Transocean Airlines also flew through. On the 1st of July 1947, the Navy handed operations to the Civil Aeronautics Administration. In 1949, the runway was paved and lengthened to 7,000 feet.

  In July 1950, the Korean Airlift began, and the Military Air Transport Service used Wake as a mid-Pacific refueling stop. By September, 120 military aircraft landed there every day. On the 15th of October, President Harry S. Truman and General Douglas MacArthur met at the Wake Island Conference to discuss Korea. The island was chosen because its distance from Korea meant MacArthur could be away from his troops only briefly.

  In September 1952, Typhoon Olive hit with sustained winds of 120 miles per hour and gusts of 142. Some 750 people sheltered in wartime bunkers. About 85 percent of the island's structures were destroyed, including every home, the hotel, and the chapel. Water and power returned on the 18th of September. Repairs cost $1.6 million and were finished in 1953, when the bridge between Peale and Wake was also rebuilt. There were no deaths, four injuries, and none of the 230 Pan Am employees was hurt.

  From 1950 to 1978, the Coast Guard ran a Loran navigation station with a staff of about ten. Its equipment first sat in a Quonset hut on Peale, and by 1958 new facilities stood there. The cargo ship USCGC Kukui supported construction in 1957. From 1958 to 1960, the United States also installed the Missile Impact Location System. It was designed to pinpoint where test missile nose cones splashed down during intercontinental ballistic missile tests.

  On the 6th of September 1967, the 18,000-ton tanker SS R.C. Stoner, owned by Standard Oil of California, was driven onto the reef by a southwesterly wind. It had failed to moor to the two buoys near the harbor entrance. About six million gallons of refined fuel oil spilled, including 5.7 million gallons of aviation fuel. The spill killed many fish along the southwestern coast to Peacock Point. Navy salvage ships and tugs came from Honolulu, Guam, and Subic Bay. On the 16th of September, Super Typhoon Sarah struck with winds up to 145 knots. Its violence flushed the harbor and scoured the coast, which sped the cleanup. Oil stayed trapped in the reef's crevices. The storm also broke the tanker into three pieces. Despite rough seas and blacktip reef sharks, the salvage team used explosives to sink the portions still above water.

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• 8. Refuge and Rockets

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  In June 1972, the last scheduled Pan Am passenger flight landed on Wake, and the airline's last cargo flight left the next month. Boeing 747s could now cross the ocean without stopping. On the 24th of June 1972, civil administration passed from the Federal Aviation Administration to the Air Force. Legal ownership stayed with the Department of the Interior. On the 1st of July 1973, the Air Force's Pacific Air Forces took full control. The same year, the future Republic of the Marshall Islands claimed Wake, citing oral legends.

  In the spring of 1975, 251 military, government, and contract personnel kept the airfield ready as an emergency runway. As Saigon was about to fall, President Gerald Ford ordered support for Operation New Life, the evacuation of South Vietnamese refugees. Subic Bay and Guam were the planned processing centers, but demand was so high that Wake became an additional one. In March, Island Commander Major Bruce R. Hoon was ordered to prepare. A 60-man engineering team reopened boarded-up buildings, two MASH units set up field hospitals, and three Army field kitchens arrived. On the 26th of April 1975, the first C-141 landed with refugees. After that, one arrived every hour and 45 minutes, each carrying 283 people. At the peak, 8,700 Vietnamese refugees were on the island. When the airlift ended on the 2nd of August, about 15,000 had passed through.

  In April 1981, a party of 19 Japanese visited, including 16 former soldiers from the war, to honor their dead at the Japanese Shinto Shrine. On the 3rd and the 4th of November 1985, 167 former American prisoners of war came with their wives and children, the first such group visit. On the 24th of November 1985, a Pan Am Boeing 747 named China Clipper II marked 50 years since Pan Am's China Clipper service began. Aboard were the author James A. Michener and Lars Lindbergh, grandson of Charles Lindbergh.

  In 1973, the Army chose Wake to test defenses against intercontinental missiles under Project Have Mill. From the 13th of February to the 22nd of June 1974, seven Athena H missiles flew from Wake to the test range at Kwajalein. Wake's position offers safe flight paths over empty ocean. In 1987, it was chosen for Project Starlab/Starbird, a missile defense program in which a Space Shuttle platform would track missiles launched from Cape Canaveral and Wake. In 1989, the Army built two launch pads on Peacock Point for the eight-ton, 60-foot Starbird missiles. After the Challenger explosion caused delays, the program was canceled in late September 1990, and no Starbird ever flew from Wake. The pads were adapted for the Brilliant Pebbles program, with a first launch on the 29th of January 1992. On the 16th of October, controllers destroyed a 30-foot Castor-Orbus rocket seven minutes after launch. That program ended in 1993. The Army's LEAP tests followed. The first launch, on the 28th of January 1993, reached 240 miles and succeeded. The second, on the 11th of February, rose only 1.2 miles and failed.

  At one time, an estimated 2 million rats lived on Wake, and people introduced cats to control them. Today thousands of hermit crabs scuttle across the atoll. The thick vegetation of tropical trees, scrub, and grasses has pushed most nesting seabirds into a designated bird sanctuary on Wilkes Island. The submerged and emergent lands there are part of the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument. Wilkes is the same islet that Pan Am's chief engineer once rejected as too low and too prone to flooding for an airline hotel.

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