Pan American Airways had a strong connection to several of the Pacific islands where the U.S. Navy was building air bases on the eve of World War II. In Building for War, I discuss the mutually beneficial relationship that allowed the airline to establish bases on Midway, Wake, and Guam in 1935, and the Navy to follow up by building facilities on those strategically located islands a few years later. By late 1941 naval air stations were nearing...

My recent work on the Wake Island rosters for Oregon and Idaho revealed several minor errors and missing information which I am glad to correct for the Wake Island Rosters posted at this website. I reentered two names for men who used an alias on Wake so that the legal name appears alphabetically (with the alias in parentheses) rather than vice versa. They are Charters, Carl C. (alias William McGallister) and Burke, Raymond L. (alias George...

A fabulous photograph in the news caught my attention last week: two F-35Bs in flight over Wake Island. These were two of the VMFA-211 “Wake Island Avengers” deployed to Iwakuni, Japan, from their base at Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma, Arizona, on May 10, 2025.  The F-35B Lightening II squadron, comprised of state-of-the-art supersonic stealth fighters, joins Marine Aircraft Group 12, 1st Marine Aircraft Wing, in Japan to support flight...

The Oregon Legislature has passed a resolution honoring the Oregon civilian contractors on Wake Island in World War II. I am proud to say that Oregon, my home state, is the first state to do so. Both the House and Senate passed the resolution unanimously, and we are very grateful to the sponsors and committees who paved the way. You can read HCR23 final in full here. Representative Rick Lewis of Oregon House District 18 initiated the...

In mid-December 2024, U. S. Marines of the 12th Marine Littoral (meaning ashore) Anti-Air Battalion (12th LAAB) trained on Wake Island for a long-distance tactical air surveillance raid. In this first field training of the recently activated battalion, the Marines deployed a state-of-the-art AN/TPS-80 radar complex (Ground/Air Task-Oriented Radar), which is an air surveillance system that can detect, identify, and track multiple types of...