On October 21, 1953, a memorial ceremony was held at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl in Honolulu to mark the mass burial of 178 Americans killed on Wake Island in World War II. Fourteen marine survivors attended, as well as some family members of the deceased and officials and dignitaries. An actual recording of the Wake mass grave dedication ceremony has recently become available at the AFRTS Archive website. See end...

Watching the Wake Island episode of Oliver North’s 2005 series “War Stories” last week, I was reminded of Brigadier General John F. Kinney’s heroic escape story. Very few POWs attempted escape from Japanese camps in WWII, and fewer still succeeded. For those interned in Japan proper escape was inconceivable, but in Japanese-occupied territories outside the homeland there was a slim chance of success. Physical escape was the least of the...

I found the following poem on the oddities of English plurals in our local newspaper today. According to the columnist, the poem’s origin is obscure: it showed up in newspapers in the late 19th century and more recently in “Crazy English,” by Richard Lederer. It’s just the sort of thing that my father and those other “hard hat poets” on Wake Island would have loved. So here, apropos of nothing, is “Ode...

In 2011, a worker discovered a group of human remains exposed on the north beach of Wake Island near the site where American POWs were massacred in October 1943. The Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) sent a team to Wake to recover the remains and excavate the site. JPAC opened a mission to identify the remains and I volunteered to locate families of the “Wake 98” to provide DNA reference samples to aid in identification. While the...

There is no better way to visit the war memorials in Washington D.C. than in the company of our nation’s war veterans. I went on the Inland Northwest Honor Flight to D.C. on October 8-9 as a volunteer “guardian” and was deeply moved many times during the trip. It was my good fortune to be matched with two fine gentlemen whose perspectives and memories gave special meaning to the experience. The dedication of the national World War II memorial...