The JPAC Wake Island mission began three years ago with the discovery of a group of human remains on the north beach. The location of the discovery and determination that the remains were Caucasian pointed to the massacre of American civilian contractors on October 7, 1943. While JPAC’s forensic anthropologists have studied the remains in their lab at Hickam AFB in Hawaii, I have been pursuing the families of the 98 to find qualified donors for...

Two weeks ago Wake Island’s nearest neighbor, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, filed suit in the international court at The Hague against nine global nuclear powers and in federal court against the United States. The lawsuits demand that these nations meet disarmament obligations established by international treaties. I looked into it at the time and watched for reactions and follow up in the coming days. Not surprisingly, it caused barely...

Like many of his generation, my father did not open up with the family about his wartime experiences. We knew he had been captured on Wake Island and spent the war in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, but little else. He had some mysterious, recurring illnesses and strange scars that we knew were related to that time, but I waited until long after his death to start asking questions. My quest to find out “what happened to Dad” turned into a full...

 Of the three components that make up Wake Atoll, Peale is the “deserted island.” Inaccessible by road since the wooden bridge burned over a decade ago, Peale has quietly slipped into obscurity. Vines and brush have swallowed the vestiges of the Pan American complex and the contractors’ naval air base facility construction, much of it bombed to ruins in the war or left to the ravages of time and tide in the postwar years. The rusty hulk of the...

Last week I made contact with the family of Henry Milton Dreyer, one of the Wake 98. Milton was twenty-five years old when he was killed on Wake Island in 1943. Two years earlier he had come to work on Wake with the medical team, assisting the civilian doctors as a surgical nurse. He had been on Oahu for at least a year before, working at the naval hospital at Ewa. Milton was the youngest of six siblings with four older brothers and one older...