October 7, 2013, marks the seventieth anniversary of a day that lives in infamy for the Wake Family. Today we honor the nearly one hundred American civilians who were cut down in cold blood on the north beach of Wake Island at the hands of their Japanese captors. They were young and old, married and single. Some men had large families and deep roots; others were vagabond workers with deliberately shallow roots. None deserved to die the way they...

News broke on Monday evening, September 30, 2013, that two U.S. Marine Corps generals were being forced into retirement for failing to take “adequate force protection measures” in a devastating Taliban attack on a southwestern Afghanistan base a year ago. I immediately thought of the deadly attack on VMA-211, the “Wake Avengers,” at Camp Bastion in September 2012 that killed two of the team and destroyed several Harrier fighters on the ground....

The Survivors of Wake, families and friends, met this past weekend (September 20-21, 2013) in Boise Idaho for the annual reunion and we were honored to have six of the civilian survivors with us. Posing for the group photograph this year are Mick Johnson and J. O. Young seated, and Leroy Myers, Rich Pagoaga, Joe Goicoechea, and Glenn Newell standing. We know of twenty-three civilian survivors still living, though distance and health issues make...

I have been anxiously following the catastrophic flooding in Colorado since yesterday morning (September 12), appalled at the record-shattering rainfall and scenes of out-of-control water and devastation in my old stomping ground. In 2006 my husband and I moved to north Idaho after fifteen years in Broomfield, Colorado, just southeast of Boulder, and our grown children and their families still live in the Denver metro area. All are safe,...

The trial of Rear Admiral Shigematsu Sakaibara, commander of Wake Island at its surrender in September 1945, convened at the U. S. Naval Air Base on Kwajalein Island in the Marshalls on December 21, 1945. Two other defendants, Lieutenant Commander Shoichi Tachibana and Lieutenant Toraji Ito, were also to stand trial before the military commission for offenses on Wake Island. The crime of the Imperial Japanese Navy officers: execution of nearly...