Early in my book project I came to realize that I couldn’t rely on memory-based sources to augment the factual account of the Wake Island story. This came as a surprise to me as a history instructor who has often used oral histories to give voice to people without a written record. However, as I met Wake survivors and talked with them about their experiences, I found that their stories often conflicted with each other or with the historical...

On October 15, 1950, President Harry S Truman and General Douglas MacArthur met on Wake Island to confer about the Korean War and other matters. The Wake Island Conference was widely covered in the press and would have significant historical ramifications. All post-1950 biographies of these two powerful personalities address the conference in context and it regularly resurfaces in relation to current issues. Today, a plaque marks the location...

Among its many challenging missions worldwide, the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command (now Defense POW-MIA Accounting Agency effective 1/1/2015) continues to pursue the Wake Island project: to identify remains that were found on Wake in 2011. It has been two years since the discovery on the north beach of Wake in a location near the generally-accepted site of the massacre of the American contractors on October 7, 1943. JPAC’s team of forensic...

During World War II thousands of American, Allied, and other prisoners of war were transported on ships to Japan or Japanese-held territory. Generally packed below decks into the ship holds like so much cargo, the prisoners endured such unspeakably vile conditions that many survivors recalled the voyage as the worst ordeal of their POW experience. In the ultimate irony of war, Allied forces bombed and torpedoed a number of these unmarked “hell...

In 1899, the year that Commander E. D. Taussig took formal possession of Wake Island for the United States, journalist Margherita Hamm scoffed at the acquisition as a “mere dot on the waste of waters.” Early twentieth century surveys of the remote atoll revealed remains of old Japanese fishing camps and a shipwreck or two, but no evidence of permanent human habitation. Fishermen, feather-hunters, passers-by, and scientists did not stay long:...