I am sad to report that Alice Ingham passed away on May 9, 2024. Alice organized and led the Wake Island reunions from 2004 to 2017 in Boise, Idaho. I had a good visit with Alice last fall in the lovely house in Oregon where the family moved her and her sister for extended care and to be near the family. While much of her memory had fallen to Alzheimer’s disease, she remained as friendly and gracious as ever. Eight years ago, Alice and her...

In the spring of 1975 Wake Island’s population briefly soared to over eight thousand, the largest number of humans ever on the little coral atoll in the mid-Pacific. Operations Babylift and New Life evacuated tens of thousands of refugees in the closing days of the Vietnam War, and Wake Island became an overflow station for the New Life program. While the island had been home to a bustling community of over a thousand Americans and Filipino...

In the decades after World War II, many civilian survivors of Wake Island took pen to paper to write recollections of their experiences on Wake as workers, the battle for the island in December 1941, and forty-four grueling months as prisoners of the Japanese. Some fleshed out their memoirs as autobiographies, including memories of their youth and postwar lives; others zeroed in on the war and how they faced the challenges that befell them from...

Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II by Daniel James Brown (Viking, 2021) offers a deeply moving account of the stark challenges faced by Japanese Americans during WWII and the heroic service rendered by the army’s segregated 100th Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team in the European Theater. These second-generation (Nisei) Japanese Americans marched into daunting missions with such determination and...

Recent work at the Center for Research: Allied POWs under the Japanese (Mansell.com) has uncovered two secret radio POW camps in Japan during the war. A few Allied prisoners were known to have worked in broadcasting for Radio Tokyo during the later years of the war, but details were vague. While the production of this camp was openly broadcast over the airwaves in Asia and the Pacific where Japan hoped to influence Allied troops, the second...