Nature’s Wrath
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, thankfully, and we hope the best for our friends and colleagues, especially those in the path of danger....
read moreWar Crime
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 one hundred American prisoners of war on Wake. Three months earlier, when Wake was formally...
read moreHard Hat Poets
With all we know now about what was brewing in the Pacific in late November 1941, I return with amazement to the scene of the Wake contractors and Marines who found spare time for an “all-out poetry blitzkrieg.” After long days hammering, riveting, digging, and bulldozing, “the boys wore pencils down to the eraser and their fingers to a numb and wallowed for days in iambic pentameter, blank and free verse.” (Building for War, 175-76) One doesn’t readily associate hard hats with poetry, but it was a fairly common pastime back in the day. As...
read moreMemory
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 record. I decided to focus as much as possible on written primary sources – letters, diaries, and other...
read moreTruman MacArthur Conference
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 of the Truman-MacArthur meeting on Wake Island in the old terminal facility south of the airstrip. I...
read moreJPAC Mission: Wake 98
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 anthropologists traveled to Wake to excavate the site, recover the remains, and bring them to the JPAC...
read moreHuman Cargo
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 ships,” unknowingly sending thousands of their countrymen to their deaths. Last week my colleague,...
read moreO Pioneers!
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: with no fresh water or soil, Wake was not a very hospitable place. The first long-term pioneers were...
read moreShelter
The EF5 tornado that swept across Moore, Oklahoma, on Monday, May 20, left a trail of utter devastation in its wake. Quick to form and quick (relatively speaking) to dissipate, a tornado is the essence of unpredictability and violence. Recovery operations began immediately in Moore, focused on the rubble that minutes earlier had been an elementary school. As the initial shock gave way to grim purpose, a troubling question arose: why was there no storm shelter here? In hindsight, it is easy to agree that there are certain places and times...
read moreDXpedition
A group of dedicated and determined radio operators are headed for Wake Island in early October 2013 for a rare opportunity to transmit from this toehold of land in the mid-Pacific. The Wake Atoll Commemorative DXpedition is “dedicated to preserving the memory of the Forgotten 98 . . . who lost their lives on Wake Island on October 7, 1943 during World War II.” The operation, observing the seventieth anniversary of their deaths, honors these men, their contributions, and their sacrifice, and is dedicated to keeping their memory alive. As a...
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