POWs
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 historical account of the Wake Island saga, but I won’t ever know what really happened to Ted Olson...
read morePeale
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 8” Japanese gun and a concrete pillbox still face the empty sea near the point. Behind them, over a...
read moreJPAC Mission Update
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 sister. It must have been a sad day when this Iowa family learned of Milton’s tragic death during the...
read moreGuamanians on Wake
The Guamanian memorial stands proudly in Memorial Row on Wake Island. The delicately engraved plaque has been obscured by a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to mitigate weathering by applying a protective coating. One has to squint and shift a bit until the light hits it just right to make out the names. Context is not offered: the casual observer might wonder who they were and how they fit in to the saga of World War II on Wake Island. The Guamanians, or Chamorros, were employees of Pan American Airways. In 1935 the airline obtained...
read moreSubject to Change
A few weeks ago I heard a Radio Lab podcast about coral that got me to thinking about time and change (“The Times They Are a-Changin’”) Scientists dissecting coral shells find gray bands similar to tree rings that represent annual growth stages. Under water, coral grows an external skeleton in time with the cycles of light, temperature, and tides. In a living coral, the space between the annual growth bands contains faint lines that number about 365, each line representing a day in a year. Paleontologists examining fossilized coral from 350...
read moreWake’s War Ruins
On September 4, 1945, aboard the USS Levy, Rear Adm. Shigematsu Sakaibara surrendered Wake Island to Brig. Gen. L. H. M. Sanderson, USMC. Shortly after the surrender a landing party of marines took a small whaleboat to shore. Colonel Walter L. J. Bayler, the last American to leave the island freely in December 1941, was the first American to set foot on Wake in 1945. The sights that greeted the landing party and those who followed were astonishing. Photographers and correspondents, including Sgt. Ernie Harwell, accompanied the American...
read moreMass Grave
The term itself makes ones stomach drop. It conjures up dark historical memories of massacres and disasters, hurried group burials, and comingled corpses under mounds of cold dirt. The twentieth century alone bears witness to mass graves of millions: tragic reminders of man’s inhumanity to man. In recent days we have shuddered at the discovery of mass graves in civil war-torn regions of South Sudan and the Central African Republic. Mother Earth bears few mass graves with respect, but one of these surely lies in the National Memorial Cemetery...
read moreBrilliant Pebbles
While researching the postwar Wake era I came upon some interesting information about Wake Island’s role in missile defense programs over the years. Of the unclassified missions and operations that are open to public inquiry, the one called Brilliant Pebbles caught my attention. The oddly festive and evocative name seems reason enough to use it for a December blog post. Sadly, history has not recorded who in the Reagan Administration came up with “Brilliant Pebbles” to name the space-based anti-missile program known in its formative stages as...
read moreThe Moveable Feast
Wake Island is variously described as V-shaped, horseshoe-shaped, or wishbone-shaped. I like the last best, and so it seems appropriate to recall Thanksgiving on Wake Island in 1941. Thanksgiving fell on November 20, 1941, on Wake, other islands, D. C., and two-thirds of the states. For the third Depression year in a row, President Franklin Roosevelt had proclaimed Thanksgiving on the third Thursday of November instead of the traditional last Thursday of the month in order to extend consumer holiday spending in a tough economic climate. This...
read more“Valiant Marines Hold Tiny Isle”
On Wake Island the United States Marine Corps memorial stands tall, a stark white spire against a blue sky. Nearly fifty years since its dedication in 1966, the memorial remains well tended and frequently visited. Marines passing through Wake pay their respects year after year, often leaving medals and pins or picking up a paint brush to give the memorial a fresh white coat, as a visiting general did last week. The defense of Wake Island in World War II is a proud legacy of the Marine Corps. When war came suddenly and without warning to Wake...
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