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...

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...

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...