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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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