The recent water contamination crisis on Oahu has rung the death knell for the U. S. Navy’s 80-year-old Red Hill underground fuel storage system. Last week the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, announced plans to defuel and permanently close the system. Congress has approved $686 million for first steps: to cover costs of thousands of families sickened and displaced by the November 2021 contamination of drinking water on Joint Base Pearl...

Six years ago, I wrote a blog post titled Ready, Aim, Fire about the successful ICBM defense test that had just taken place on and near Wake Island in November 2015. In this test a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system stationed on Wake detected, intercepted, and downed a target missile launched from a C-17 over the Pacific. While other components of the layered defense system failed in that test, the success at Wake warranted...

Uninhabited until the 1930s, tiny Wake Island had no claim to fame but for a shipwreck that caught the attention of national news media. One dark and stormy night in March 1866 a German sailing ship struck the eastern reef of the low-lying atoll. The shipwrecked Libelle, a stranded opera star, and hundreds of thousands of dollars-worth of buried treasure made for story-telling gold. When Pan American Airways sent a crew in 1935 to build a...

The nationwide “Wreaths Across America” remembrance ceremony was held this year on December 14, 2019, at more than two thousand cemeteries across the nation and more internationally. Family members, dignitaries, service members, and volunteers join at regional veterans’ cemeteries to honor those who served our nation and to lay evergreen wreaths on each grave. The solemn ceremony opened at noon on Saturday at the Washington State Veterans...

Several years ago I wrote about the trial of Rear Admiral Shigematsu Sakaibara for the execution of the 98 American civilian POWs on Wake Island during World War II (see War Crime). In recent months I’ve been digging deeper into trial records and contacting government agencies to help the Forsberg family find a material item used as evidence in the Sakaibara trial. My research has revealed some interesting new (to me) material on the Wake story...

The massacre of the last 98 Americans on Wake Island in 1943 did not constitute genocide, but I wonder where the line is crossed between war crimes committed against civilians and acts of genocide committed against civilians. I recently gave a talk on genocide and dictatorship and during my research found that crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide do not have clear lines of separation, even in international law. The concept of...