Below is a photograph of young Lawton Shank, who was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross for his heroism on Wake Island in World War II. The doctor worked steadily and at great risk to care for casualties during the siege and battle in December, 1941, and volunteered to remain on the island with the last 98 American POWs, only to be cut down with them in a blaze of Japanese bullets on October 7, 1943. I wrote about Dr. Shank a couple of years...

No, Wake Island isn’t dead. I know I make a connection to Wake Island in just about every blog post (it turns out that there are generally six or fewer degrees of separation), but this post is about the recent book by Seattle’s Erik Larson: Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania (Broadway Books, 2015). The skilled narrative non-fiction author of In the Garden of the Beasts and The Devil in the White City turns here to the well-known but...

There are two Palmyras, worlds apart. The ancient city of Palmyra in war-torn Syria has become a target for the systematic destruction of irreplaceable pre-Islamic antiquities by Islamic State militants – a pressing topic for sure; but this post is about the other Palmyra: a tiny tropical atoll in the mid-Pacific. I learned about the atoll while researching and writing Building for War, and it recently came to my attention again when I heard...

In January 2014 the massive World War II-era underground fuel tank facility near Pearl Harbor was found to have sprung a leak, which immediately raised environmental concerns for spillage and contamination of drinking water. The leak, or “release” as the Navy reported it, of 27,000 gallons of jet fuel, didn’t visibly spill out like the devastating oil slicks in recent memory. It didn’t coat birds or choke fish; it didn’t blacken beaches,...

In September 2015 when I last wrote about the JPAC/DPAA mission in Not Forgotten, we were still fielding some recent and resubmitted family DNA reference samples to help identify remains found on Wake Island in 2011. The remains were linked to the October 7, 1943, massacre of American POWs on Wake Island, and I have helped to locate qualified DNA donors from the families of the 98 victims. Working with the Armed Forces DNA Identification...

A few weeks ago I received a link to a story about a midair collision of fighter jets over the Pacific, about 250 miles west of Wake. Gregory Roberts of the Voice Observer reported that two F-18 Hornets had collided and fallen into the Pacific on Thursday, December 17. One pilot was rescued quickly and returned to the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, but the other pilot was still missing. Multiple ships and helicopter crews were engaged in the...