An island is a body of land surrounded by water. (Continents are also surrounded by water, but because they are so big, they are not considered islands.) An atoll is a ring-shaped coral reef, island, or series of islets. The atoll surrounds a body of water called a lagoon. (National Geographic)
Wake is a small tropical coral atoll in the Pacific Ocean consisting of three islands (Peale, Wake, and Wilkes) enclosing a shallow, central lagoon and surrounded by a narrow fringing reef.
From reef to reef, the atoll is approximately 5 miles long and 2.5 miles wide. The atoll is about 2,460-miles west of Hawaiʻi, 1,600-miles east of Guam and 700-miles north of Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands.
Oral traditions claim that the Marshallese knew of Wake Atoll prior to contact with European navigators. The Marshallese name for the atoll was Eneen-Kio or Ane-en Kio, “Island of the kio flower.”
The atoll was a source of feathers and plumes of seabirds. Prized were the wing bones of albatross, from which tattooing chisels could be made. In addition, the rare kio flower grew on the atoll.
Bringing these items to the home atolls implied that the navigators had been able to complete the feat of finding the atoll using traditional navigation skills of stars, wave patterns and other ocean markers. (Spennemann)
Today, it is more commonly referred to as ‘Wake Island’ or ‘Wake Atoll’ (rediscovery of Wake and its naming is usually credited to Captain William Wake of the British trading schooner Prince William Henry, enroute from Port Jackson, Australia to Canton in China in 1792). (NPS)
Wake, to the west of Honolulu, Hawaii, is the northernmost atoll in the Marshall Islands geological ridge and perhaps the oldest living atoll in the world. Wake Atoll was claimed by the United States in 1898; formal possession of Wake was made by the US on January 17, 1899.
Pan American Airways applied in 1935 for permission to establish a seaplane base at Wake for its “Clipper” flying boats, the pioneer trans-Pacific air route: San Francisco, Hawaii, Midway, Wake, Guam, Manila, and later, Hong Kong.
Pan Am commenced its profitable transpacific airmail delivery service on November 22, 1935, and its transpacific passenger service nearly a year later on November 4, 1936. (HALS UM-1) The flight across the Pacific then took six days. (NPS)
Pan Am the blasted over one hundred coral heads from within Wake’s lagoon to prepare a suitable landing area for its “Clippers”. Pan Am passengers debarked at the lagoon-end of a long docking pier and passed through a pavilion on the shore side of the pier on their way to the Pan Am hotel. (HALS UM-1)
Just as a prefab hotel was built on Midway, a prefabricated hotel building was built on Wake. The hotel was Y-shaped, with the lounge and dining room in the center and 20 rooms in each of the two flanking wings. It was sited to take advantage of views across the lagoon.
Between 1935 and 1941, the Pan Am seaplane station on Peale Island consisted of a landing docking and shelter, a single-story hotel, crew and personnel quarters, recreation building, sick bay, shop and warehouse buildings, utility structures and communication facilities. (HALS UM-1)
The location of Wake Island made it a strategic location for both the US and Japan. It was recognized that if war broke out between Japan and the US, Wake could: …
… provide for a defensive outpost; enable long range reconnaissance deep into enemy territory; enable the disruption of shipping; serve as staging ground for offensive operations; and be utilized as an emergency air station. (Butowsky)
Wake was substantially modified by the US to create a military base before WWII. As part of the WWII build-up, by mid-1941, construction of the Naval Air Station seaplane base included a seaplane ramp and parking area on the lagoon side of central Peale Island.
The Japanese declared war on the US with its attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the same day in another time zone attempted to seize Wake Island.
The Japanese opening attack of Wake came swiftly by air at 11:58 am (local time) on December 8, 1941; Wake was defended by about 500-military personnel (about one-quarter of its intended size.) In addition, there were about 1,200-civilian workers on the atoll.
Despite the earlier preparations, none of the defensive installations were sufficiently completed by the time of the Japanese attack. (The facilities were estimated to have been only 65-percent finished.)
The island finally fell on December 23, 1941; with the fall of Wake Island to the Japanese in late-December 1941, Midway became their westernmost US outpost in the central Pacific. More than 700-Japanese were killed during the attacks, while only 52-US military personnel lost their lives.
The Japanese took approximately 1,600 prisoners of war (POWs), 450 of whom were military personnel. The American POWs were sent to Japanese prison camps, mostly in China but some in Japan. Of these 1,600, 360 were retained by the Japanese to work as forced laborers for the Japanese.
In September, 1942, all were removed from the island except for ninety-eight of the prisoners (all civilian heavy equipment operators, except for one doctor) who were kept on Wake to assist the Japanese in developing their defensive positions on the atoll. (HALS UM-1)
(A sad side story notes that on October 7, 1943 when the Japanese saw subsequent invasion of Wake, Rear Admiral Shigematsu Sakaibara ordered the execution of the 98-American civilian prisoners. They were taken to one side of the island and shot with machine guns.)
(One prisoner escaped and carved a memorial into a large rock “98 US PW 5-10-43;” it’s still there. This prisoner was caught and also executed shortly after. After the war, Sakaibara and his subordinate, Lieutenant-Commander Tachibana, were sentenced to hang for this massacre.) The memory of their sacrifice is sustained by the inscription on “POW Rock” on Wilkes Island.
During their almost 4-year occupation of Wake, the Japanese constructed elaborate shoreline defenses. The Japanese widened and lengthened the US-built runway on the eastern side of the south arm of Wake Island and built two additional runways.
From 1941 to 1945, the Japanese stationed as many as 4,000 troops on the atoll at any given time, and they continued their development of Wake Island unabated until June of 1943.
In July of 1943, American bombers, who had begun bombing and shelling Wake since February of 1942, attacked Japanese coastal defense positions. On August 13, 1945, Marine planes conducted their last attack on Japanese positions on Wake, and on September 4, 1945, Admiral Sakaibara surrendered Wake Island back to the US.
Today, Wake serves as a trans-Pacific refueling stop for military aircraft and supports Missile Defense Agency test activities. Wake is currently managed by the Pacific Air Force Support Center located at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Anchorage, Alaska, and falls under 11th Air Force. (15th Wing)
https://api.dvidshub.net/hls/video/536620.m3u8?api_key=key-55f197190d6a3
A little personal side story … When Pan Am used Midway and Wake as stopping points for flights across the Pacific, my grandmother (Laura Sutherland) was Assistant Head Librarian for the Library of Hawai‘i in charge of the “Extension Department.”
My grandmother took advantage of these flights and expanded the reach of her “Extension Department” by supplying reading material to residents on Midway and Wake, with the cooperation of Pan Am. Each week, a new supply of books was added to the flights in what is believed to be America’s only Flying Library Service.
Oh, the title to this piece? … Guam, a US Territory, adopted a de facto motto is “Where America’s Day Begins”; but that’s not technically true. Wake is 1,500-miles further east, right next to and west of the International Date Line. Given that placement with the Dateline, while most in America are experiencing a new day, folks on Wake are already into tomorrow.
“The dawn’s earliest light — the first rays of sun on US soil – shine upon Wake Island. Every morning America wakes up on Wake Island.” The sign on the Wake airstrip terminal building reads “Where America’s Day REALLY begins.” (CBSNews)
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