🏳 Wake Island

Spanish explorer Mendaña, sailing from Callao in search of a gold-rich southern land, came upon a low barren island on the eve of the feast of Saint Francis and named it Isla San Francisco. The crew found the atoll waterless and without coconut or pandanus, which discouraged any settlement attempt. The sighting placed Wake on European charts, however inaccurately.

Wake, commanding the merchant ship Prince William Henry, came upon the atoll and named it after himself. Shortly afterwards Charles William Barkley of the brig Halcyon, unaware of prior contact, named it Halcyon Island. The name Wake ultimately stuck and remains the island's designation.

Lieutenant Charles Wilkes arrived aboard USS Vincennes and sent boats to survey the island, recording its triangular coral form, central lagoon and absence of fresh water. Naturalist Titian Peale collected specimens including a short-tailed albatross egg and a Polynesian rat. The two outer islets were later named Wilkes and Peale after them.

The iron-hulled Bremen barque struck the eastern reef in a gale while carrying mercury from San Francisco to Hong Kong. Survivors buried cargo and set out in two boats; the longboat reached Guam in April while the captain's gig was lost. The episode gave Wake Island its first widespread notoriety and prompted a Spanish salvage voyage from Guam.

The British clipper struck the reef en route from Fuzhou to Sydney; the captain and 12 crew escaped in a longboat without water or compass. After 31 days adrift they reached Kosrae in the Caroline Islands. The captain blamed erroneous charting of the low, hard-to-see atoll.

Greene, en route to the Philippines aboard SS China, stopped at Wake and hoisted the flag. The gesture came amid US expansion following the annexation of Hawaii and the acquisition of Guam and the Philippines, with Wake seen as a potential cable and coaling station midway between Honolulu and Manila.

Acting on orders from President McKinley, Commander Edward D. Taussig of USS Bennington landed on the unclaimed and uninhabited atoll, fired a 21-gun salute, raised the flag and affixed an inscribed brass plate to the flagstaff, formally taking possession for the United States. The annexation was intended to provide a station for the planned trans-Pacific telegraph cable, and it established the American sovereignty that has governed Wake ever since.

Although the Wake route would have been 137 miles shorter, Rear Admiral Royal Bird Bradford testified to Congress that Wake was swept by the sea, lacked a harbour and would require costly works. Midway was selected instead for the Commercial Pacific Cable Company station between Honolulu and Guam. The decision left Wake undeveloped for another three decades.

After US Army transports found Japanese parties gathering guano and drying fish on Wake, the incident was raised with the State Department. Takahira replied that Japan had no claim whatever on the island's sovereignty, only expecting protection for peaceful subjects there. The note removed the sole significant challenge to American title before the Second World War.

A storm disabled the ship and swept the captain and five crew overboard; 36 survivors landed on Wake and endured hardship, disease and starvation. In May 1908 the Brazilian Navy training ship Benjamin Constant spotted their distress flag and mounted a three-day rescue of the 20 remaining survivors. The episode underlined the atoll's lack of water and food.

Lt Cmdr Sherwood Picking reported that Wake was ideally located, dividing the Honolulu-to-Guam passage into thirds with Midway, but that the shallow lagoon barred surface warships. He strongly recommended Wake be developed as an aircraft base for any future trans-Pacific flight. The report anticipated the atoll's later role in aviation and Pacific strategy.

A joint Biological Survey, Bishop Museum and Navy expedition led by ornithologist Alexander Wetmore charted the atoll, gathered specimens and made offshore soundings from USS Tanager. It confirmed that Wake was an atoll of three islands round a central lagoon and named Wilkes and Peale Islands. Abandoned Japanese feather-poaching camps and the now-extinct Wake Island rail were also documented.

The order transferred Wake, Johnston, Sand Island at Midway and Kingman Reef to the Department of the Navy, resolving the jurisdictional vacuum that had blocked Pan American's development plans. Rear Admiral Yarnell designated Wake a bird sanctuary to disguise military intentions. It set the legal foundation for the atoll's subsequent militarisation.

Days after USS Nitro completed a two-day survey of the atoll, Swanson formally authorised PAA to construct facilities. The decision let Juan Trippe proceed with an island-hopping trans-Pacific route while giving the Navy a commercial cover for projecting air power. It began the first substantial development in Wake's history.

The chartered freighter arrived with workers, materials and equipment to build facilities and clear the lagoon for flying boats. Cargo was lightered across Wilkes on an improvised narrow-gauge railway and barged to Peale, chosen as the site for the settlement. Some five tons of dynamite were used to blast coral heads from a mile-long landing area.

A PAA flying boat set down in the newly blasted lagoon channel during a survey flight of the Midway-to-Wake route. The landing proved the atoll's viability as a trans-Pacific stepping stone. It marked the beginning of Wake's aviation era.

A second North Haven expedition completed the facilities in February 1936, offloading a diesel locomotive for the Wilkes Island Railroad and assembling a prefabricated 48-room hotel on Peale. Staff included Chamorro men from Guam employed as hotel and kitchen workers. The village on Peale was the atoll's first permanent human habitation.

After a press flight by the China Clipper on 11 October and a VIP flight by the Philippine Clipper on 18 October, the Hawaii Clipper arrived on 25 October carrying the first paying airline passengers ever to cross the Pacific. From 1937 Wake became a regular stop on PAA's scheduled passenger and airmail service, with two flights each week. The atoll became a fixture of global commercial aviation.

About 4,000 troops, comprising the IJN 65th Guard Unit and the 13th Independent Mixed Regiment, held the island under Captain Shigematsu Sakaibara. American captives were forced to build bunkers and fortifications, and an 8-inch naval gun was brought in. The US chose a submarine blockade and sustained bombing rather than invasion.

Work commenced on defences and facilities, employing around 1,221 civilian workers from Morrison-Knudsen Corp. The base plan was still incomplete when war broke out, leaving hangars and bunkers unfinished and hampering aircraft repair during the battle. It nonetheless converted Wake from a commercial waypoint into a forward military position.

The proclamation established the Wake Island Naval Defensive Sea Area covering territorial waters to the three-mile limit, and a Naval Airspace Reservation above it. Only US government ships and aircraft could enter without the Secretary of the Navy's authorisation. It legally closed the atoll to civilian and foreign traffic on the eve of war.

Some 449 Marine officers and men were stationed on the island under Navy Cmdr Winfield Scott Cunningham, alongside 68 naval personnel and over 1,200 civilian contractors. In November VMF-211 flew 12 F4F-3 Wildcats to the atoll from USS Enterprise, arriving on 3 December. These forces would bear the weight of the Japanese assault weeks later.

At least 27 Mitsubishi G3M bombers from Kwajalein struck on 8 December, destroying eight of the twelve Wildcats on the ground. Repeated raids followed, and on 11 December Wake's artillery turned back an amphibious invasion, sinking two destroyers in what was widely reported as the first American battlefield success of the war. Pan Am's last Clipper evacuated 40 people hours after the first raid.

A reinforced invasion force overwhelmed the isolated garrison on 23 December; a US relief fleet, delayed by weather and losses at Pearl Harbor, turned back on hearing of the fall. American casualties were 52 military and about 70 civilians killed, against Japanese losses exceeding 700. Some 1,603 people, of whom 1,150 were civilians, were taken prisoner.

Multiple high wave events flooded areas of the low-lying atoll in early 2024, damaging dormitories and a dining hall. Similar inundation damaged the US facility at Roi-Namur to the south. The episodes highlighted the vulnerability of the base to sea-level and wave hazards.

Campaign Fierce Sentry Flight Test Operational-02 Event 2 combined a THAAD system on Wake, two AN/TPY-2 radars and USS John Paul Jones with its Aegis system against three near-simultaneous air and missile targets. The THAAD battery detected and destroyed a short-range ballistic missile target air-launched from a C-17. It demonstrated integrated layered ballistic missile defence and confirmed Wake's continuing strategic test role.

The executive order protected the marine environments around Wake and six other US Pacific possessions, assigning waters and lands to the Interior Department and fisheries beyond 12 nautical miles to NOAA. Days later Interior Secretary Kempthorne ordered that the Wake portion be managed as a National Wildlife Refuge, pending termination of the existing Air Force agreement. President Obama expanded the monument to the full 200-mile EEZ in September 2014, raising the Wake area from 15,085 to 167,336 square miles.

The Air Force evacuated all 188 residents and suspended operations on 28 August 2006 as Super Typhoon Ioke approached. On 31 August the southwestern eyewall passed over the atoll with winds well over 185 mph, driving a 20-foot storm surge into the lagoon and damaging wildlife, electrical and waste-water systems and the golf course, though the runway survived largely intact and damage was comparatively minor. Assessment teams restored limited function in September, and a US Air Force repair team went on to restore full capability to the airfield and facilities, leaving the island a vital strategic link in the Pacific.

After the Coast Guard interdicted MV Jung Sheng Number 8 south of Hawaii with 147 Chinese illegal immigrants aboard, the group was transported to Wake on 29 July and housed and cared for by military units. They were repatriated to China by commercial charter on 7 August. A similar staging operation, Marathon Pacific, handled over 113 more migrants in late 1996.

Under a caretaker permit from the Air Force, USASSDC took over the atoll owing to continued Army missile testing there. Wake became a rocket launch site for the Kwajalein Missile Range, known as the Wake Island Launch Center. Administrative control returned to the Air Force's 15th Wing on 1 October 2002.

Selected in 1987 for the SDI Project Starlab/Starbird, Wake received two launch pads on Peacock Point and support facilities for eight-ton multi-stage test missiles. The programme, which involved tracking from a Space Shuttle platform, was cancelled in September 1990 after Challenger-related delays, and no Starbird missile ever flew from Wake. The pads were converted for Brilliant Pebbles launches, the first on 29 January 1992.

Following an early-1980s evaluation of the Second World War cultural resources on Wake, Wilkes and Peale, the atoll was listed on 16 September 1985. The designation protects sites and artefacts associated with the Pacific war and the pre-war transpacific aviation era. Later surveys in 2010 and 2011 uncovered unexploded ordnance and further human remains at the POW execution site.

With the fall of Saigon imminent, President Ford ordered Wake prepared as an additional refugee processing centre alongside Subic Bay and Guam. MASH units, field kitchens, security police and immigration agents were flown in, and from 26 April a C-141 carrying 283 refugees arrived every hour and 45 minutes. At the peak 8,700 Vietnamese were on the atoll; the airlift ended on 2 August.

Wake was selected in 1973 as a launch site for testing defences against ICBMs under Project Have Mill, with a missile launch complex activated on the atoll. Between 13 February and 22 June 1974 seven Athena H missiles were fired to the Roi-Namur Test Range at Kwajalein. The programme entrenched Wake's role in ballistic missile defence testing.

Since 1974 the airstrip has been used by the US military and for emergency landings by aircraft crossing the Pacific.

Meeting in Saipan as the legislature of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, they declared that Enen-kio is and always has been the property of the people of the Marshall Islands, citing oral tradition. It was the first challenge to American title in 75 years. The Marshall Islands government later notified its diplomatic partners in April 1998 that claims by the self-styled Kingdom of EnenKio were fraudulent.

Under an agreement between the Secretaries of the Interior and the Air Force, responsibility passed from the FAA to the Air Force, with legal ownership retained by the Interior Department. The Military Airlift Command took over in July, and on 1 July 1973 all FAA activities ceased as PACAF's Detachment 4, 15th Air Base Wing assumed control. Military administration has continued in various forms since.

Longer-range Boeing 747s eliminated the need for a mid-Pacific refuelling stop, and the last scheduled passenger flight landed in June with the last cargo flight departing in July. Other airlines likewise dropped Wake from their schedules, and the US military switched to C-5A and C-141 aircraft. The atoll's era as a commercial aviation hub closed.

Standard Oil of California's 18,000-ton tanker was driven onto the reef after failing to moor, spilling aviation fuel, diesel and bunker oil into the small boat harbour and along the southwestern coast. Large numbers of fish were killed and Navy salvage vessels came from Honolulu, Guam and Subic Bay to skim and burn the oil. Super Typhoon Sarah struck on 16 September, scouring the coast but leaving oil embedded in the coral.

MILS combined a precision target array with a broad ocean area system to locate the splashdowns of test missile nose cones. The Wake terminal supported intercontinental ballistic missile testing within the Pacific Missile Range, alongside sites at Kaneohe Bay, Midway and Eniwetok. It began the atoll's long career as missile-test infrastructure.

Sustained winds of 120 mph with gusts to 142 mph forced 750 people into Second World War bunkers and caused severe flooding. All homes, the hotel, the chapel, the Quonset huts and the Coast Guard LORAN station were destroyed or damaged, at a repair cost of $1.6 million. No one was killed and facilities were fully restored by 1953.

The two men met on the atoll to discuss progress and strategy for the Korean Peninsula. Wake was chosen for its proximity to Korea so MacArthur would not be long absent from the front. It remains the most prominent diplomatic event ever staged on the island.

From the start of the Korean War, MATS relied on Wake's airfield as an essential mid-Pacific stop for moving men and supplies. By September 1950 some 120 military aircraft were landing at Wake each day. The atoll's strategic value as an air bridge to Asia was decisively demonstrated.

Rising commercial traffic led the Navy to hand administration, operations and maintenance to the CAA. In 1949 the CAA paved the coral runway and extended it to 7,000 feet. The change marked the atoll's shift from naval outpost to civil aviation hub.

Brigadier General Lawson H. M. Sanderson accepted the surrender on 4 September, ending three years and eight months of Japanese administration. Roughly 2,200 Japanese remained, most repatriated aboard the Hikawa Maru by 1 November. Interrogations and officers' suicide notes soon exposed the 1943 POW massacre.

Four hundred Seabees of the 85th Naval Construction Battalion arrived in October 1945 to clear war damage and build a Naval Air Base, completed in March 1946. Pan Am resumed scheduled commercial passenger service on 24 September 1946, switching from flying boats to landplanes using the new coral runway. BOAC, Japan Airlines, Philippine Airlines and Transocean also established routes through Wake.

With the Allied advance bypassing Wake and its resupply base captured in January 1944, the garrison began strict food rationing in May 1944. Soldiers survived on tern eggs, Polynesian rats and scant makeshift gardens, killing tens of thousands of rats in a single day. About three-quarters of the garrison perished, and the endemic Wake Island rail was hunted out of existence.

After an American air raid on 5 October, the remaining civilian POWs were blindfolded, marched to the northern end of the island and machine-gunned into an anti-tank ditch. One escapee carved the message 98 US PW 5-10-43 on a coral rock before being recaptured and beheaded. The crime was exposed after the surrender and Sakaibara was hanged in Guam in 1947.