Occupied Wake, 1942–1945: Raids, Starvation and the Murder of the 98

Japan held Wake Island for more than three and a half years and never had to defend it against a landing. American bombs and the blockade starved the garrison, and on 7 October 1943 the island’s commander had the last 98 American civilians on the atoll shot on the beach.

Why it mattered

The Battle of Wake Island ended on 23 December 1941, but the story of Wake Island in World War II did not. The surrender described in Chapter 6 handed the Japanese a small, half-finished air base more than 2,000 miles west of Hawaii, together with more than 1,600 American prisoners. Most of the prisoners were shipped off within weeks, as told in Chapter 7. A few hundred civilian construction men were kept behind to run the bulldozers and cranes they had brought to build the American base, and to build Japanese defenses instead.

For the next three and a half years Wake was a target. The U.S. Navy raided it with carriers in February 1942, used it as a training ground for new carrier air groups in 1943 and 1944, and shelled it from cruisers and a battleship. Army and Navy bombers flew against it from Midway and later from the Marshalls. The Americans never landed. Once the Central Pacific drive went around Wake to the Gilberts, the Marshalls and the Marianas, the island had no value worth the cost of an assault. Its garrison was left to wither, and it did: by the American count most of the Japanese who died on Wake died of hunger and disease, not bombs (Spennemann, “To Hell and Back”).

The occupation is also the setting for the worst crime of the Wake story. After the heavy carrier raid of 5 and 6 October 1943, Capt. Shigematsu Sakaibara, convinced an invasion was coming, ordered the 98 Americans still on the island killed. They were shot on the north beach on 7 October. One man got away long enough to carve a short message into a coral rock. That rock, the “98 Rock,” is now the best-known memorial on the atoll, and the case against Sakaibara became one of the U.S. Navy’s war crimes trials in the Pacific (Hubbs, “Massacre on Wake Island”; NHHC, “The Forsaken Defenders of Wake Island”).

A note on dates: Wake lies west of the International Date Line, a calendar day ahead of Hawaii. Dates in this chapter are Wake local dates, as the sources generally give them.

Otori-shima: the island the Japanese took

The Japanese renamed the atoll Otori-shima, usually rendered “Great Bird Island.” Dirk Spennemann’s history of wartime Wake, which draws on Japanese and American records, dates the renaming to 22 December 1941, the day before the final landing, and traces the garrison’s beginnings to the units that came ashore or followed soon after: the Navy’s 65th Guard Unit (keibitai), part of the 4th Naval Construction Battalion of about 1,000 men, a battalion of the Army’s 170th Infantry, and detachments of the 22nd and later the 24th Air Flotilla, whose headquarters stayed at Roi in the Marshalls (Spennemann, “To Hell and Back”).

The first island commander was Capt. Susumu Kawasaki, who held the post from January 1942 to 13 December 1942. His successor was Capt. Shigematsu Sakaibara, a 1918 graduate of the Imperial Naval Academy who had served in cruisers and the battleship Mutsu. Sakaibara commanded on Wake for the rest of the war and was promoted to rear admiral in October 1944. His executive officer was Lt. Cmdr. Soichi Tachibana; an Army colonel, Shigeharu Chikamori, commanded the Army troops (Spennemann; Commons caption to the 1945 surrender photograph). Tachibana’s given name appears as both Soichi and Shoichi in the sources.

What the Japanese found on 23 December was a battered work camp around an unfinished naval air station. The airstrip on Wake Island proper worked. The contractors’ camps, the half-built naval facilities and the heavy equipment parks gave the Japanese both shelter and machinery. The airstrip was littered with the wrecks of VMF-211’s Wildcats. A Navy photograph taken after the capture shows at least seven wrecked F4F-3s, including “211-F-11,” the plane Capt. Henry T. Elrod flew on 11 December when his bombs helped sink the destroyer Kisaragi (NHHC photo 80-G-179006). The Japanese wanted Wake as an outpost: a patrol-plane base and an early-warning station on the eastern edge of their perimeter, and a stepping stone toward Midway.

The men who were kept

The civilian workforce on Wake in December 1941 belonged to the Contractors Pacific Naval Air Bases consortium, whose lead firm on the island was Morrison-Knudsen; their story is the subject of Chapter 1. The NHHC counts 1,146 civilians on the atoll at the start of the war, of whom 70 were killed and 20 wounded in the siege (NHHC, “The Forsaken Defenders of Wake Island”). The Marine Corps commemorative history gives the same 1,146 and 70 killed, with 12 wounded (Cressman, A Magnificent Fight). NHHC H-Gram 002 counts 1,104 civilian workers taken prisoner, of whom 108 died in captivity, and warns that “sources vary on some of these numbers.”

On 12 January 1942 the liner Nitta Maru took the military prisoners and most of the civilians away to Yokohama and Shanghai (Spennemann). The Japanese held back the men they needed. A contractor named Lee Wilcox wrote in his diary on 12 January that all but 360 of the contractors had been sent off; the ones kept were heavy-equipment operators, mechanics and tradesmen, put to work on Japanese defenses (Hubbs, “Massacre on Wake Island,” Naval History, February 2001). Spennemann gives the figure as 346. Among those who stayed was the contractors’ physician, Dr. Lawton E. Shank of Angola, Indiana, who had set up an emergency hospital in an empty ammunition magazine when the camp hospital was bombed on 9 December (Gilbert, “Wake 98 Hero”).

The work was forced labor on military construction. Mark Hubbs, a retired Army Reserve officer and cultural resources analyst who studied the case, lists what the prisoners built: antitank ditches, barbed-wire entanglements, minefields, about 200 pillboxes and bunkers, and revetments for some 30 heavy guns. Under the 1929 Geneva Convention, which Japan had promised in early 1942 to apply to American prisoners and to civilian internees, prisoners were not to be put to work directly connected with the operations of the war (Hubbs; IMTFE Judgment, Annex A-6). The men lived in their old barracks, worked under guard and were fed, by their own diaries, poorly but not at starvation level in 1942. Wilcox recorded 45 deaths among the prisoners during 1942. Leal Russell, another diarist, mentioned only two (Hubbs).

The first execution came in May 1942. Julius “Babe” Hoffmeister, a contractor with a drinking problem, was caught drunk in the Japanese canteen on 8 May. After what Hubbs calls a hasty trial, he was blindfolded and made to kneel at the edge of his grave on 10 May, and Ensign Kiroku Horie beheaded him while the contractors’ foremen and superintendents were made to watch (Hubbs). Spennemann notes that the beheading fell on Mother’s Day 1942, and that two other contractors died at sea after escaping in a stolen boat. On 11 May, 20 recuperating Marines and sailors who had been too badly hurt to travel in January were shipped to China in the Asama Maru (Hubbs).

On 30 September 1942 a freighter took 265 more prisoners to Yokohama, Wilcox and Russell among them (Hubbs). Spennemann names the ship as the Tachibana Maru. Ninety-eight Americans were left. Dr. Shank was one of them by choice: Bonita Gilbert, who has written the fullest history of the Wake contractors, records that he volunteered to stay with the men who remained (Gilbert, “Wake 98 Hero”). Hubbs notes that one account says 97 men were chosen to stay, but the diaries and every later count give 98.

Navy Cross · Posthumous

Dr. Lawton E. Shank, civilian physician, Contractors Pacific Naval Air Bases, Wake Island

His citation credits him with “extraordinary heroism” on 9 December 1941, when Japanese bombers destroyed the contractors’ camp hospital: he stayed at his post, supervised the evacuation of patients and equipment and set up a new hospital in an empty magazine. Cunningham’s recommendation praised his “complete disregard of his own safety.” Shank, born in 1907 in Angola, Indiana, volunteered to stay on Wake with the last 98 prisoners in September 1942 and was killed with them on 7 October 1943. Gilbert describes him as the only American civilian awarded the Navy Cross.

Citation →

24 February 1942: the first raid on Wake

The Navy came back to Wake two months after it fell. In February 1942 the Pacific Fleet sent Vice Adm. William F. Halsey’s Enterprise task force to raid the island. The Navy’s 1943 combat narrative, Early Raids in the Pacific Ocean, describes the plan: Enterprise, screened by the destroyers Dunlap, Blue, Ralph Talbot and Craven, would launch from the north while a bombardment group under RAdm. Raymond A. Spruance, the heavy cruisers Northampton and Salt Lake City with the destroyers Balch and Maury, closed the island to shell it (ONI, Early Raids in the Pacific Ocean). Pacific Wrecks lists the operation as the “first Wake Island Raid,” by Task Force 16.

The air group commander, Cmdr. Howard L. Young, led 36 SBD Dauntlesses, nine TBD Devastators and six F4F Wildcats against the island. They found no Japanese aircraft on the airfield and bombed shelters, magazines, fuel stores and gun positions; the torpedo planes made horizontal bombing runs on fuel and antiaircraft sites. The cruisers opened fire on Peale at 0742 from 14,000 to 16,000 yards and fired for about half an hour. Northampton expended 264 rounds of 8-inch, Salt Lake City 261, Balch almost 1,200 rounds of 5-inch and Maury about 350. A fuel fire on Peale and a burning dredge marked the damage, but the narrative admits the shore batteries were not silenced and that officers disagreed about how much the shelling had accomplished (ONI, Early Raids). Spennemann identifies the dredge as the contractors’ Columbia.

The Japanese lost two patrol boats, sunk by gunfire from Maury and Balch after Enterprise planes had attacked them; Balch picked up four survivors and held them as prisoners. A fighter patrol shot down a four-engine flying boat, and two more patrol planes were destroyed. The Americans lost one SBD: Ens. Percy W. Forman and his radioman-gunner, J. E. Winchester, were believed to have come down at sea and been captured. Another pilot ditched for lack of fuel and was picked up, and a radioman-gunner was lost in a take-off accident (ONI, Early Raids).

The raid did little lasting damage. Like the other carrier raids of early 1942, it was meant as much to hit back somewhere, and to give the carrier crews combat experience, as to destroy anything on the island. For the American prisoners on Wake, the sight of American planes overhead was a reminder that the war was going on without them. It was also the first of many raids that would make their captors more frightened and more dangerous.

Bombers from Midway, 1942–1943

After the Battle of Midway in June 1942, the atoll 1,200 miles east-northeast of Wake became the base for land-based attacks on it. The first ended in tragedy. On 7 June 1942 Maj. Gen. Clarence L. Tinker, commander of the Seventh Air Force, took off from Midway with a flight of LB-30 Liberators “to make a pre-daylight attack on the Japanese Fleet in the vicinity of Wake Island.” His plane was seen to go out of control and fall into the sea; he and his crew were lost (U.S. Air Force biography, “Major General Clarence L. Tinker”). Tinker, who was one-eighth Osage, was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Medal; Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma bears his name.

Single B-17s photographed the island through the summer, fighting off Japanese fighters, and three LB-30s bombed it at night on 26–27 June (Pacific Wrecks, “American Missions Against Wake”). The first real bombing raid came at the first anniversary of Wake’s fall. On the night of 22–23 December 1942, 26 B-24D Liberators of the 307th Bombardment Group, staged through Midway, flew a mission that covered more than 4,300 nautical miles in all, each plane dropping five 500-pound bombs from about 4,000 feet in a single run. Four Japanese fighters got airborne but did not intercept. The press called it a Christmas Eve raid (Pacific Wrecks; Spennemann, who dates it 23 December and calls it the first land-based night bombing of Wake).

Through 1943 the Seventh Air Force kept coming back in small numbers: six B-24s on 25 January, a small force on 15 May that lost one bomber, eight on 24 July and eight more on 26 July, the last Seventh Air Force mission flown from Midway. By then Wake’s fighters were rising in strength, 20 to 30 at a time, and the bomber crews claimed many of them (Pacific Wrecks, “American Missions Against Wake”). None of these raids threatened the garrison’s hold on the island. They did keep its men digging, and they kept the prisoners hauling coral and pouring concrete.

5–6 October 1943: Task Force 14 strikes Wake

By the autumn of 1943 the Navy had the carriers it had lacked in 1942. The new Essex-class fleet carriers and Independence-class light carriers were joining the Pacific Fleet with new air groups flying the F6F Hellcat, and the planners needed somewhere to practice multi-carrier tactics against a defended target before the invasion of the Gilberts in November. Wake was the place. Task Force 14, under RAdm. Alfred E. Montgomery, sailed with three fleet carriers, three light carriers, three heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, 24 destroyers and two oilers, the largest carrier force the Americans had yet assembled (Pacific Wrecks, 5 October 1943 and “American Missions Against Wake”). Among the carriers were the new Yorktown (CV-10) and Lexington (CV-16) and the light carriers Cowpens and Belleau Wood (DANFS, “Yorktown IV”; DANFS, “Cowpens”; NHHC, “USS Belleau Wood”; Bonilla, “Wake Island Odyssey”).

Yorktown‘s history records “two days of air strikes”: she launched on 5 October, retired east for the night, came back early on the 6th and struck through most of the day before the task group turned for Hawaii (DANFS, “Yorktown IV”). Belleau Wood sent two strikes of 10 Avengers and 14 Hellcats, lost two fighters on the sweep, and lost four men of her flight deck crew when a damaged plane crashed on landing (NHHC, “USS Belleau Wood”). The cruisers Minneapolis, San Francisco and New Orleans shelled the island on 5 October, with Curtiss SOC floatplanes spotting their fall of shot (NHHC photos 80-G-55238 and 80-G-55338; Spennemann).

The weight of the attack was new. Hubbs, drawing on the Navy’s reports, gives 340 tons of bombs from the air and 3,198 projectiles from the cruisers and destroyers over the two days, and about 31 Japanese planes destroyed on the ground. Spennemann’s figures differ: 738 sorties in six strikes in his narrative but 510 sorties and 340 tons of bombs in his chronology, with 22 Japanese aircraft actually destroyed against 65 claimed, and American losses of 12 aircraft in combat and 14 in operational accidents. Whatever the exact figures, it was the heaviest blow Wake had taken since December 1941.

The raid also saw the first rescues by the Navy’s submarine “Lifeguard League.” USS Skate (SS-305), stationed off Wake, picked up six downed aviators over several days, among them Lt. Harold T. Kicker of Cowpens, Ens. Murray H. Tyler of Yorktown and Lt. Cmdr. Mark A. Grant, commander of Cowpens‘ air group. Paul T. Bonilla, an SBD radioman-gunner from Lexington whose pilot ditched about 50 miles from Wake on 6 October, wrote years later that his last flare brought Skate to their raft the next morning (Bonilla, “Wake Island Odyssey,” Naval History, April 2020). Lifeguard submarines became a standard part of later carrier strikes.

On Wake, the raid looked like something else. Two days of bombing and shelling by six carriers and a cruiser force, with American planes overhead from dawn to dusk, was exactly what a preliminary bombardment for a landing would look like. Sakaibara believed an invasion force was offshore (Hubbs). He had about 3,000 men, a fortified island and 98 American prisoners who knew where most of his guns and shelters were.

7 October 1943: the murder of the 98

What happened next is known chiefly from the testimony and confessions taken for the 1945 trial, summarized by Hubbs and by Gilbert from the trial record. On 7 October, the day after the raid ended, Sakaibara ordered the prisoners killed. Gilbert gives the order, as recorded in the trial documents, as “shoot to death the prisoners of war on the northern shore.” Tachibana passed it to Lt. Toraji Ito, who had taken command of the headquarters company that day and, by Gilbert’s account, had arrived on Wake only about an hour before (Gilbert, “War Crime” and “Victors’ Justice”). Hubbs spells his given name Torashi.

The prisoners were marched to an antitank ditch on the north shore. In the late afternoon, Hubbs writes, Ito had them seated facing the sea, blindfolded, with their hands and feet bound. Three platoons opened fire on them with machine guns and rifles; Gilbert puts the firing party at about a hundred men. The bodies were dumped into the ditch and covered with coral sand (Hubbs; Gilbert, “War Crime”). The men had been prisoners for 21 months. They had been kept alive because they were useful, and they were killed because Sakaibara decided they had become a danger.

The next day a sailor reported that one prisoner had escaped. The grave was dug open and the bodies counted; one man was missing (Hubbs). He was found near the food stores and beheaded on the shore of Peale Island. Sakaibara testified at his trial that the man was killed either by his own hand or on his order; Hubbs and Gilbert both describe Sakaibara as doing it personally. They differ on when: Gilbert, citing the trial record, says about a week after the massacre; Hubbs says about three weeks. The man’s identity has never been determined (Hubbs; Gilbert, “Victors’ Justice”).

Before he was caught, he left a mark. On a large coral rock near the lagoon he scratched the number of the dead, the words “US PW” and a date. The inscription is still there.

In their words

98 US PW 5-10-43

The killings were not the only executions under Sakaibara. Hubbs and Gilbert both describe a contractor beheaded in July 1943 after he was caught stealing food. Gilbert names the executioner as Lt. (jg) Nonaka and quotes the justification recorded at the trial: “in order to maintain military discipline it was necessary that the man be executed.” Hubbs places the beheading in Sakaibara’s presence. The garrison’s senior medical officer in 1943, Lt. Cmdr. Jiro Miyasaki, certified the death and later testified about it (Gilbert, “War Crime” and “Victors’ Justice”).

The cover story

The garrison had two years to prepare an explanation, and it did. When the Americans arrived in September 1945 and asked about the prisoners, Sakaibara let Ensign Horie, the officer who had beheaded Hoffmeister in 1942, do the talking. Horie’s account, as Hubbs summarizes it, was that the Americans had been put in two bomb shelters during the October 1943 raid; one shelter took a direct hit, and the men in the other panicked, killed a guard, broke out and fought to the death on the north beach. Other Japanese witnesses told the same story (Hubbs). Investigators from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey and Capt. Earl A. Junghans heard it too (Gilbert, “War Crime”). Pacific Wrecks summarizes the claim the Japanese gave in their first interrogations: that most of the 98 had died in an American bombing raid and the rest had been cornered on the north beach.

The physical evidence had been prepared as well. In August 1945, after the Emperor’s surrender broadcast and before the Americans came, the Japanese dug the bones out of the ditch and reburied them in a single grave in the old American cemetery at Peacock Point (Hubbs). Pacific Wrecks describes the new grave marked with wooden crosses. When the Marines went ashore, the Japanese showed them two common graves and one marked with the name Will Miles, freshly painted and trimmed (Gilbert, “War Crime”). Sanderson’s report of 7 September noted that the Japanese reported 40 Americans buried in two graves (Sanderson report, in Heinl, The Defense of Wake, Appendix). Ernie Harwell, then a Marine combat correspondent for Leatherneck, reported two common graves, one holding about 80 bodies (Harwell, as recounted in Naval History, August 1996).

The story did not hold. The numbers did not match, the graves were too neat, and the witnesses’ stories were too alike. Suspicion settled on Sakaibara and fifteen of his officers and men (Gilbert, “War Crime”). How the truth came out is told below, in the section on the trial.

Bypassed and starving, 1944–1945

Wake reached its greatest strength just as its usefulness ended. Spennemann puts the garrison at about 2,700 men in December 1942, about 3,100 in early 1943 and about 4,100 in January 1944, after roughly 1,000 Army troops arrived. Wikipedia’s summary of the garrison gives the Navy’s 65th Guard Unit as 2,000 men and the Army’s 13th Independent Mixed Regiment as 1,939, which agrees in round numbers. Then the Americans took Kwajalein and Eniwetok in February 1944, and Wake was cut off from the Marshalls that had supplied it.

By the numbers

The Japanese garrison on Wake, 1942–1945

Approximate strength at four dates; the last bar is the number who surrendered

December 19422,700

Early 19433,100

January 19444,100

September 19451,242

The last surface supply ship, the Akagi Maru, reached Wake in January 1944; two later attempts failed. After that the island was fed by submarine. Spennemann describes the boats arriving every month or six weeks, each 2,000-ton submarine able to land enough rice to feed 5,000 men for seven to ten days. It was never enough for the whole garrison. The Japanese Navy abandoned submarine supply runs to other bypassed islands after losing eight boats between February and June 1944, but kept them going to Wake; the last one arrived on 28 June 1945. Fresh water came from rain caught off the runways and roofs (Spennemann).

The garrison planted gardens in the coral, fished the lagoon and ate whatever it could catch. When the Marines arrived in 1945, Harwell found the survivors living underground on pumpkins, rice and fish, and reported that they had recently been eating rats and gooney birds (Harwell, Naval History, 1996). Spennemann’s tally of Japanese deaths on Wake is about 600 from enemy action and about 1,300 from starvation and disease. In the summer of 1945 the Japanese hospital ship Takasago Maru was allowed through to Wake to take off the sick; Spennemann counts 974 evacuees on her return voyage. U.S. destroyers stopped and searched her at sea in July and let her continue under the rules protecting hospital ships (Spennemann; DANFS, “McDermut II”).

The raids never stopped. Navy PB2Y Coronado flying boats bombed Wake at night from Midway four times in late January and February 1944 to cover the invasion of the Marshalls. From March 1944 Seventh Air Force B-24s flew against it from Kwajalein, sometimes 41 at a time. Montgomery came back with carriers on 23 May 1944, and another carrier group struck on 3 September. Night harassment by single B-24s went on through the autumn (Pacific Wrecks, “American Missions Against Wake”). Spennemann totals the effort between January and May 1944 alone at 996 sorties, 1,079 tons of bombs and 7,092 rounds of 5-inch and 6-inch shells from surface ships. In 1945 the island became a stop for carriers on their way west: three carriers of Task Group 12.4 under RAdm. Ralph E. Jennings on 20 June, including Cowpens; Wasp on 18 July; Cabot and the battleship Pennsylvania, which bombarded the island, on 1 August; and Intrepid on 6 August. The last raid, by Marine Corps aircraft against the guns at Peacock Point, came on 13 August, two days before the Emperor’s broadcast (Pacific Wrecks; DANFS, “Cowpens”; Cabot war history).

4 September 1945: the surrender aboard USS Levy

Japan’s government surrendered in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945. Two days later a small American force arrived off Wake: the destroyer escort USS Levy (DE-162), with USS Lehardy (DE-20) and USS Charles R. Greer (DE-23). Aboard Levy was Brig. Gen. Lawson H. M. Sanderson, commanding the 4th Marine Aircraft Wing in the Marshalls-Gilberts area, who had been sent to accept the surrender on behalf of RAdm. W. K. Harrill (Sanderson report, in Heinl, Appendix; USMC biography of Sanderson). Sakaibara came out to the ship. The surrender document was signed aboard Levy at 0819 on 4 September (Sanderson report).

The first American to set foot on the island was a man chosen for the symbolism. Col. Walter L. J. Bayler had come to Wake on 29 November 1941 to set up air-ground radio communications and had left aboard a Navy PBY that flew out on 21 December, two days before the island fell. He was known ever after as the “last man off Wake Island” (Sanderson report; Heinl). Sanderson’s report records the flag going up at about 1330, a 21-gun salute fired from Levy, a proclamation read and General Order No. 1 issued, and command of the atoll handed to Cmdr. W. Masek, USN (Ret.). Sanderson toured the island and saw no Japanese troops, only military police posted along the roads. Sakaibara presented a samurai sword as a gift for Admiral Harrill. Sanderson described him as “cheerful and cooperative” (Sanderson report, in Heinl, Appendix).

Ernie Harwell, later famous for four decades as the radio voice of the Detroit Tigers, was there for Leatherneck. He quoted Sakaibara saying, “I am very happy to turn the island over to you,” and found the garrison “in such terrible shape” that the Americans brought four tons of rice and fish and 550 pounds of medical supplies. “Many were sick and dying,” he wrote (Harwell, as recounted in Naval History, August 1996). Heinl’s appendix introduction dates the surrender to 7 September, the date of Sanderson’s report; Spennemann treats 4 September as the signing aboard Levy and 7 September as a formal surrender to Sanderson. The NHHC, the photographic record and most accounts use 4 September.

Timeline

Occupied Wake, 1941–1947

1. 23 Dec 1941Wake surrenders; the Japanese rename it Otori-shima (Spennemann dates the name to 22 December).
2. 12 Jan 1942Nitta Maru sails with the military prisoners and most civilians; about 360 contractors are kept (Wilcox diary; Spennemann gives 346).
3. 24 Feb 1942First carrier raid, by Halsey’s Task Force 16, with Spruance’s cruisers shelling Peale.
4. 10 May 1942Contractor Julius Hoffmeister beheaded after a hasty trial.
5. 7 Jun 1942Maj. Gen. Clarence Tinker lost leading LB-30s from Midway toward Wake.
6. 30 Sep 1942265 prisoners shipped to Japan; 98 remain on Wake.
7. 13 Dec 1942Capt. Shigematsu Sakaibara takes command of the island.
8. 22–23 Dec 194226 B-24s from Midway bomb Wake at night.
9. Jul 1943A contractor caught stealing food is beheaded.
10. 5–6 Oct 1943Task Force 14’s carriers and cruisers pound the island.
11. 7 Oct 1943The 98 are shot on the north beach on Sakaibara’s order.
12. Oct 1943The escaped prisoner is recaptured and beheaded on Peale, about a week (Gilbert) or three weeks (Hubbs) later.
13. Jan 1944Last supply ship arrives; garrison peaks at about 4,100.
14. 28 Jun 1945Last supply submarine reaches Wake.
15. 13 Aug 1945Last American air raid.
16. 4 Sep 1945Sakaibara surrenders aboard USS Levy; the U.S. flag is raised at about 1330.
17. 5 Nov 1945Sakaibara and 15 others shipped to Kwajalein; two kill themselves en route.
18. 21–24 Dec 1945Military commission at Kwajalein; Sakaibara and Tachibana sentenced to death.
19. 19 Jun 1947Sakaibara hanged on Guam (some sources give 18 June).

The confession and the Kwajalein trial

On 5 November 1945 Sakaibara and fifteen officers and men were shipped to Kwajalein, where the U.S. Navy was holding war crimes proceedings for the Marshalls area. Two of them, who had admitted taking part and had implicated others, killed themselves on the way, leaving statements that pointed to Sakaibara (Gilbert, “War Crime”; Hubbs; Spennemann). Ito, the lieutenant who had commanded the firing squad, also hanged himself in custody after writing a signed statement. Gilbert says he died before the trial; Hubbs says during it. Confronted with Ito’s statement, Sakaibara confessed that he had ordered the executions and said the responsibility was his. Sakaibara, Tachibana and Ito all admitted that the escape story was false (Hubbs; Gilbert).

The trial was held from 21 to 24 December 1945 before a U.S. Navy military commission, under the rules for such commissions issued by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers: five to seven officers who decided guilt and sentence, a Navy judge advocate prosecuting and defense counsel for the accused (Gilbert, “Victors’ Justice”). The charge was the murder of the 98 American prisoners. The prosecution relied on the 1929 Geneva Convention and its bar on killing prisoners without trial. Tachibana argued that he had only passed on his commander’s order, as Japanese naval practice required; the prosecution answered that a subordinate is bound to obey only lawful orders (Gilbert). Sakaibara and Tachibana were both sentenced to death. Tachibana’s sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment (Hubbs), and he was sent to Sugamo Prison in Tokyo (Sakaibara’s Wikipedia biography).

Sakaibara was taken to Guam and hanged on 19 June 1947, along with five other war criminals, according to Hubbs and Spennemann; other accounts give 18 June. In his last statement, Hubbs writes, he said his trial had been unfair but that he would “obey with pleasure.” The Tokyo war crimes prosecutors also collected his statement about issuing the order; it survives as International Prosecution Section document No. 8439 in the National Diet Library’s collection (National Diet Library, Pros. Doc. No. 8439, via Wikimedia Commons). Spennemann’s chronology says Tachibana was executed with Sakaibara; Hubbs and Gilbert, writing from the trial and review records, say his sentence was commuted, and that is the better-supported version.

The families and the remains

For nearly two years the families of the 98 had heard nothing definite. Most were told in January 1946 that their men had died on Wake in 1943. One family, that of Archie Pratt, did not learn what had happened to him until 1953 (Hubbs). In 1946 the remains from the Peacock Point grave were taken to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, the Punchbowl, in Honolulu. Attempts to separate and identify them failed, and in 1953 the men were interred together in Section G under a marble stone, about five by ten feet, carrying 178 names, 98 of them the executed contractors (Hubbs). Spennemann’s chronology records the Wake cemetery decommissioned on 18 March 1947, with its graves moved to Pearl Harbor for later disposition.

Not all of the remains left the island. Gilbert argues that the hasty Japanese reburial of August 1945 almost certainly left some bones in the ground. In 2011, a contractor doing asbestos abatement on Wake found what appeared to be human remains on the north beach, near the generally accepted site of the massacre. The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command sent anthropologists Greg Berg and Denise To, who recovered the lower part of a skeleton from about a square meter of ground and flew the remains to Hawaii for analysis (U.S. Air Force, “Officials search for POW/MIAs on Wake Island”; Gilbert, “JPAC Mission: Wake 98”).

The identifications have been slow. In early 2016 Gilbert reported that 71 of the 98 families had given DNA samples, 14 had no known qualified donor, six had declined and seven could not be found, and that, as far as she knew, no family had yet been notified of a positive identification. The remains were commingled and badly degraded, and the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, which replaced JPAC in 2015, had not yet assigned the case to a military department. She later added that the Navy had taken responsibility for its contractors (Gilbert, “Wake 98 Update”). We have not found a public record of identifications since then.

People

RAdm. Shigematsu Sakaibara (1898–1947), from Yamagata Prefecture, graduated from the Imperial Naval Academy in 1918 and commanded on Wake from 13 December 1942 to the surrender. He ordered the killing of the 98 and, by his own testimony, killed or ordered the killing of the man who escaped. He was hanged on Guam in June 1947.

Lt. Cmdr. Soichi Tachibana, Sakaibara’s executive officer and headquarters company commander, relayed the execution order. Condemned with Sakaibara at Kwajalein, he had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment and was sent to Sugamo Prison. His given name also appears as Shoichi.

Lt. Toraji Ito (died 1945) took command of the headquarters company on 7 October 1943 and directed the firing party. He confessed in a written statement and hanged himself in custody at Kwajalein. Hubbs gives his name as Torashi.

Dr. Lawton E. Shank (1907–1943), of Angola, Indiana, was the contractors’ physician. He kept treating the wounded through the December 1941 bombing, chose to stay with the last 98 prisoners in 1942 and died with them. He was awarded the Navy Cross posthumously.

Julius “Babe” Hoffmeister (died 1942), a contractor, was beheaded on 10 May 1942 after being caught drunk in the Japanese canteen, the first prisoner executed on Wake.

The unknown prisoner escaped the shooting on 7 October 1943, carved “98 US PW 5-10-43” on a coral rock and was recaptured and beheaded on Peale. No one has identified him.

Maj. Gen. Clarence L. Tinker (1887–1942), born in Kansas and one-eighth Osage, commanded the Seventh Air Force. He was lost at sea on 7 June 1942 leading LB-30s from Midway toward Wake and was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal posthumously.

Brig. Gen. Lawson H. M. Sanderson (born 1895), a Marine aviator since 1919 who had flown in Haiti and Nicaragua and served on Guadalcanal, commanded the 4th Marine Aircraft Wing and accepted the surrender of Wake aboard USS Levy. He retired as a major general in 1951.

Col. Walter L. J. Bayler (1905–1984) left Wake by PBY on 21 December 1941 and came back as the first American ashore on 4 September 1945. He retired as a brigadier general in 1957 and later taught high school physics in California.

Ernie Harwell (1918–2010), a Marine combat correspondent for Leatherneck, reported the surrender and the condition of the starving garrison before beginning his long career as a baseball broadcaster.

Losses and uncertainty

The central facts are not in doubt: on Sakaibara’s order, the 98 American civilians still on Wake were shot without trial in October 1943, one escaped briefly and was killed, and the garrison lied about it until confronted. Much of the detail is less certain. The killings left no American survivors, and the account rests on the confessions and testimony of the men who did it, on Japanese garrison records and on the diaries of contractors who had left the island a year earlier.

How many. The figure of 98 comes from the garrison’s own count and the trial, and it is carved on the rock and the memorial plaque. Other figures circulate: Hubbs notes one account of 97 chosen to stay; History.com’s summary gives 96 prisoners shot; Harwell reported “100-odd” civilians; and a document collected for the Tokyo war crimes trial speaks of the shooting of “approximately 100 American civilian workers.” The arithmetic of 1942 does not quite close either: 360 kept in January (Wilcox) or 346 (Spennemann), at least 45 deaths in 1942 by Wilcox’s count, and 265 shipped out in September should leave fewer than 98. The diaries and the Japanese count agree on 98, and that is the number used here.

When. The trial record, Hubbs, Gilbert, Spennemann and the NHHC put the killings on 7 October 1943. The U.S. Air Force’s captions for its photographs of the 98 Rock say 5 October, and so does the inscription itself, read as day and month. Sakaibara’s Wikipedia biography adds that a prisoner caught stealing was beheaded on 7 October, before the shooting; Hubbs and Gilbert place that beheading in July 1943. No source explains why the carver wrote 5 October. It may have been the day the raid began, or a simple error by a man who had little time.

Where. Accounts drawn from the trial place the shooting at an antitank ditch on the north shore, and the remains found in 2011 came from the north beach. The U.S. Air Force describes the inscribed rock as standing on Wilkes Island at the edge of the lagoon, near the mass grave; its photograph coordinates and the U.S. War Memorials survey put it near the junction of Wake and Wilkes. We have not been able to reconcile these descriptions from published sources, and readers should treat the exact killing ground as uncertain.

The garrison. Japanese losses on Wake are estimates. Spennemann gives about 600 killed by American attacks and about 1,300 dead of starvation and disease; Harwell, writing from what the Marines were told in 1945, reported roughly 1,000 killed by air attack and twice as many by malnutrition. The number who surrendered is given as 1,242 (Spennemann), about 1,250 (Harwell) and about 2,200 (History.com). Wikipedia’s summary, citing several sources, says about three-quarters of the garrison died.

Other variants. The escapee was recaptured about a week later (Gilbert, from the trial record) or about three weeks later (Hubbs). Ito died before the trial (Gilbert) or during it (Hubbs). Sakaibara was hanged on 19 June 1947 (Hubbs, Spennemann, his Wikipedia biography) or 18 June (other accounts). The surrender is dated 4 September (NHHC; the Navy and Marine photographs; most histories) or 7 September (Heinl’s appendix introduction, from the date of Sanderson’s report). The October 1943 raid is credited with 510 or 738 sorties and with destroying 22, about 31 or 65 Japanese aircraft, depending on the source.

Questions readers ask

What is the 98 Rock on Wake Island?

It is a large coral rock near the lagoon on which an American prisoner, who had escaped the Japanese firing squad on 7 October 1943, carved “98 US PW 5-10-43.” The 98 were the civilian contractors kept on Wake as forced labor; the carver was caught and beheaded, and his name is unknown. After the war a granite marker was set against the rock, and a bronze plaque nearby lists the names of the 98. It is the best-known memorial on the atoll.

Why did the Japanese execute the 98 civilians on Wake?

After the heavy American carrier raid of 5 and 6 October 1943, Capt. Shigematsu Sakaibara believed a landing was imminent. He feared the prisoners would aid the invaders, a “fifth column” in Cressman’s phrase, and ordered them shot on 7 October. There was no landing; the Americans never invaded Wake. The garrison later claimed the men had died in a bombing raid and a breakout, and Sakaibara admitted the truth only after his subordinates’ confessions.

Was Wake Island recaptured in World War II?

No. The United States raided Wake repeatedly from February 1942 to August 1945 but never landed. After the Marshalls were taken in early 1944, Wake was bypassed and blockaded. The garrison surrendered peacefully on 4 September 1945, two days after Japan’s formal surrender, aboard the destroyer escort USS Levy.

What happened to Admiral Sakaibara?

He was taken to Kwajalein in November 1945, tried by a U.S. Navy military commission from 21 to 24 December 1945 for the murder of the 98 and sentenced to death. He was hanged on Guam in June 1947. His executive officer, Lt. Cmdr. Soichi Tachibana, was also sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

Where are the 98 buried?

Most of their remains, reburied by the Japanese at Peacock Point in 1945, were moved to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu and interred together in Section G in 1953, under a stone listing 178 names. Remains found on Wake’s north beach in 2011 were recovered by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command for DNA analysis; we know of no published identifications.

How many Japanese died on Wake during the occupation?

Roughly 1,900 by Spennemann’s count: about 600 killed in American raids and about 1,300 dead of starvation and disease, out of a peak garrison of about 4,100. Other estimates run higher. About 1,240 men were left to surrender in 1945, many of them sick.

How it connects

The 98 were the last of the civilians whose work on Wake began in 1941, described in Chapter 1. Dr. Shank’s Navy Cross was earned in the bombing of 9 December described in Chapter 2 and Chapter 4, and the wrecked Wildcats the Japanese found on the airstrip were the planes that sank Kisaragi in Chapter 3. The Navy’s return to Wake in February 1942 came two months after it turned back the relief force told in Chapter 5, and the surrender that left the contractors in Japanese hands is in Chapter 6. The men who were shipped away, and who mostly survived, are the subject of Chapter 7. Memorials, the 1981 recognition of the contractors as veterans and Wake today follow in Chapter 9.

Wake’s capture was planned alongside the attack described in our Pearl Harbor collection; the carriers Hiryu and Soryu that came to Wake in December 1941 had sailed with the force described in Kido Butai and the Northern Route. The American decision to bypass Wake contrasts with the decision to take Iwo Jima by assault in 1945, told in the Battle of Iwo Jima collection. The war crimes questions raised here, and the Navy’s own investigations after Pearl Harbor, are part of a larger accounting described in Salvage, Investigations and Memory. For the whole Wake story, return to the Wake Island collection, its timeline and the Wake Island FAQ, or browse the World War II collections.

What happened afterward

The Japanese garrison went home in stages; Spennemann records a large contingent leaving aboard the Hikawa Maru on 1 November 1945. The Navy ran Wake as an air facility, and Pan American Airways resumed operations through the island on 24 September 1946, returning it to the role it had played before the war. Administrative control passed from the Navy to the Department of Commerce in 1948, the first of several transfers before the Air Force took charge (Spennemann).

The Americans who had been shipped away in 1942 came home from the camps in China and Japan in the autumn of 1945, as told in Chapter 7. Only then did the families of the 98 learn that their men had not been with them. For the civilians, recognition came slowly. In 1981 the Defense Department recognized the Wake contractors as eligible for military discharges, medals and veterans’ benefits (Idaho Legislature, House Concurrent Resolution 27, 2026). Idaho, which sent 225 men to the Wake project, counts ten of its citizens among the 98 (Idaho HCR 27). The story of how the nation remembered Wake, in medals, in the 1942 Paramount film and in the long argument between the island’s commanders, is the subject of Chapter 9.

Walking the ground today

Wake Atoll is an active U.S. Air Force installation with a runway used for military and emergency diversion flights. It is not open to the public; access is limited to authorized personnel and to occasional visits approved in advance, such as trips by veterans’ groups and families. There are no commercial flights and no visitor facilities. Anyone planning a visit should expect to need official sponsorship.

The wartime sites on the atoll were listed together as a National Historic Landmark in 1985 (National Register reference 85002726). Much of what remains from the occupation was built with prisoner labor: Japanese pillboxes and blockhouses, antitank ditches and revetments. Pacific Wrecks also lists the Marine command post and hospital bunkers of 1941 and the Japanese command post bunker. The 98 Rock stands at the edge of the lagoon, with a granite marker set against it and a bronze plaque nearby naming the 98 (U.S. War Memorials survey; U.S. Air Force photograph, 2008).

Most readers will never get to Wake, but anyone can visit the 98. The common grave of the Wake contractors is in Section G of the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Punchbowl Crater, Honolulu, open daily and a short drive from Pearl Harbor National Memorial (Hubbs). A visitor to the Pearl Harbor sites can stand at that stone the same day.

Sources and further reading

• Mark E. Hubbs, “Massacre on Wake Island,” Naval History 15, no. 1 (February 2001): the prisoners kept on Wake, Hoffmeister, the 7 October 1943 shooting, the cover story, the trial and the Punchbowl grave.
• Dirk H. R. Spennemann, “To Hell and Back: Wake During and After World War II” (Digital Micronesia, 2000): Japanese garrison, fortification, supply, starvation, raids and postwar chronology.
• Bonita Gilbert, articles drawn from the Kwajalein trial record and family sources: “War Crime”, “Victors’ Justice”, “Wake 98 Hero” (Dr. Lawton Shank), “JPAC Mission: Wake 98” and “Wake 98 Update”; see also her book Building for War: The Epic Saga of the Civilian Contractors and Marines of Wake Island in World War II.
• Lt. Col. R. D. Heinl Jr., The Defense of Wake (USMC Historical Section, 1947): HyperWar text, USMC University PDF, and the appendix reproducing Brig. Gen. Sanderson’s report on the surrender of Wake.
• Robert J. Cressman, “A Magnificent Fight”: Marines in the Battle for Wake Island (Marines in World War II Commemorative Series, 1992): NPS History edition, especially “A Difficult Thing To Do” on casualties, captivity and the 98.
• Naval History and Heritage Command: “The Forsaken Defenders of Wake Island”; H-Gram 002 (prisoner and civilian figures); ONI Combat Narrative, Early Raids in the Pacific Ocean, February 1 to March 10, 1942; and the NHHC overview of the early carrier raids.
• NHHC, Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships and ship histories: Yorktown IV (CV-10), Cowpens (CVL-25), Belleau Wood (CVL-24), Northampton II, McDermut II.
• NHHC photographs: 80-G-55238 and 80-G-55338 (the October 1943 bombardment), NH 50949 (patrol boat under attack, 24 February 1942), 80-G-179006 (wrecked VMF-211 Wildcats) and NH 96813 (flag raising, 4 September 1945).
• Paul T. Bonilla, “Wake Island Odyssey,” Naval History, April 2020 (the October 1943 raid and USS Skate’s rescues); “Ernie Harwell, Leatherneck Magazine and the Marines,” Naval History, August 1996 (the surrender and the starving garrison).
• Pacific Wrecks: Wake Island, “American Missions Against Wake Atoll”, 5 October 1943 and Maj. Gen. Clarence Tinker.
• U.S. Air Force: biography of Maj. Gen. Clarence L. Tinker; “Officials search for POW/MIAs on Wake Island”; 15th Wing photograph and caption of the 98 Rock memorial and “PACAF members conduct site survey at Wake Island.”
• Marine Corps University, biography of Lawson H. M. Sanderson; Home of Heroes, Navy Cross citation of Dr. Lawton E. Shank.
• International Military Tribunal for the Far East, Judgment, Annex A-6 (Japan’s 1942 undertakings on the Geneva Convention); National Diet Library, International Prosecution Section document No. 8439 (Sakaibara’s statement on the execution order), via Wikimedia Commons.
• U.S. War Memorials survey, Wake Island and “The 98 Rock”; Idaho Legislature, House Concurrent Resolution 27 (2026) on Idaho’s Wake contractors.
• For the full narrative, see Gregory J. W. Urwin, Facing Fearful Odds: The Siege of Wake Island (1997); Bill Sloan, Given Up for Dead: America’s Heroic Stand at Wake Island (2003); John Wukovits, Pacific Alamo (2003); Richard Fuller, Shokan: Hirohito’s Samurai (1992), for Sakaibara’s career; and Samuel Eliot Morison, Aleutians, Gilberts and Marshalls (vol. VII, 1951), for the 1943 carrier raid.

Photographs: official U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Air Force photographs, National Archives and Naval History and Heritage Command, public domain.