Captives: The Nitta Maru, the Camps in China and the Men Left Behind

For the 1,500-odd Americans taken on Wake Island, the battle ended on 23 December 1941 and the ordeal began. Five were beheaded at sea on the Nitta Maru, most of the rest spent three and a half years in camps near Shanghai and in Japan, and nearly a hundred civilians were kept on the atoll and never left it.

Why it mattered

The Battle of Wake Island in December 1941 lasted fifteen days. The captivity of its defenders lasted about 1,350. When Cmdr. Winfield S. Cunningham decided to surrender on the morning of 23 December 1941, as told in Chapter 6, he handed more than 1,500 Americans to an enemy that had not ratified the Geneva convention on prisoners of war and whose troops had just bound, and in some cases killed or wounded, the patients they found in the island’s hospital (Heinl, The Defense of Wake, chapter 4). Heinl’s official Marine Corps monograph counts the prisoners as 368 Marines, 60 sailors, 5 soldiers and 1,104 civilian contractors (Heinl, The Defense of Wake, Appendix III). The civilians outnumbered the servicemen by more than two to one, and that fact shaped everything that followed.

The Wake Island prisoners of World War II became a test of almost every question the law of war could raise. Could a captor execute prisoners in reprisal? Could it punish an escape with ten years in a cell? Could it put prisoners to work on its own military projects? Were construction workers who had picked up rifles to defend an American base prisoners of war, civilian internees or something else? The Japanese answered each question badly. Five servicemen were beheaded on the deck of a transport ship. Cunningham, the senior American officer, spent most of the war in prison cells for trying to escape. Contractors who had been building a naval air station found themselves quarrying stone for a Japanese naval dam, and nearly a hundred of their colleagues, held back on Wake to keep the bulldozers running, were shot on a beach in October 1943.

Yet the striking fact about the Wake captives is how many came home. The servicemen lost about 17 to 20 men in captivity out of 433, a death rate of a few percent, while prisoners from Bataan and Corregidor died in the thousands. The historian Gregory Urwin, who interviewed nearly a hundred survivors for Victory in Defeat (2010), credits discipline, mutual aid among small groups of “buddies,” and the restraining presence of neutral observers and the Red Cross in Shanghai (Felton, review of Urwin, Naval History, May 2011). The civilians fared far worse, and their story has taken longer to tell.

A note on dates: Wake lies west of the International Date Line, so the surrender on Wake’s 23 December happened on 22 December in Hawaii and Washington. (A 1943 State Department telegram gives the fall of Wake as 22 December for exactly that reason.) This chapter uses local dates: Wake dates on the atoll, and local dates in Japan and China, which share Wake’s calendar day.

Three weeks on the atoll: 23 December 1941 to 12 January 1942

Capture began with humiliation. The official Marine Corps history of the war’s final phase, Victory and Occupation by Benis Frank and Henry Shaw, describes the Japanese stripping the Americans regardless of rank, binding many of them, and herding them by sunset on 23 December toward the airfield. Before giving up, the Marines had destroyed their personal weapons and wrecked what they could of their crew-served guns. The wounded were sheltered in an underground magazine (Frank and Shaw, Victory and Occupation, pp. 737–738). Cressman’s commemorative history records that at Peacock Point, Barninger had the firing locks buried and the optics smashed, and that his men ate what they could, because nobody knew how much food the captors would allow (Cressman, A Magnificent Fight).

The prisoners were held in the open at the VMF-211 aircraft parking area until dusk on 25 December, Christmas Day. For about 54 hours, Frank and Shaw write, they had no medical care, no shelter from sun or rain, no food and almost no water. Then they were marched to vacant civilian barracks (Frank and Shaw, p. 738). The contractors’ camps had been built for more than a thousand men, and they now housed the whole captive population of the atoll under guard.

For a few weeks, life on Wake under the Japanese was strangely quiet. Urwin titles his chapter on the period with the words “The Japanese continue to treat us with respect” and calls it “a deceptively gentle transition to POW life” (Urwin, Victory in Defeat, chapter 4). The Japanese had their own reason for keeping the contractors healthy: the atoll was half built, and the men who knew how to run the dredges, cranes and graders were the men they had captured.

On 11 January 1942 the prisoners were assembled and read a list of rules. Frank and Shaw summarize them: violations, including such trivial acts as talking without permission, could bring death (Frank and Shaw, p. 738, citing Devereux, The Story of Wake Island). The next morning the transport Nitta Maru, which had arrived with supplies and fresh troops for the garrison, began taking on prisoners.

The Nitta Maru

Nitta Maru was no ordinary troop transport. She was the newest liner of Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK), built by Mitsubishi at Nagasaki and completed in March 1940, a ship of about 17,000 gross tons designed for the company’s European and transpacific passenger services, and she had been built with an Imperial Navy subsidy so that she could be converted to an aircraft carrier in war (Wikipedia, “Japanese aircraft carrier Chūyō,” citing Stille and Tully; Wikimedia Commons ship record). Before Japan stopped sailings to the United States in the summer of 1941, she had carried passengers to San Francisco. By January 1942 she had been requisitioned as a military transport.

How many prisoners boarded her is given differently in almost every account. Cunningham’s postwar narrative says “about one thousand two hundred of the military and civilian personnel were taken to Shanghai” (Cunningham, Narrative, NHHC). Bonita Gilbert, the daughter of a Wake contractor and the author of Building for War, gives 1,235 (Gilbert, “Wake Island POWs”). Pacific Wrecks gives about 1,200. The difference matters less than the arrangement: virtually every serviceman left Wake on Nitta Maru, along with most of the civilians. Left behind were about 360 contractors, “chosen because of their skills in operating heavy equipment,” and a group of sick and wounded men in the hospital (Hubbs, “Massacre on Wake Island,” Naval History, February 2001; Frank and Shaw, p. 738).

The enlisted men and civilians were packed into the holds. The officers were locked into the ship’s mail room (Frank and Shaw, p. 738; Greey, Princeton Alumni Weekly, 19 October 1945). The prisoners had been captured in tropical clothing, and many had been stripped of most of it. For twelve days, Frank and Shaw write, they were stripped of their valuables, fed irregularly, forbidden to talk and denied exercise. The holds were unheated, and as the ship worked north through January toward Japan the temperature fell steadily. Urwin’s chapter on the voyage is titled “A real hell ship” (Urwin, chapter 5).

The rules read on Wake were repeated aboard. The Japanese Navy’s printed “Regulations for Prisoners,” issued over the title of the commander of the prisoner escort, listed the acts that would bring death: disobeying orders, talking without permission, walking about without orders, touching the ship’s equipment, using more than the allotted blankets. Others promised heavy punishment for reaching for food out of turn and for carelessness with the latrine buckets set in the corners of each hold (COFEPOW facsimile of the regulations; Frank and Shaw, p. 738). The document ended with a promise that obedient prisoners would be well treated.

In their words

The prisoners disobeying the following orders will be punished with immediate death.

Nitta Maru reached Yokohama on 18 January 1942 (Frank and Shaw, p. 738; Pacific Wrecks). Elmer B. Greey, a Navy civil engineer reservist who had supervised the base construction contract on Wake, remembered the date as 19 January (Greey, 1945). At Yokohama, some prisoners were brought on deck and photographed for the Japanese press. Cressman reproduces one such picture of Cunningham, taken aboard Nitta Maru at Yokohama about 18 January 1942 (Cressman, A Magnificent Fight). About twenty prisoners were taken off for camps in Japan, a story picked up below. The rest stayed in the holds, and the ship sailed for China.

Murder at sea: five men on the deck

On the run from Yokohama to Shanghai, the guards came down into the hold and called out five men. Heinl’s monograph, written in 1947 from the evidence then available, counts among the deaths in captivity “2 Marines and 3 sailors whose heads were chopped off,” their “bodies mutilated and thrown overboard from the Nitta Maru” on the voyage from Yokohama to the prison camp near Shanghai (Heinl, Appendix III). Urwin dates the killings to 21 or 22 January 1942 (Urwin, letter reproduced by the Center for Research, Allied POWs under the Japanese). The Marine Corps casualty records used by the Missing Marines project give 22 January.

The five, as listed by Roger Mansell’s Center for Research, Allied POWs under the Japanese, were Master Technical Sergeant Earl R. Hannum and Technical Sergeant Vincent W. Bailey of the Marine Corps, and Seaman Second Class Theodore Franklin, Seaman Second Class John W. Lambert and Seaman Second Class Roy H. Gonzales of the Navy (Mansell, “Wake Island Men”). Hannum and Bailey were radiomen of Marine Aircraft Group 21 attached to VMF-211; Hannum, born in 1908 at Lostant, Illinois, had been a Marine since 1927, and Bailey, born in Spokane in 1917, had a wife in Seattle (Missing Marines, “Earl R. Hannum” and “Vincent W. Bailey”). The three sailors belonged to the small Navy detachment at the naval air station. None of them had done anything aboard ship to single them out.

Why these men? Urwin’s account, in a letter to Bailey’s family later reproduced by Mansell, is that a Japanese aviation officer wanted “ritual revenge” on the American air unit that had fought so hard at Wake, and that enlisted men of the aviation ground crew and the seaplane detachment were chosen because killing the American pilots, all officers, would have been too conspicuous (Urwin letter, via Mansell). The commander of the guard detail is named in American sources as Lt. Toshio Saito; some secondary accounts spell the name Sato (Missing Marines; Pacific Wrecks, “Chuyo”). A widely repeated account, traced by Wikipedia to James Wensyel’s article in World War II magazine, has him telling the five, “You have killed many Japanese soldiers in battle,” before they were blindfolded and made to kneel. The men were beheaded with swords on the deck. The guards then used the bodies for bayonet practice and threw them into the sea (Heinl, Appendix III; Missing Marines).

The killings were hidden for years. Bailey’s family received what the Missing Marines project calls a “cruelly misleading message” as late as September 1945; the truth reached American newspapers only in December 1947, when the war-crimes investigation was public (Missing Marines, citing the Klamath Falls Herald and News of 25 September 1945 and the Minneapolis Star of 23 December 1947). Urwin writes that the five Japanese petty officers who carried out the executions were tried after the war and sentenced to prison terms, and that Saito, the officer who ordered them, was never brought to justice. The trial record is held by the National Archives in Record Group 153, the files of the Army Judge Advocate General (Urwin letter, via Mansell).

Yokohama: the men taken off in Japan

The group put ashore at Yokohama was small but carefully chosen. It included Maj. Paul A. Putnam, the commander of VMF-211, whose papers at East Carolina University record his arrival at the Zentsuji prison camp on the island of Shikoku on 29 January 1942 (ECU, Paul A. Putnam Papers; Frank and Shaw, p. 738). Mansell’s camp records, drawing on the diary of a New Zealand coastwatcher held there, list thirteen men from Wake arriving at Zentsuji in late January 1942, with more following through the spring (Mansell, “Wake Island Men”; “Zentsuji POW Camp”).

Zentsuji was a showplace. It was opened in January 1942 under the Osaka prisoner-of-war command, held mostly officers, and was used for propaganda; Mansell calls it a “show camp” (Mansell, “Zentsuji POW Camp”). Putnam’s diaries, kept from 1942 to 1945 and partly written in shorthand, describe food shortages, poor sanitation, the differences in treatment between officers and enlisted men, rabbit raising and farm work. In June 1945 the American officers were moved to Rokuroshi, in the mountains of Honshu, where Putnam was when the war ended (ECU, Putnam Papers; Mansell).

A second small group vanished into the Japanese Navy’s own system. Four radiomen of the Wake naval air station, Marvin W. Ballhorn, Victor C. Besancon, Charles A. Sargent and Franklin B. Kidd, were held by the Navy and on 17 April 1942 were sent from Ofuna to the Navy’s shortwave station at Kanigaya, near Kawasaki, where prisoners with radio skills were made to monitor Allied broadcasts and naval traffic (Mansell, “Tokyo Kanigaya”). Ofuna, outside Yokohama, was the Imperial Navy’s secret interrogation center for aviators and submariners. It was never reported as a prisoner-of-war camp, and the Red Cross was never admitted (Wikipedia, “Ofuna prisoner-of-war camp,” citing Tuohy). An American naval officer’s memo to the postwar investigators called Ofuna and the similar camp at Bunka “entirely unlawful” (Blinn memo, quoted by Mansell). Kidd died at Kanigaya on 22 October 1944 of a stomach illness, variously described in Mansell’s sources. It is the only death recorded on Mansell’s roster of Wake servicemen sent to Japan, apart from the five killed at sea (Mansell, “Wake Island Men” and “Tokyo Kanigaya”).

Woosung: the first winter

Nitta Maru reached Shanghai about 24 January 1942, six days after leaving Yokohama. The Japanese had promised the prisoners a parade through the city; it did not happen (Frank and Shaw, p. 738). Devereux’s official biography gives 24 January as his arrival at Woosung (USMC History Division, “Brigadier General James P. S. Devereux”); Greey remembered disembarking on 23 January. The prisoners, many barefoot or in rags, were marched to the Shanghai War Prisoners Camp at Woosung, near the mouth of the Whangpoo River downstream from the city. At the camp the Japanese Navy handed custody of the Wake prisoners to the Japanese Army (Frank and Shaw, p. 738).

Woosung was a former Japanese Army barracks of seven long wooden huts and a few smaller buildings, surrounded by an electrified fence (Mansell, “Woosung POW Camp”; Frank and Shaw, p. 734). The huts had double-deck wooden bunks, thin blankets and no heat. Eric Niderost, writing in World War II magazine, gives winter temperatures as low as 15°F, a staple diet of thin rice soup, polluted well water and open latrine pits (Niderost, “Escaped POWs’ Chinese Odyssey”). Men who had arrived in tropical khaki now faced a Shanghai winter; Frank and Shaw describe the cold as a serious problem for men who were already underfed. Urwin’s chapter title calls the first months “the most painful days we spent in prison camp” and describes the period as “hitting bottom at Woosung” (Urwin, chapter 7).

The Wake men were not alone for long. On 1 or 2 February 1942 about 200 “North China Marines” arrived, the embassy guard from Peking and the detachments from Tientsin and Chinwangtao, captured when the war began (Frank and Shaw, pp. 733–734; Mansell, “Woosung POW Camp”). British naval prisoners from the gunboat HMS Peterel, sunk at Shanghai at the outbreak of war, and a hundred British survivors of a sunken prison ship followed, bringing the camp to about 1,500 (Mansell; Niderost).

The camp commandant was Col. Yuse. The figure the prisoners remembered best, though, was a civilian interpreter named Isamu Ishihara, educated in Honolulu, who carried a sword and used it and his fists on prisoners. They called him “The Beast of the East.” Frank and Shaw record that Ishihara once attacked Sir Mark Young, the captured British governor of Hong Kong, and that the Japanese camp executive officer, Capt. Endo, beat Ishihara for it; after that Ishihara was forbidden to wear a sword (Frank and Shaw, pp. 752–753). Col. Ashurst, the senior American officer among the China Marines, protested conditions again and again, to little effect.

Things improved slowly. Prisoners were first allowed to write letters home in June 1942 (Gilbert, “Wake Island POWs”). After eight or nine months, a representative of the International Red Cross visited Woosung and arranged shipments of food, medicine and clothing, which the prisoners believed kept many of them alive (Frank and Shaw, p. 753). A Red Cross report published in August 1943 called conditions “tolerable” as far as known, while noting the suffering of the previous winter; Mansell warns that the Red Cross delegates in Shanghai were not neutral observers and that their reports concealed a good deal (Mansell, “Woosung POW Camp”). Urwin’s chapter on outside aid is titled with a survivor’s words: “Without Red Cross help … we would never have pulled through” (Urwin, chapter 9). Shanghai, with its neutral consulates and international community, was a different place to be a prisoner from a jungle camp in the Philippines, and Urwin argues that the captors knew they were being watched (Felton, review of Urwin).

Deaths at Woosung were few by the standards of Japanese camps, but the Wake prisoners as a whole lost men steadily to disease, injury and the effects of malnutrition. The NHHC’s count is that 20 of the 433 service members captured at Wake died in captivity (NHHC, H-Gram 002). Heinl, writing in 1947, put the figure at about 17, or 3 to 4 percent, including the five killed on Nitta Maru (Heinl, Appendix III).

Cunningham’s escapes

The senior American officer from Wake did not intend to sit out the war. On the night of 10–11 March 1942, about seven weeks after arriving at Woosung, Cunningham and four companions dug under the electrified fence and slipped away into the Yangtze delta. With him were N. Dan Teters, the contractors’ general superintendent; Lt. Cmdr. Columbus Darwin Smith, who had commanded the river gunboat USS Wake when the Japanese captured her near Shanghai at the outbreak of war (FRUS 1943, vol. III, doc. 812, n.); John Woolley, a British naval officer; and a Chinese interpreter named Liu (Niderost; Gilbert, “Escape”). Cunningham’s own postwar narrative, written in the third person, is brief: “On march 11, 1942, Commander Cunningham and four other[s] escaped from this camp. They were recaptured the next day” (Cunningham, Narrative, NHHC).

They were taken by Chinese troops serving the Japanese-sponsored puppet government and handed to the Kempeitai, the Japanese military police, who held them in solitary cells at Kiangwan; Cunningham’s later affidavit for the Tokyo tribunal names the Kempeitai‘s Bridge House among the places he was held (Niderost; IMTFE Prosecution Document 8209). They were then court-martialed. Niderost gives the sentences as ten years for Cunningham, Smith and Woolley, two years for Teters and one year for Liu; Frank and Shaw confirm Cunningham’s ten years of close confinement (Niderost; Frank and Shaw, pp. 751, 754–755). Cunningham was then confined in the Shanghai Municipal Jail, the big modern prison on Ward Road completed in 1934 and known to its inmates as Ward Road Gaol (Cunningham, Narrative; Niderost).

Washington fought the sentences through the protecting power. A telegram from the American minister in Switzerland on 9 January 1943 reported that the Swiss minister in Tokyo had been pressing the Japanese since December to revoke the sentences of “Teeters, Cunningham and Smith,” but with “small hope” of success given “the severity Japanese legislation regarding attempts escaped prisoners war” (FRUS 1943, vol. III, doc. 812). In July 1943 Secretary of State Cordell Hull instructed that Teters, as a civilian engineer, should have first priority in the exchange of nationals then being negotiated. A footnote to the published telegram records that in August 1943 the Japanese Foreign Office refused, on the ground that Teters was a prisoner of war (FRUS 1943, vol. III, doc. 735). The State Department papers spell his name Teeters.

Navy Cross · Announced while a prisoner

Cmdr. Winfield Scott Cunningham, USN, Commanding Officer, Naval Air Station Wake

Cunningham learned of his own award only after the war. The citation, published in the Bureau of Naval Personnel Information Bulletin No. 317 of August 1943 while he was in Ward Road Gaol, honors him “for extraordinary heroism and distinguished service in the line of his profession” in directing the defense of Wake “against impossible odds.” His postwar narrative quotes a shorter version, for “distinguished and heroic conduct in the line of his profession in the defense of Wake Island, 7-22 December, 1941” (the Hawaii dates).

Citation →

Cunningham tried again. On the night of 6 October 1944, he and seven other prisoners broke out of Ward Road Gaol. Niderost’s account, built on Smith’s memoir, describes bars sawed through in Smith’s cell window, a descent on knotted sheets and a climb over a wall of about 25 feet by human pyramid and blanket rope. The escapers split up. Smith, Woolley and Cpl. Jerold B. Storey, a Marine of the embassy guard who had made an earlier escape from Woosung, crossed the city on foot through the French Concession and, with help from Chinese villagers, soldiers and a Chinese general, reached an American outpost on 3 November 1944 (Niderost). Cunningham’s group was caught trying to cross Soochow Creek. In his own words, “Cunningham and four others were recaptured the same night, investigated and court martialed again, and for the remaining ten months of the war were confined under rigorous conditions in military prisons at Shanghai, Nanking and Peiping” (Cunningham, Narrative).

Kiangwan and “Mount Fuji”

In December 1942 the Japanese closed Woosung and moved its prisoners about five miles to a new camp at Kiangwan, another suburb of Shanghai (Frank and Shaw, p. 738). Devereux’s official biography dates his move to 9 December 1942; Greey remembered leaving Woosung on 7 December (USMC History Division; Greey, 1945). Mansell’s records put the population at about 400 Wake Marines, 203 China Marines and some 800 Wake civilians (Mansell, “Kiangwan POW Camp”). Greey described an eight-foot brick wall topped with electrified wire and a peak population of about 1,600, mostly American and British. The commandant was Col. Otera, who once threatened an American officer with his sword over farm produce stolen from the camp garden (Frank and Shaw, pp. 752–753).

Kiangwan brought hard labor. Officers worked a prison farm. From about January 1943 to September 1944, the enlisted men and civilians were marched out to build a rifle range north of the military airport, moving earth by hand to raise a huge mound. The work, on the camp’s diet, produced malnutrition and tuberculosis (Frank and Shaw, p. 754). Urwin calls the project “Mount Fuji” and titles his chapter on it with a prisoner’s phrase: “A hellacious damn deal till we finished” (Urwin, chapter 13). From September 1944 the work details dug ditches and built gasoline storage dumps. Among the prosecution documents later gathered for the Tokyo tribunal is an affidavit by an American prisoner, Richard Oliver Bone, on “use of POWs on enemy military works, Kiangwan, China” (IMTFE Prosecution Document 8141, National Diet Library).

Kiangwan was also a place of departures. The first group of prisoners left for Japan in September 1942, while the camp was still at Woosung; Gilbert’s father, a contractor named Ted Olson, was among them and spent the rest of the war at Fukuoka No. 3, laboring at the Yawata steel works (Gilbert, “Wake Island POWs”). On 20 August 1943, 525 more were shipped from Kiangwan to Japan, 400 to the Kobe area and 125 to the Kawasaki camp on Tokyo Bay (Mansell, “Woosung POW Camp” and “Kiangwan POW Camp”). Frank and Shaw note that some Wake men worked as stevedores at Osaka from August 1943 until the spring of 1945 (Frank and Shaw, p. 738, n.). Each transfer scattered the Wake men further. Urwin’s chapter on the “Wake Island diaspora” takes its title from the words on the coral rock at Wake: “98 US PW, 5-10-43.”

By late 1944 the prisoners at Kiangwan could sense the war turning; Urwin’s chapter for the period is titled “Optimism … is running high” (Urwin, chapter 14). Recently captured American pilots, held at Kiangwan, brought news into the camp (Gilbert, “Escape”). The Japanese, for their part, began planning to move the prisoners out of reach.

The men left behind on Wake

When Nitta Maru sailed, a Wake contractor named Wilcox wrote in his diary: “All but 360 of the contractors have been sent to Japan today.” Another, Russell, wrote that “about 350 including the key men were selected and were supposed to stay.” The Japanese had kept them, Maj. Mark E. Hubbs writes in his study of their fate, for their skill with heavy equipment, and set them to finishing the airfield and building the defenses of what was now a Japanese naval base (Hubbs, “Massacre on Wake Island”). Frank and Shaw give about 300 civilians and about 100 sick, most of whom were later moved to China or Japan (Frank and Shaw, p. 738). Those who stayed included the civilian physician, Dr. Lawton Shank, who volunteered to remain with them along with a dentist and a surgical nurse (Gilbert, “The Wake 98”).

The prisoners on Wake had no neutral observers and no Red Cross relief. Wilcox’s diary records 45 deaths among them between January and November 1942 (Hubbs). On 10 May 1942 a contractor named Julius “Babe” Hoffmeister, caught drunk in the Japanese canteen, was beheaded by Ensign Kiroku Horie (Hubbs). The next morning about twenty wounded Marines and sailors, the last servicemen on the atoll, were shipped out on the transport Asama Maru (Hubbs). Mansell’s roster suggests that most of them reached Zentsuji in Japan in late May (Mansell, “Wake Island Men”).

On 30 September 1942, 265 more contractors were put aboard the freighter Tachibana Maru and shipped to Japan (Hubbs; U.S. Navy, CFAS 2016). Mansell’s records give a slightly different chronology, with the ship leaving Wake on 20 September and reaching Moji on 30 September (Mansell, “Fukuoka POW Camp #18”). That left 98 Americans on Wake, or 97 by some counts (Hubbs). Their fate, the summary execution of the 98 on the north beach on 7 October 1943 on the order of RAdm. Shigematsu Sakaibara, after American carrier raids, is the subject of Chapter 8.

Soto Dam: the contractors at Sasebo

The 265 contractors who left Wake on Tachibana Maru went straight into one of the deadliest work sites in the Japanese prison system. The Imperial Navy wanted a reservoir to supply its base at Sasebo, on Kyushu, and assigned the American prisoners to build the Soto Dam at Yunoki, outside the city (U.S. Navy, CFAS 2016). A Japanese guard, Navy Cpl. Sachio Egawa, later told investigators the prisoners arrived on 14 October 1942 and stayed eighteen months (Mansell, “Fukuoka POW Camp #18,” citing Egawa’s statement in the Rogge report). The camp, first run by the Navy, became Fukuoka No. 18 Branch Camp under the Army in October 1943 (Mansell, citing Toru Fukubayashi).

The prisoners worked in squads of 20 to 22, quarrying rock and mixing cement for the dam, at bayonet point (U.S. Navy, CFAS 2016). Egawa recalled one stretch of 36 hours without sleep and a single month, March 1943, in which the camp lost 35 men, six of them from his own group of twenty (Mansell, citing Egawa). The U.S. Navy at Sasebo, drawing on local historians, counts 53 American deaths at the dam; Fukubayashi, the Japanese researcher of the camp, gives the same figure for deaths in the camp and adds that many more died soon after it closed as a result of what they had endured there (U.S. Navy, CFAS 2016; Mansell). The first prisoner died within a month of arrival. The dead were buried on a hillside near the dam, and their remains were returned to the United States around 1949.

The dam was finished and the camp closed on 17 April 1944. About 100 survivors were moved to Fukuoka No. 1 to build the Mushiroda airfield, later Itazuke Air Base (Mansell, “Fukuoka POW Camp #18”). The dam still supplies Sasebo’s water. In about 1956 the city built a memorial tower at the site, and American sailors and Japanese residents have gathered there each spring for decades to read the names of the dead (U.S. Navy, CFAS 2016).

North by rail: Fengtai, the boxcar escape and Hokkaido

In May 1945 the Japanese emptied Kiangwan. The prisoners were loaded into freight cars for a journey that, for most of them, ended in Japan (Frank and Shaw, p. 738). Washington knew it was coming. On 22 May 1945 the Acting Secretary of State, Joseph Grew, sent a protest through the Swiss: the United States had learned that prisoners were being moved from the “Kiangwan camp in Shanghai,” with departure set for 7 May, to Fengtai, a railway junction about 15 kilometers from Peking, and it demanded assurance under Article 9 of the Geneva Convention that they would not be held near “the railroad junction and military installations at Fengtai” (FRUS 1945, vol. VI, doc. 217). A handful of sick men stayed behind; Mansell’s records list five Wake Marines transferred to a Shanghai hospital on 8 May (Mansell, “Photo of rescued POWs”).

The train gave a few men the chance they had waited three years for. On the night of 10 May 1945, near Nanking, a group of Marine officers worked loose the bars and barbed wire over the window of their boxcar and dropped out into the dark (McBrayer, Escape!, publisher’s description). They were Lt. John F. Kinney, a VMF-211 pilot from the defense of Wake; Lt. John A. McAlister, who had fought on Wilkes Island; and two China Marines, Lts. Richard Huizenga and James D. McBrayer. Louis Bishop, whom Gilbert lists as an ensign, joined at the last minute (Gilbert, “Escape”). Kinney lost his partner in the jump and left his kit behind, but the group came together again in the countryside and linked up with Chinese Communist guerrillas, who helped them reach American forces (Gilbert; McBrayer). They were home on 9 July 1945 (Gilbert, “Escape”; Kinney, Wake Island Pilot). The next night two young civilians from Wake, William Taylor and Jack Hernandez, jumped from another car. Hernandez broke his leg and was recaptured, but survived. Taylor went on alone, made contact with the Communist forces and reached home on 27 July (Gilbert, citing Taylor, Rescued by Mao).

For the rest, the journey was long and slow. Greey described five weeks at Fengtai, near Peking, then boxcars through Manchuria and Korea, a sea crossing, and rail travel through Tokyo to Hokkaido, the northernmost of the home islands (Greey, 1945). Devereux’s official biography gives the same stages: five weeks at “Fungtai,” then camps in central Hokkaido (USMC History Division). Greey’s group ended at Nishiashibetsu, a mining camp in the Hakodate group, after a stop at Takikawa. Mansell’s records say most of the Kiangwan prisoners ended up in the coal mines of northern Hokkaido (Mansell, “Kiangwan POW Camp”).

Liberation

News of the end came to the prisoners in pieces. At Nishiashibetsu, Greey wrote, the men learned on 14 August 1945 that the Soviet Union had entered the war, from a British prisoner’s remark about caviar. On 18 August the camp commander announced that the war was over. Navy planes dropped supplies on 26 August and Army planes on 28 August. Relief parties arrived on 11 September, and the prisoners were flown from Chitose to Yokohama and sent home by way of Iwo Jima, Guam, Kwajalein and Pearl Harbor to Oakland. Greey was at his home near Princeton on 24 September (Greey, 1945). Devereux was released from his Hokkaido camp in September 1945 (USMC History Division).

Elsewhere the timing varied. On 29 August a landing party from the light cruiser USS San Juan, carrying the unit commander charged with freeing Allied prisoners in Japan, Commodore Rodger W. Simpson, went ashore in Tokyo Bay and liberated the camps at Omori and Ofuna and the Shinagawa hospital (Commons, U.S. Navy photograph from the San Juan cruise book). Mansell’s records show the Kanigaya radiomen evacuated to Ofuna in August 1945 (Mansell, “Tokyo Kanigaya”). The Zentsuji prisoners were rescued on 5 September and left for Wakayama (Mansell, “Zentsuji POW Camp”). Cunningham, in a military prison at Peiping, returned to the United States on 7 September 1945 (Cunningham, Narrative).

On Wake itself, the Japanese garrison surrendered on 4 September 1945. No Americans were found alive there. How the surrender was taken, how the Japanese tried to explain away the missing 98, and how the truth came out at Kwajalein are told in Chapter 8.

Timeline

The Wake Island prisoners, 1941–1945

1. 23–25 Dec 1941Surrender on Wake; prisoners held in the open at the airfield for about 54 hours, then moved to civilian barracks.
2. 11 Jan 1942Rules read to the prisoners; violations, including talking without permission, punishable by death.
3. 12 Jan 1942Nitta Maru sails from Wake with about 1,200 prisoners; some 360 contractors and the hospital patients stay behind.
4. 18 Jan 1942Arrival at Yokohama; prisoners photographed for the press; about twenty, including Maj. Putnam, taken off for camps in Japan.
5. About 22 Jan 1942Five servicemen beheaded aboard Nitta Maru between Yokohama and Shanghai.
6. 24 Jan 1942Prisoners reach Shanghai and are marched to Woosung; the Navy hands custody to the Army.
7. 29 Jan 1942Japan tells the Swiss it will apply the Geneva convention “mutatis mutandis” to American prisoners.
8. 10–11 Mar 1942Cunningham, Teters, Smith, Woolley and Liu escape from Woosung; recaptured the next day.
9. 10–11 May 1942Contractor Julius Hoffmeister beheaded on Wake; the last wounded servicemen leave the atoll on Asama Maru.
10. Sept 1942First group from Woosung shipped to Japan; 265 contractors leave Wake on Tachibana Maru for Sasebo, leaving 98.
11. Dec 1942Woosung prisoners moved to Kiangwan.
12. Jan 1943–Sept 1944Kiangwan prisoners build a rifle range (“Mount Fuji”) north of the airport.
13. 20 Aug 1943525 prisoners shipped from Kiangwan to Kobe and Kawasaki.
14. 7 Oct 1943The 98 civilians on Wake executed on Sakaibara’s order (Chapter 8).
15. 4 Dec 1943The former Nitta Maru, now the escort carrier Chūyō, sunk by USS Sailfish.
16. 17 Apr 1944Soto Dam completed; Sasebo camp closed after 53 American deaths.
17. 6 Oct 1944Eight prisoners break out of Ward Road Gaol; Cunningham recaptured that night; Smith, Woolley and Storey reach American lines on 3 Nov.
18. May 1945Kiangwan emptied; prisoners moved by rail to Fengtai. Kinney, McAlister, Huizenga, McBrayer and Bishop escape from the train on 10 May.
19. June–Aug 1945Prisoners moved through Korea to Japan and on to camps in Hokkaido.
20. 18 Aug–Sept 1945End of the war announced in the camps; Ofuna liberated 29 Aug; Zentsuji 5 Sept; Hokkaido relief 11 Sept.

People

Cmdr. Winfield Scott Cunningham (died 1986), Naval Academy class of 1921 and a naval aviator, commanded all forces on Wake and made the decision to surrender. He escaped twice, in March 1942 and October 1944, was recaptured both times and spent most of the war in prison cells. He retired as a rear admiral in 1950 and published Wake Island Command in 1961. He died in Memphis.

Maj. James P. S. Devereux (1903–1988), born in Cuba, commanded the Wake Detachment of the 1st Defense Battalion. He was held at Woosung and Kiangwan, moved to Fengtai and then Hokkaido, and released in September 1945. He received the Navy Cross, retired as a brigadier general in 1948 and later served in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Navy Cross

Maj. James P. S. Devereux, USMC, Wake Detachment, 1st Defense Battalion

Awarded “for distinguished and heroic conduct in the line of his profession in the defense of Wake Island.” Selected for lieutenant colonel while a prisoner, he could not be promoted until he was repatriated; in January 1946 he was made a colonel with rank dated from 10 November 1942.

Biography →

Maj. Paul A. Putnam (1903–1982) commanded VMF-211 on Wake and received the Navy Cross. Taken off Nitta Maru at Yokohama, he spent the war at Zentsuji and Rokuroshi in Japan. His diaries, letters and squadron rosters are at East Carolina University.

N. Dan Teters, general superintendent of the contractors on Wake, escaped with Cunningham in March 1942 and was sentenced to two years. The State Department tried to have him exchanged as a civilian; Japan refused in August 1943, calling him a prisoner of war.

Lt. Cmdr. Columbus Darwin Smith, USN, commanded the river gunboat USS Wake, captured near Shanghai at the start of the war. He shared Cunningham’s two escapes and succeeded in the second, reaching American lines in November 1944.

Lt. John F. Kinney, a VMF-211 pilot at Wake, escaped from the prison train in May 1945, retired as a brigadier general after commanding a fighter squadron in Korea, and told his story in Wake Island Pilot (1995).

T. Sgt. Vincent W. Bailey (1917–1942) and M. T. Sgt. Earl R. Hannum (1908–1942), Marine radiomen with VMF-211, were two of the five men beheaded aboard Nitta Maru. Like Seamen Second Class Theodore Franklin, John W. Lambert and Roy H. Gonzales, they have no graves; Bailey and Hannum are listed on the Honolulu Memorial (Missing Marines).

Lt. Cmdr. Elmer B. Greey, CEC, USNR, a Princeton engineer in charge of the Navy’s construction contract on Wake, went through Woosung, Kiangwan, Fengtai and Hokkaido. His account in the Princeton Alumni Weekly, published within a month of his return, is one of the earliest first-hand records of the journey.

Isamu Ishihara, a Honolulu-educated civilian interpreter at Woosung, was the guard the prisoners feared most. They called him “The Beast of the East.”

Losses and uncertainty

No two sources count the Wake prisoners the same way. The core problem is the civilians. Contractors died on Wake, at sea, in China and in a dozen camps in Japan, and some died after liberation of what captivity had done to them. They were counted by their employer, by the Navy and by their families’ associations, not by a single military record office. Even the number captured varies: Heinl’s 1,537 (368 Marines, 60 Navy, 5 Army, 1,104 civilians) is the official Marine Corps figure; the NHHC uses 433 service members and 1,104 civilians; Gilbert gives 1,716 military and civilian prisoners, counting Pan American Airways’ Guamanian employees among the civilians (Heinl, Appendix III; NHHC, H-Gram 002; Gilbert, “Wake Island POWs”).

By the numbers

Taken prisoner at Wake, by group

Americans captured at the surrender, 23 December 1941

Civilian contractors1,104

Marines368

Navy60

Army5

Deaths in captivity are less certain still. For the servicemen, the figures are close: about 17 in Heinl’s 1947 monograph, 20 in the NHHC’s. For the civilians the range is wide. Heinl gives about 180, or 16 percent, including the 98 killed on Wake; the NHHC gives 108 deaths among 1,104 civilian prisoners; Gilbert writes that of about 1,145 contractors, some 250 died before the war ended, a figure that appears to include those killed in the battle (Heinl; NHHC; Gilbert). The table sets out the main figures and where they come from.

Dates disagree too, usually by a day. Nitta Maru‘s arrival at Yokohama is given as 17, 18 or 19 January and at Shanghai as 23 or 24 January. The executions are dated 21 or 22 January. The move to Kiangwan is 7 or 9 December 1942. Tachibana Maru sailed from Wake on 20 or 30 September 1942. Some of these differences come from men writing from memory years later; some come from the date line, since a ship moving west from Wake to Japan stayed on the same calendar but a report filed in Washington did not. Where the record conflicts, this chapter gives both.

Questions readers ask

What happened to the Wake Island prisoners after the surrender?

Almost all the servicemen and most of the civilians were shipped on 12 January 1942 aboard the liner Nitta Maru to Yokohama and then to Shanghai, where they were held at Woosung and, from December 1942, Kiangwan. About twenty were taken off in Japan. Many were later sent to labor camps in Japan, and the rest were moved north in May 1945 to Fengtai and then to Hokkaido. About 360 contractors were kept on Wake; most were later shipped to Japan, and the last 98 were executed on the atoll in October 1943 (Frank and Shaw; Hubbs).

Who was executed on the Nitta Maru?

Five enlisted men: Marine Master Technical Sergeant Earl R. Hannum and Technical Sergeant Vincent W. Bailey, radiomen with VMF-211, and three Navy seamen second class, Theodore Franklin, John W. Lambert and Roy H. Gonzales (Mansell). They were beheaded on deck on about 22 January 1942, between Yokohama and Shanghai, on the order of the guard commander, Lt. Toshio Saito, apparently as revenge for Japanese losses at Wake. Their bodies were mutilated and thrown into the sea (Heinl; Urwin).

How many Wake Island prisoners died in captivity?

About 17 to 20 of the 433 servicemen, according to Heinl and the NHHC, including the five killed at sea. Civilian deaths were much higher: the NHHC gives 108, Heinl about 180 including the 98 executed on Wake, and at least 53 contractors died building the Soto Dam at Sasebo alone. The table above sets out the figures.

Did Cunningham try to escape?

Twice. On 11 March 1942 he and four others got out of Woosung and were caught the next day; he was sentenced to ten years and held in Ward Road Gaol. On 6 October 1944 he and seven others broke out of Ward Road; Cunningham was recaptured that night, while three of his companions reached American lines. He spent the last ten months of the war in military prisons at Shanghai, Nanking and Peiping (Cunningham, Narrative, NHHC).

Were the Wake civilian contractors treated as prisoners of war?

Yes, in practice, and often worse. The Japanese refused them civilian-internee status, which might have made them eligible for exchange, and held them with the military prisoners or in separate labor camps (Gilbert). In 1943 Japan refused to release the contractors’ superintendent, Dan Teters, in a civilian exchange, calling him a prisoner of war (FRUS). In 1981 the Department of Defense recognized the civilians who helped defend Wake as eligible for veterans’ status, discharges and medals, a story told in Chapter 9.

How it connects

The prisoners in this chapter were the men who built Wake in Chapter 1, lost their Wildcats on the ground in Chapter 2, turned back the first landing in Chapter 3 and held out under the bombs through the siege in Chapter 4. The air unit whose fight the Japanese avenged on Nitta Maru was VMF-211, and the Navy men killed with the two Marines had served the seaplanes. The relief force that might have brought out the civilians before the end, and its recall, are in Chapter 5; the surrender that began their captivity is in Chapter 6. The 98 men left on the atoll, and the trial of the admiral who ordered them killed, are in Chapter 8. The medals, memoirs and long fight for the contractors’ recognition are in Chapter 9, and quick answers are on the Wake Island FAQ.

Wake fell two weeks after Pearl Harbor, while the country was still absorbing that shock; the declarations of war and the public reaction are in the Pearl Harbor collection’s “Day of Infamy” chapter, and the long American reckoning with that day is in Salvage, investigations and memory. The carriers that raided Wake before the final assault came from the Kido Butai that struck Hawaii. For the wider war, see the Pearl Harbor collection, the Battle of Iwo Jima, where the liberated Wake prisoners passed through on their way home in 1945, and the site’s World War II hub.

What happened afterward

The ship that carried the Wake prisoners into captivity did not survive the war. Nitta Maru was converted to the escort carrier Chūyō and spent most of her career ferrying aircraft. On 4 December 1943, returning from Truk to Yokosuka, she was hit by torpedoes from USS Sailfish, struck again at dawn and once more at 0842, and capsized six minutes after the last hit. Pacific Wrecks counts 513 crew and 737 passengers lost and 161 rescued (Pacific Wrecks, “Chuyo”). Among those aboard were about twenty American submariners captured from USS Sculpin; only one of them lived.

The war-crimes trials reached some of the men responsible and missed others. The five petty officers who carried out the Nitta Maru executions were tried and imprisoned; Saito was never found (Urwin letter, via Mansell). The Tokyo tribunal’s prosecution files include affidavits by Wake survivors on the voyage and the camps, among them Cunningham’s own on his treatment at Woosung, Bridge House, Kiangwan, Ward Road, Nanking and Peking, and a statement by a Japanese guard, Yasuo Kohara, on the executions aboard Nitta Maru (IMTFE Prosecution Documents 8209 and 8480, National Diet Library). Rear Adm. Sakaibara was tried by a U.S. military commission at Kwajalein and hanged on Guam on 19 June 1947 (Hubbs). The commander of Zentsuji was sentenced to twenty years and its camp doctor was hanged (Mansell, “Zentsuji POW Camp”).

The five men killed at sea have no graves. Bailey and Hannum are memorialized at the Honolulu Memorial, with their remains recorded as lost at sea (Missing Marines). The 53 contractors who died at Soto Dam were buried near the dam and brought home around 1949 (U.S. Navy, CFAS 2016).

For the survivors, captivity did not end in 1945. Cunningham and Devereux disagreed in print about the surrender and the conduct of the defense, a dispute taken up in Chapter 9. The contractors spent decades seeking recognition; in 1981 the Department of Defense, under the procedures Congress created in 1977 for civilian groups that had served with the armed forces, recognized the civilians who defended Wake as eligible for military discharges, medals and veterans’ benefits (Idaho House Concurrent Resolution 27, 2026; Congressional Research Service, IF12242). Idaho, where 225 of the contractors had ties, hosted annual reunions of Wake survivors and their families until 2017. Urwin’s book, published in 2010, closes with a survivor’s words that serve as its last chapter title: “We had a bond there that’s still going.”

Walking the ground today

Wake Island is a restricted U.S. Air Force installation with no public access; visits are limited to people with official business there. The atoll is a National Historic Landmark, designated in 1985, and part of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument (U.S. Air Force photograph caption, 2016). Those who do reach it can see the places where the captivity began: the airfield and, on the lagoon shore of Wilkes Island, a coral boulder carrying the inscription “98 US PW 5-10-43.” An Air Force account describes it as the work of an unidentified prisoner who escaped the 7 October 1943 massacre and was later recaptured and beheaded (U.S. Air Force, “Officials search for POW/MIAs on Wake Island,” 2008). Memorials near the air terminal honor the Marines and the civilian contractors. Anthropologists of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command excavated on Wake in 2008, and the search for remains missed in the hasty postwar recovery has continued (U.S. Air Force, 2008; Gilbert, “The Wake 98”).

The places of the captivity outside Wake are harder to find. Woosung and Kiangwan have long since been absorbed into the growth of Shanghai. Zentsuji is a Japan Ground Self-Defense Force base; Mansell notes that its museum does not mention the camp. At Yunoki, outside Sasebo, the Soto Dam and its memorial tower are accessible, and an annual ceremony organized by American sailors and Japanese residents reads the names of the prisoners who died building it (U.S. Navy, CFAS 2016). In Honolulu, the Honolulu Memorial at the Punchbowl lists Bailey and Hannum among the missing (Missing Marines).

Sources and further reading

• Lt. Col. R. D. Heinl Jr., The Defense of Wake (USMC Historical Section, 1947): HyperWar text; Chapter 4, “The Fall of Wake”; Appendix III, U.S. and Japanese casualties (prisoners and deaths in captivity).
• Benis M. Frank and Henry I. Shaw Jr., Victory and Occupation, History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, vol. V (1968), Part on Marine prisoners of war: PDF, Marines.mil.
• Robert J. Cressman, “A Magnificent Fight”: Marines in the Battle for Wake Island (Marines in World War II Commemorative Series, 1992): introduction and biographies; “A Difficult Thing To Do” (surrender and aftermath).
• Naval History and Heritage Command: Narrative of Captain W. S. Cunningham relative to events on Wake Island; H-Gram 002, Attachment 2A (Samuel J. Cox, 2016); Guy Nasuti, “The Forsaken Defenders of Wake Island” (2016).
• Foreign Relations of the United States: 1943, vol. III, doc. 812 (Swiss intervention on the sentences of Teters, Cunningham and Smith); 1943, vol. III, doc. 735 (Teters and the exchange); 1945, vol. VI, doc. 217 (the move from Kiangwan to Fengtai).
• International Military Tribunal for the Far East, judgment, Annex A-6, Appendix D (Japan’s 1942 Geneva pledge); prosecution documents on Wikimedia Commons from the National Diet Library: Doc. 8480 (Kohara, on the Nitta Maru executions) and Doc. 8209 (Cunningham affidavit).
• The law: Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, 1929 (ICRC), especially Art. 2, Art. 31 and Art. 50; Hague Convention IV and Regulations, 1907 (Avalon Project).
• Mark E. Hubbs, “Massacre on Wake Island,” Naval History, February 2001; Mark Felton, review of Urwin, Victory in Defeat, Naval History, May 2011.
• Elmer B. Greey, “A WWII Prisoner of Japan Tells His Story,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, 19 October 1945.
• Center for Research, Allied POWs under the Japanese (Roger Mansell): Wake Island Men; Urwin letter on TSgt Vincent W. Bailey; Woosung; Kiangwan; Zentsuji; Kanigaya; Fukuoka #18 (Sasebo); Wake men left in Shanghai, May 1945.
• Bonita Gilbert, Building for War: The Epic Saga of the Civilian Contractors and Marines of Wake Island in World War II (Casemate, 2012), and her articles “Wake Island POWs”, “Escape”, “The Wake 98” and “War Crime”.
• Eric Niderost, “Escaped POWs’ Chinese Odyssey,” World War II, April 2006 (the Ward Road escape).
• Missing Marines: Vincent W. Bailey and Earl R. Hannum. Hall of Valor: Cunningham and Putnam Navy Cross citations. USMC History Division, Brigadier General James P. S. Devereux. East Carolina University, Paul A. Putnam Papers.
• U.S. Navy, Commander Fleet Activities Sasebo, “Commander Fleet Activities Sasebo and local community remember Soto Dam POWs” (2016); U.S. Air Force, “Officials search for POW/MIAs on Wake Island” (2008); Pacific Wrecks, Chūyō (former Nitta Maru).
• COFEPOW, “Japanese Orders for Prisoners at Sea” (facsimile of the “Regulations for Prisoners”); Idaho Legislature, House Concurrent Resolution 27 (2026) on the Wake contractors; Congressional Research Service, “Veteran Status Based on Service with Certain Civilian Groups” (2022).
• Books: Gregory J. W. Urwin, Victory in Defeat: The Wake Island Defenders in Captivity, 1941–1945 (Naval Institute Press, 2010) and Facing Fearful Odds: The Siege of Wake Island (1997); W. Scott Cunningham with Lydel Sims, Wake Island Command (1961); James P. S. Devereux, The Story of Wake Island (1947); John F. Kinney with James M. McCaffrey, Wake Island Pilot (1995); James D. McBrayer Jr., Escape! (McFarland); William Taylor, Rescued by Mao (2007); Bill Sloan, Given Up for Dead (2003).

Photographs: U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Navy photographs, public domain; Japanese photographs of 1940 and 1943, public domain in Japan and the United States; via Wikimedia Commons.