The HORRORS Of The Wake Island Executions JJ

98 men knelt on a coral beach in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Their hands were tied behind their backs. Their eyes were covered. Not one of them was a soldier. They were carpenters, electricians, crane operators, mechanics, and cooks. American construction workers who had signed contracts to build an airirstrip on a speck of land nobody back home could find on a map.

 Behind them, Japanese machine gunners waited on the signal of a naval officer who had already decided that keeping these men alive was a risk he would not accept. It was the 7th of October, 1943. Within minutes, the beach was quiet again. The men who died there carried no rifles, wore no uniforms, and had committed no act of resistance.

 Their families would not learn the truth for almost 2 years. This is the story of what happened on Wake Island and of the officer who gave the order and who walked to a gallows on Guam 4 years later because of it. If you want more forgotten war crimes told the way they actually happened with real names, real dates, and real documents, subscribe to Army History right now.

 It cost you nothing and it keeps these stories from disappearing. Wake is not one island. It is three small strips of coral wrapped around a lagoon sitting roughly 2,000 mi west of Hawaii with nothing around it in any direction. It has no fresh water and no native population. Rainfall is the only source of drinking water and everything else, food, fuel, timber, cement has to arrive by ship.

 For most of recorded history, it was a place ships avoided. In January 1941, that changed. The United States Navy awarded a contract to the contractor’s Pacific Naval Air Bases Group, led by the Morrison Canudson Company, to turn Wake into a forward air and submarine base. Civilian workers began arriving by ship that same month.

 By December, there were roughly 1,200 of them living on the atole. These were ordinary working men from Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and California. Many had signed on for the money. The pay was good. The contracts were long, and the Pacific sounded like an adventure. They dredged the lagoon, blasted coral, poured runways, and built barracks.

 They also built the defensive positions that would soon be used against the men who built them. Most of them had never handled a weapon. Their contracts said nothing about combat, and the Navy had made no plan for what to do with 1,200 civilians on an isolated atole if a war started. That gap in planning would decide how most of them died.

 Alongside them were around 450 United States Marines of the First Defense Battalion under Major James Devo, a small naval detachment, and a handful of Army radio operators. Commander Winfield Scott Cunningham held overall command. 12 Marine fighter aircraft had arrived only days earlier. On the 8th of December 1941, the same day as Pearl Harbor, on the far side of the international datine, Japanese bombers from the Marshall Islands appeared over Wake at midday.

 They came in low out of a rain squall and hit the airfield before anyone heard them. Eight of the 12 fighters were destroyed on the ground within minutes. 23 men of the aviation squadron were killed. The civilians had no shelters, no weapons, and no orders. Some ran into the brush. Others within hours were carrying ammunition, driving trucks under bombing, and dragging wounded Marines to the makeshift hospital.

 Around 200 of them volunteered outright to serve alongside the garrison. That decision would later become the center of a legal argument about whether they counted as combatants, an argument the Japanese command would use to justify what it did to them. On the 11th of December, a Japanese invasion force approached the atal.

 Devo held fire until the ships were inside effective range of the 5-in coastal guns, then opened up. The destroyer, Hayateate, was hit and sank with almost all hands. A second destroyer, Kisaragi, was struck by bombs from a surviving Marine fighter, detonated her depth charges, and went down. Other ships took damage. The Japanese force turned around.

 It was the first time in the Pacific War that an amphibious landing had been driven off entirely and one of the few pieces of good news the United States received in December 1941. In a month of defeats, American newspapers seized on wake as proof that the war could be fought. The garrison held out for 15 days while relief that had been ordered was recalled before it arrived.

 The Japanese returned on the 23rd of December with a far larger force, carrier air support, and a landing party willing to accept heavy losses. Fighting ran through the night in the dark among the coral. By morning, the position was hopeless. Cunningham surrendered the atal. The prisoners, marines, sailors, and civilians together were stripped, tied with telephone wire, and held on the air strip in the open sun.

 Some were left bound for 2 days. A few were used as human shields at defensive points while the Japanese waited for an American counterattack that never came. In January 1942, most of them were loaded onto the transport Nitamaru for the voyage to China and Japan. On board, five American prisoners were taken on deck and beheaded in front of an assembled crowd of Japanese crew.

 The men who carried it out were later tried for those killings. The survivors of that voyage spent the rest of the war in camps at Wuang and Kiang Wuan near Shanghai and later in Japan itself, working in mines and factories on rations that kept them permanently close to starvation. Men who had arrived on Wake as fit construction workers in their 20s and 30s came home weighing under 100 lb. Not everyone left.

 The Japanese kept a group of civilian workers on Wake because they needed their skills. These men were put to work building bunkers, gun imp placements, and tunnels for the garrison that now occupied the atole. The same kind of work they had been doing for the Navy a few months earlier under a very different employer.

 Their number was reduced over time by disease, starvation, and killings. By the autumn of 1943, 98 American civilians remained alive on the island. They had been there almost 2 years. They lived in a compound on the atole, worked under guard, and ate rations that shrank as the war turned, and the supply convoys stopped arriving.

 Some of them had watched friends die of berry berry and untreated infection. They were, by every legal definition available at the time, civilian internees, and they had no way of knowing that the American advance rolling west across the Pacific had already made their situation more dangerous, not less. Wake had become a stranded outpost.

 The American advance had bypassed it, leaving thousands of Japanese troops isolated and slowly starving on an island they could not leave. On the 5th and 6th of October 1943, American carrier aircraft struck wake in a heavy two-day raid ahead of operations elsewhere in the Pacific. Aircraft were destroyed, installations burned, and the garrison took losses.

The commander on wake was Rear Admiral Shigamatsu Sakibara. He concluded that the raid was the opening move of an invasion. He also concluded that 98 American civilians on the island represented a danger. Men who knew the layout of every fortification who might guide an assault or seize weapons. There was no invasion coming.

 American planners had already written wake off as a target not worth the casualties and the atal would remain in Japanese hands cut off and steadily starving until the surrender in September 1945. The decision Sakibara made was based on a threat that did not exist. On the 7th of October 1943, the prisoners were assembled and marched to the northern shore of the atole.

 Their hands were bound, their eyes were covered. They were lined up on the beach above an anti-tank ditch that had been dug into the coral by the garrison and in places by the prisoners themselves. Japanese troops with machine guns had been positioned on the high ground behind them. On the order they opened fire. 97 men died on that beach.

 The bodies were pushed into the ditch and buried there. There was no trial, no charge, and no accusation of any specific act. They had been kept alive for 2 years because their labor was useful. They were killed on the day their labor stopped being worth the risk. One prisoner was not accounted for.

 In the confusion, one man escaped the beach. His name has never been established. What is known is what he did next. He made his way to a large coral rock near the edge of the lagoon and cut a message into its surface with a chisel or a sharp piece of metal. a record of the number of men and the date so that whoever came afterwards would know something had happened there.

 He was caught within weeks. Sakibara had him brought forward and according to the testimony of Japanese personnel given after the war beheaded him personally. The rock survived. It is known today as the 98 rock and it still sits near the lagoon on Wake Island. It is the only marker those men made for themselves.

Sakibara understood exactly what he had done. He reported to Tokyo that the prisoners had been killed during the American air raid. Casualties of American bombs rather than Japanese machine guns. When Wake was surrendered in September 1945, that story was repeated to the Americans who came to take the atal back.

 It did not survive contact with the evidence. The mass grave was located. The rock was found. Japanese officers and enlisted men on the island began to talk and their accounts matched one another and contradicted the official report. Sakaiara and his subordinates were brought before a United States military commission on Guam in 1946.

The defense argued that the civilians had taken part in the fighting in December 1941 and could be treated as lawful targets. The commission rejected it. Whatever those men had done during the battle, they had spent almost two years afterwards as prisoners under Japanese control, and their killing was murder.

 The evidence against him came almost entirely from his own men. Japanese officers and sailors who had been on wake described the assembly of the prisoners, the positioning of the machine guns, and the order itself. Sakai was convicted and sentenced to death. His subordinate, Lieutenant Commander Tachibana Soy, received a death sentence that was later reduced to life imprisonment.

 Others received prison terms. Shigamatsu Sakibara was hanged on Guam on the 18th of June, 1947. He did not deny giving the order. He maintained until the end that he had acted as a commander defending his position and that the verdict against him was unjust. The remains in the anti-tank ditch were recovered after the war.

 The condition of the grave and the passage of years meant that most of the men could not be individually identified. They were reinterred at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, the Punch Bowl, many of them under markers that carry no name. A number of the recovered remains were eventually matched to individual men through dental records and personal effects.

 And those families were given a name on a stone. Most were not. Their families had spent the war receiving nothing, no letters, no Red Cross notifications, no confirmation of death. Men listed as missing on a construction contract in 1941 stayed missing on paper long after they had been killed. Of the roughly 1,200 civilians who were on wake when the war reached it, more than 180 died on the beach, in the fighting, aboard the ships, and in the camps in China and Japan.

The men killed on wake were not soldiers and never claimed to be. They went to a coral atal to build an airirstrip and pour concrete and they were still there unarmed and unrepresented when a commander decided they were inconvenient. What kept their story alive was one of them running for his life across an island he could not leave.

 Stopping long enough to cut a number into a rock so that the count could not be erased. He was caught and killed for it. The Rock outlived the man who ordered his death, outlived the garrison, and outlived the war. If this is the kind of history you want more of, the cases that never made the front page and never made the textbooks, subscribe to Army History and turn on the bell.

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