The 98 Rock of Wake Island

Wake Island is a coral atoll located in the North Pacific Ocean, just north of the Marshall Islands. The island is an unorganized, unincorporated territory of the United States with no permanent residents, just members of the U.S. military and civilian contractors who manage the facility. During the second World War, the island held a great strategic importance. The island was under the occupation of the United States Navy before it was wrestled out of the Americans by the Japanese with an attack that happened just few hours after the infamous Pearl Harbor attack on December 8, 1941. After the Japanese lay siege on Wake island, they sent most of the captured civilians and military personnel to POW camps in Asia, but retained some of the civilian laborers and tasked them to reinforcing the island’s defences. Photo credit Over the next several weeks, transport ships would come and take away POWs to various camps in Japan and China. On the last day of September in 1942, all but 98 of the prisoners were loaded aboard a freighter and sent to Yokohama. The remaining POWs were to continue their work on construction projects. The U.S. forces meanwhile continued bombing the island periodically. On October 5, 1943, when an American naval aircraft raided Wake Island, the Japanese Rear Admiral Shigematsu Sakaibara somehow came to the conclusion that an invasion was imminent. Two days later, he ordered the execution of the 98 captured American civilian workers who had been kept to perform forced labor. In the waning afternoon light of October 7, 1943, the prisoners were taken blindfolded to the northern end of the island, made to line up along a ditch facing the sea and then executed with a machine gun. The bodies were dumped unceremoniously into the ditch and covered with coral sand. Unknown to the Japanese, one of the prisoners had escaped during the confusion of the massacre.