The Wake Island massacre

On 7 October 1943 Japanese soldiers on Wake atoll shot 98 American civilian construction workers who had been held prisoner there for nearly two years. The order was given by the garrison commander, Captain Shigematsu Sakaibara. Two days earlier aircraft from American carriers had attacked the island, and the Japanese were expecting a landing. The crime was concealed for two years. It came to light only after the garrison surrendered in September 1945, and its perpetrator went to the gallows in 1947.

The civilians of Wake

The victims were not soldiers. In 1941 the United States Navy commissioned a consortium of civilian construction firms, in which Morrison-Knudsen played the leading role, to build a base on Wake: an airfield, a seaplane station and facilities for submarines. Some 1,150–1,200 workers came to the atoll. Many of them had previously worked on the great dams of the western United States; others were simply looking for well-paid work at a time when the country was only just emerging from the Depression.

When the Japanese attacked the island on 8 December 1941 (local time), the workers found themselves in the middle of the fighting. Some helped the defenders: they carried ammunition, repaired aircraft and manned positions, and several dozen fought with weapons in hand. The first Japanese landing was repulsed on 11 December; the second, on 23 December, ended in surrender and brought the Battle of Wake Island to a close. The evacuation of the civilians, planned at Pearl Harbor, had not been carried out in time. About 1,600 people were taken prisoner, among them some 1,150 civilians.

On 12 January 1942 most of the prisoners were shipped to China and Japan aboard the Nitta Maru. Some 350–360 people, however, were kept on the island, mainly civilians who could operate construction machinery or who were too badly wounded to be moved. The Japanese forced them to work on fortifications – bunkers, shelters and gun positions intended to repel an American attempt to retake the atoll. This was forced labour on military installations, contrary to the rules on the treatment of prisoners and interned civilians. In September 1942 the ship Tachibana Maru took away another 265 men. After deducting those who had died or been killed earlier, 98 Americans remained on Wake.

An island under siege

Wake lay far from the main fronts, but it was not forgotten. From February 1942 the Americans bombed the atoll from time to time: first Admiral William Halsey’s carriers, then, for more than a year, four-engined Liberators flying from Midway. American submarines made it hard to supply the island. The garrison, several thousand soldiers and labourers strong, lived amid growing privation and in the conviction that sooner or later a landing would come.

Shigematsu Sakaibara, a 1918 graduate of the naval academy and a naval gunnery officer, held the rank of captain (kaigun taisa) in 1943 and commanded the defence of the atoll. American sources often call him a rear admiral, but he received that rank only in the autumn of 1944.

The raid of 5–6 October

On 5 and 6 October 1943 Wake was struck by Rear Admiral Alfred E. Montgomery’s Task Force 14. It comprised six carriers, including new Essex-class ships such as USS Yorktown and USS Lexington, together with lighter Independence-class carriers. It was the largest carrier force the US Navy had yet sent on a single operation. For two days aircraft bombed the airfield, gun positions and depots, and cruisers shelled the island from the sea. The Japanese lost many aircraft on the ground and in the air. For the Americans it was above all a trial of the new ships, of new tactics for operating several carriers together and of the new Hellcat fighters ahead of the great offensive in the Central Pacific.

To the Wake garrison the raid looked like the prelude to an invasion. Sakaibara feared that in the event of an American landing the prisoners might help the attackers, pass on what they knew of the fortifications they themselves had built, or escape. Some sources state that at this time or shortly before, one of them was beheaded on Sakaibara’s orders for stealing food. Others place this incident in July 1943.

7 October 1943

On 7 October soldiers of the garrison marched the 98 Americans to the northern end of the main islet, to an anti-tank ditch near the beach. The prisoners were blindfolded and then machine-gunned. The bodies were buried on the spot in a mass grave.

One of the men managed to escape in the confusion. His name has never been established. For some time he hid on the island, and during that time he carved the inscription “98 US PW 5-10-43” (“98 US prisoners of war, 5 October 1943”) on a large block of coral near the grave. The date on the stone does not match the day of the execution. It is most often read as the day of the air raid that sealed the prisoners’ fate, but it is not known exactly what its author meant to commemorate. The fugitive was soon caught, and Sakaibara beheaded him personally with his sword. The inscribed stone survived the war and still stands on Wake today as a memorial to the victims.

The figure usually given is “98 American civilians”. That number and the date agree with the findings of the post-war trial and with historians’ studies. According to most studies the figure covers all the Americans then remaining on the island, and thus also the escapee who was killed after his capture.

Covering up the crime

For almost two years no one outside the garrison knew what had happened to the prisoners. Wake remained in Japanese hands until the end of the war. The Americans did not land there: in the Central Pacific offensive Admiral Chester Nimitz bypassed islands whose capture was not essential and left the blockaded garrisons to their own devices. Cut off from supplies, the men on Wake starved. In June 1945 the Americans allowed a Japanese hospital ship through to Wake, and it took 974 emaciated and sick soldiers off the island.

When Japan announced its surrender in August 1945, Sakaibara had the mass grave dug up and the remains moved to a cemetery at Peacock Point, where wooden crosses were put up. On 4 September 1945 the garrison surrendered to a detachment of Marines under Brigadier General Lawson Sanderson. In the first interrogations the Japanese claimed that 98 Americans had been killed in an American air raid and that the rest had been caught in an ambush on a beach in the north of the island and had fought to the end. This version soon collapsed. Several Japanese officers committed suicide in custody, leaving written statements incriminating their commander, and Sakaibara admitted giving the order.

Trial and sentence

Sakaibara, his subordinate Lieutenant Commander Shōichi Tachibana and other officers of the garrison were taken to Kwajalein atoll, where they were tried by a US Navy military commission. In December 1945 Sakaibara and Tachibana were sentenced to death for war crimes, including the murder of the 98 civilians. Tachibana’s sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. In his final statement Sakaibara admitted he had acted wrongly, but accused the Americans of having no moral right to judge him after dropping the atomic bombs. In his home prefecture of Yamagata some people afterwards regarded him as a victim of “victors’ justice”. Sakaibara was hanged on Guam on 19 June 1947.

The victims’ remains were exhumed and buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, known as the Punchbowl, most of them as unknowns in common graves. On Wake their memory is kept above all by the inscribed stone.

Place in the war

The Wake Island massacre had no effect on the course of military operations, but it is one of the best-documented Japanese crimes against American civilians. It shows how prisoners and internees were treated in Japanese garrisons in the Pacific: as labour for building fortifications and, at a moment of danger, as a risk to be eliminated. The same pattern was repeated in December 1944 on the island of Palawan in the Philippines, where, on news of an approaching American convoy, some 140–150 American prisoners were burned and shot.

The fate of the Wake workers long remained in the shadow of the legend of the atoll’s defenders. Only in the early 1980s were the contractor’s civilian employees who had fought on Wake recognised by the US authorities as veterans, which gave them and the victims’ families the right to benefits. The stone inscribed “98 US PW 5-10-43” remains the most important testimony to a crime whose perpetrators believed for two years that no one would ever learn of it.