CXLVII
Even
as “Gooneyville” was under construction on Midway, the S.S. North Haven was dropping anchor at
Wake. The Pan American Airways facility
that eventually opened on Wake, named “PAAville” was in most respects identical
to “Gooneyville.” The hotel was slightly
larger, with 48 rooms, and rather than a single large dormitory-style residence
for the staff, small cottages were constructed, affording the men who worked at
PAAville more privacy.
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Wake
Island today
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Faced
with the utter isolation of life on Wake, Pan American agreed that staffers’
families could live on the island. Many did, particularly in the summer months,
when school was out at home. A few married couples lived at PAAville
year-round, and Pan American turned a blind eye to unmarried couples who
cohabitated so long as they were discreet. Due to the isolation employees
faced, the pay scale on Wake was relatively high especially for the Great
Depression years. There was little to spend money on, and young couples managed
to put away some decent nest eggs living on Wake. Wives worked as chambermaids
or ran the small concessions and shops (including a residents’ cantina) that
popped up “downtown” from PAAville. There was a small garrison of Marines as
well, to man the hidden gun emplacements and handle the military matters that
arose on the Navy-owned atoll.
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Heavy
equipment being offloaded from the S.S. North
Haven
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Possibly
that same tractor digging foundations at Wake
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Like
Midway, Wake had no fresh water sources. Pan American experimented,
establishing the world’s first successful relatively large-scale hydroponic
gardens on Wake to provide fresh vegetables to the occupants, an idea which was
later copied at Midway. Developing Pan American's island bases gave men plenty of opportunity for ingenuity.
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The
men who created PAAville
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Visitors
had the usual array of entertainments. Cocktails, card games and nightly movies
kept the overnighting Pan Am passengers happy. They were also encouraged to birdwatch,
hunt for shells and pretty corals, collect a few of the thousands of glass
fishing floats that the currents had washed ashore on Wake as souvenirs
(primarily from Japanese fishermen) and to shoot with complimentary air rifles
the seemingly numberless rats that called (and still call) Wake Island home.
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Innumerable
Polynesian (Pacific) rats existed on Wake Island, vying with the birds for
whatever food there was
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The
PAAville Hotel (formally known as the “Pan American Hotel At Wake Island”) was
a larger copy of the one at Midway. Both were prefabricated buildings
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PAAville.
The hotel is to the upper left, the Clipper dock to the lower right just out of
the frame
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One
of Wake Island’s truly unique attractions was a narrow-gauge railway, installed
during PAAville’s construction, that was used to move heavy items around. When
not in use for transport, it was used for passenger sightseeing tours. Pan Am tried mightily to make its scrubby island outposts seem exotic.
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Working
on the railroad: The Wake Island locomotive
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PAAville
was more difficult to develop than Gooneyville. When the North Haven reached Wake it was discovered that there was no easy
way to enter the lagoon to offload supplies, and so everything had to be
transferred from the North Haven
across the open sea by lighter and then manhandled one way or the other across
the reef. Amazingly, none of the
materials used to build PAAville went to the bottom.
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With
the North Haven just offshore, men
bring supplies up the hastily-constructed redwood wharf
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The
atoll of Wake is made up of three separate islands, Wake, Wilkes, and Peale. Of
the three, the smallest, Peale Island, lay inshore of the reef, closest to the
lagoon, and was least likely to be inundated by stormy seas. Peale became the
site of PAAville and of “downtown” Wake.
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The
original “Drifter’s Reef Bar” is abandoned today, but it was built after World
War II as a getaway for transpacific pilots (civilian and military) and the
roughnecks who toiled on Wake. It was as notorious as it looked
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The
second Drifter’s Reef, advertising “The Cheapest (and only) Beer for 700 miles”
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After
choosing the site, Pan American’s engineers were faced with clearing the lagoon
of the thousands of coral heads that broke its surface, any one of which could
slice the hull of a flying boat to metal ribbons. To clear the lagoon, they
dynamited an uncountable number of coral heads, filling the lagoon of Wake with
a cacophony of sound the atoll had never experienced. Broad landing channels
and taxiways a mile long, three hundred yards wide, and six feet deep were
marked out on a chart, and for weeks a motorboat chugged slowly along the
marked-out paths pulling a barge behind it. When the barge bottom scraped
anything --- there was either a sound or a sudden jolt, or both --- the diver
on the barge, a young, muscular, well-tanned, utterly bored, sleepy fellow
named Bill Mullahey, would go over the side, find the base of the coral head,
attach a charge, plant a marker pennant, and climb back on board the barge, to
be towed ahead until the next crunch-and-jolt awakened him. Soon enough, yellow
pennants decorated the lagoon, and one by one they were detonated, destroying,
in those days before Environmental Impact Studies, what may well have been one
of the most pristine coral reefs on earth. Boom.
Boom. Boom . . .
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Bill
Mullahey reputedly built those goggles out of bamboo. Although he was the
laid-back sort, Mullahey’s task of performing underwater demolition in the Wake
lagoon was very dangerous, and he performed it well. Pan Am didn’t forget. He
eventually became Operations Manager for Hawaii
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Most of the workmen on Wake were not
summer-job college students like Mullahey, but Chamorros, the native people of
Guam. The Chamorros lived a marginal existence even on Guam itself, due largely
to the racism of the American government. U.S. leaders (including FDR) dismissed
them as “Orientals,” they were denied American citizenship, and local
educational and economic opportunities were severely limited on Guam. The major
industry was copra (coconut oil) harvesting, and during the Great Depression,
copra production fell from four million pounds annually to less than two. As a Territory, Guam barely benefited from the
New Deal, except insofar as Roosevelt saw fit to build up the naval force
there.
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Chamorro
staffers acted as waiters and porters, and did a myriad of other jobs to keep
PAAville operating smoothly
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Thus,
when Pan Am advertised in Guam for workmen, a large Chamorro contingent went to
work on Wake. And even though their pay was less than an equivalent
Euro-American’s (a Pan Am habit that proved hard to break), the work was steady,
the pay was regular, and it was far more than most men could earn on Guam.
After PAAville was completed, most of the Chamorros stayed, taking jobs as
hotel staff members, and their families joined them.
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Philippine Clipper at Wake Island
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In
many respects, life, both at PAAville and Gooneyville was redolent of
Kiplingesque and Maughamist neocolonial values. White-jacketed “Boys”
circulated among the wealthy short-term residents of these unique Pan Am
cities, bringing colorful tropical drinks and hors d'oeuvres upon demand. Life was good, at least if you were wealthy
and white, in the Great Depression.
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Wake
was attacked at the same time as Pearl Harbor, December 7 / 8. 1941. Pan Am had
been evacuating nonessential personnel for some time and the Navy had been
beefing up defenses, but isolated Wake was ripe for the picking. When the
Japanese first arrived, the Philippine
Clipper in the lagoon was stitched with heavy machine gun fire, but managed
to escape with all but one civilian passenger. Some 520 defenders, including
Chamorro workers who chose to stand and fight, held off a Japanese armada of
aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers and 2,500 Japanese naval infantry until
December 23, 1941, when they were taken prisoner. Many were executed. Their
valiant defense led to the cry, “Never Forget Wake Island!”
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Unfortunately,
not all was well with Wake. The Japanese government objected to any American
presence there, claiming that the intermittent use of the island by Japanese fishermen
and bird poachers gave Japan a clear claim to the island. Japan also claimed
that because Wake was west of the International Date Line, Wake was within
Japan’s “sphere of influence.” Japan went so far as to file a formal objection
with the U.S. Government over Pan American Airways’ use of the island, an
objection the Roosevelt Administration dismissed blandly by saying it had no
influence over what use the island was put by a private corporation. It was a
disingenuous reply, and it was clear that Wake was going to be a flashpoint in
the increasingly-inevitable Pacific War.
