Pacific Steppingstones: Wake

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. 

Wake Island today

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.

 

Heavy equipment being offloaded from the S.S. North Haven

Possibly that same tractor digging foundations at Wake

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. 

The men who created PAAville

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.     

Innumerable Polynesian (Pacific) rats existed on Wake Island, vying with the birds for whatever food there was

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

PAAville. The hotel is to the upper left, the Clipper dock to the lower right just out of the frame

 

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.

Working on the railroad: The Wake Island locomotive

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.

With the North Haven just offshore, men bring supplies up the hastily-constructed redwood wharf

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.

 

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

The second Drifter’s Reef, advertising “The Cheapest (and only) Beer for 700 miles”

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 . . .  

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

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.

 

Chamorro staffers acted as waiters and porters, and did a myriad of other jobs to keep PAAville operating smoothly

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.

 

Philippine Clipper at Wake Island

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.   

 

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!” 

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.