"A bustling metropolis in the midst of the Pacific."

CLXI

Wake, seen from above

Ed Musick won his bet. The China Clipper found Wake while tracing one of its zigzags in what was now a lapis lazuli sky. Fred Noonan later admitted, “We had it right on the nose.”

Having been warned of the coral heads in the lagoon by Rod Sullivan, Ed (who had taken back the yokes from Sullivan prefatory to landing) made a reconnoitering pass over Wake before attempting to land. What he saw surprised him, and surprised Sullivan even more; the lagoon had been largely cleared of coral so that the big flying boat could make any approach it wanted. The fact was that blasting had been stopped just over an hour before the M-130 was due to make landfall. 

A coral head in the lagoon at Wake. Note the fish. Thousands of these delicate natural structures were destroyed in the course of creating the clippers’ landing field. Later, Pan Am was to promote Wake as an “unspoilt paradise for snorkeling and diving” based on the remnant that remained

 

Wake wasn’t large enough to maintain its own tourism industry, but Pan Am tried, advertising swimming, diving, sightseeing (by glass-bottom boat)  and sailing in the lagoon, and deep sea fishing beyond the reef. The open ocean waters around Wake teemed with fish, including sharks

A Wake Island spotter, seeing the big plane pass overhead without maneuvering, assumed the clipper crew had missed the landfall, and fired a flare to catch their eye. 

Ed had in fact seen Wake from afar off. What he had seen first was Wake’s flagpole --- a towering cement pole from which fluttered an appropriately oversized American flag, the Stars and Stripes dancing in the trade winds. He saw the flare, and wagged his wings in response.

 

PAAville. Note the flagpole

A few minutes later, at 1:38 P.M., about seven minutes ahead of schedule, the China Clipper moored in Wake’s lagoon.  

The crew was given a heroes’ welcome, beginning with a tour of Wake, including a ride on the island’s short line narrow gauge railway that reached a distance of about two city blocks. They were then fed the best meal the staff could contrive, including the inevitable “Welcome To Wake” cake. Tactfully, no one mentioned Rod Sullivan’s April argument with the site manager.  

The layout of Wake’s PAAville was very similar overall to Midway’s Gooneyville. But if Gooneyville, with its tennis court and golf course, had the air of a brand-new unoccupied suburban subdivision, PAAville had an air of the Wild West.  Most of the men walked around with BB guns slung over their shoulders in order to shoot on sight the Polynesian rats that were even more ubiquitous than the birds, and far more destructive, if not as creepy as the armored land crabs that clank-scuttled through the sand. The project on Wake had been started about two months after the project on Midway, and was lagging behind schedule. The Y-shaped structure of the PAAville Hotel had only one of its three arms completed.  Men were living in tents. Construction materials stuffed the airport warehouse and lay under outdoor tarpaulins to shield them from the sun.

Wake’s observation tower, weather station, and infirmary in 1935

Pan American construction foreman Bert Voortmeyer in his tent on Wake, 1935. Most of the following pictures are from Voortmeyer's collection

Bert Voortmeyer and colleagues in front of the unfinished PAAville Hotel, 1935

The PAAville Hotel under construction

The PAAville tank farm

The PAAville Hotel in 1936, completed but not painted

The kitchen at the PAAville Hotel, 1936

A remnant of the PAAville Hotel, inscribed with a date

Two views of the China Clipper in the lagoon

The mooring dock at Wake

The Pan American ground crew at Wake assembled in front of the China Clipper

Despite the delays in construction, Wake was a busy place. Pan American’s ever-creative Public Relations Department dubbed Wake “a bustling metropolis in the midst of the Pacific.” There were about seventy people living on Wake when the China Clipper arrived for the first time, mostly Chamorro laborers from Guam. There were also the construction foremen, the PAAville Hotel staff, the airfield ground crews, and the nominal detachment of Navy officers and Marines to oversee the communications and man the guns --- just like at Midway.  

The clipper’s air crew was a little surprised, and perhaps a little alarmed, that the main topic of conversation over dinner wasn’t the China Clipper or progress on PAAville, but the Japanese, who just that day had delivered yet another diplomatic protest to Washington objecting to American development of the west Pacific air routes. The objections had begun the moment Pan Am had announced development of the route, and they became more strident with each successive step of the project. The Japanese had described Pan American Airways in so many words as a willing tool of Euro-American political expansion into Oceania and East Asia with the plan of dominating its peoples. They were entirely correct, but the objections of the Imperial Government were more than a little disingenuous. They considered everything on their side of the International Date Line as belonging to their “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” --- including Wake.  For all the years that Wake had been unoccupied Japan had never bothered to assert any formal claim on the atoll, but now, belatedly, Japan was claiming that Wake had been colonized by Japan.

 

The Japanese claim to Wake relied on the atoll’s opportunistic use by passing feather poachers and fishermen. But the Japanese flag had never flown there

The Roosevelt Administration had ignored the protests, or on occasion, referred them “for further consideration,” a more polite way of ignoring them. 

It was a properly diplomatic way of disposing of a minor matter in Washington, except that for the tiny community on Wake, it wasn’t a minor matter. While almost nobody (among the white mainlanders) seriously believed that the “Japs” (or “Nips”) would ever penetrate as far east as Midway or Hawaii, Wake was another matter. Even those who believed that the Japanese fighting man was inherently racially inferior to a white soldier knew that seizing Wake was within the presumably limited capabilities of the Asians. Utterly isolated, the residents of PAAville were under no illusions as to how much the Marine detachment at Wake could do if a half-expected Japanese armada appeared over the horizon. There were just enough of them to hold a pleasant flag-lowering ceremony just before they surrendered the island to the new Japanese Governor. And there was even wild talk that the Japanese might make a go at Midway and Hawaii someday --- the Chamorros had heard word from other Mariana Islanders that some Japanese considered Hawaii a kind of runaway colony to be reclaimed. Of course, they’d never manage it, but . . .

In reality, the peoples of the region by-and-large had just as much, and usually less, of a connection to Japan than they did to the United States, Britain, and other Western Powers. That did not trouble Japan a bit.   

Japanese invaders coming ashore at Wake, December 1941. The vastly outnumbered American force held out for over two weeks against two Japanese task forces