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Although Wake Island is officially called an island in its singular form, it is geologically an atoll composed of three islets (Wake, Wilkes, and Peale islets). [150] They enclose a shallow lagoon of 3.3 by 7.7 kilometers (2.1 by 4.8 miles), with average depth of around 1 meter (3.3 feet) and a maximum depth of 4.5 meters (15 feet).
Servicemembers search for POW/MIAs on Wake Island : Source: Digital: Image title: A memorial to prisoners of war is seen Jan. 12 on Wake Island. The "98 Rock" is a memorial for the 98 U.S. civilian contract POWs who were forced by their Japanese captors to rebuild the airstrip as slave labor, then blind-folded and killed by machine gun Oct. 5 ...
Wilkes Island was named during the Tanager Expedition for the U.S. Naval officer Charles Wilkes, who led a U.S. expedition to Wake Atoll in 1841. [ 6 ] [ 7 ] In the 1930s, it was the site where supplies were off-loaded for the Pan-Am airways seaplane facilities, which was built on Peale Island on the other side of the Wake Lagoon.
According to one Marine, the earliest account of U.S. troops wearing ears from Japanese corpses took place on the second day of the Guadalcanal Campaign in August 1942 and occurred after photos of the mutilated bodies of Marines on Wake Island were found in Japanese engineers' personal effects.
Brown boobies atop pier posts at Johnston Atoll, September 2005. The United States Minor Outlying Islands is a statistical designation applying to the minor outlying islands and groups of islands that comprise eight United States insular areas in the Pacific Ocean (Baker Island, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, Midway Atoll, Palmyra Atoll, and Wake Island) and two ...
It is separated from Wake Island by a channel which, from World War II to the 21st century, was crossed by a wooden bridge. The bridge had burned down by 2003. In 1953 the bridge between Peale and Wake Island was rebuilt. [4] Wake is one of the most remote islands on the planet and is hundreds of miles from the nearest land.
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The Battle of Wake Island was a battle of the Pacific campaign of World War II, fought on Wake Island.The assault began simultaneously with the attack on Pearl Harbor naval and air bases in Hawaii on the morning of 8 December 1941 (7 December in Hawaii), and ended on 23 December, with the surrender of American forces to the Empire of Japan.