Wake Island: Japan’s First Setback

The battle for a lonely outpost in the Pacific became a supreme test of wills between the island’s American defenders and the overconfident Japanese invaders.

This article appears in: Spring 2021

By Nathan N. Prefer It didn’t look like much—just a speck in the vast ocean. Most travelers spent only a night in the Pan American Hotel and never ventured far from the small adjoining airfield. It was called Wake Island, and until recently, it had been an uninhabited atoll in the mid-Pacific. Wake Island was V-shaped and consisted of three atolls: Wake, Wilkes, and Peale. Together they contained barely 2,600 yards of sand and coral fringed by a coral reef on which the Pacific pounded loud