Nearly four years after the fall, Wake Island is handed back to the United States
Wake Island had been in Japanese hands since December 23, 1941, when its Marine garrison was overrun early in the Pacific war. On September 7, 1945, three weeks after Japan's unconditional surrender, Rear Admiral Shigematsu Sakaibara formally surrendered the atoll to Brigadier General Lawson H. M. Sanderson aboard the destroyer escort USS Levy. A ceremonial raising of the American flag followed that same day, closing out one of the last Japanese-held outposts of the Pacific war.
Wake's fall in 1941 had become an early symbol of American resistance under siege, its garrison's defiance covered widely at home even as the island was lost. Its recapture on paper, without a fight, four years later, closed quietly: the flag went back up without a fight, three weeks after Japan had already surrendered.
QWhat happened to the Japanese commander who surrendered Wake Island?
Rear Admiral Shigematsu Sakaibara, who handed over the atoll aboard USS Levy in September 1945, was later tried by a U.S. military tribunal and executed for ordering the massacre of ninety-eight American civilian contractors on Wake Island in October 1943, men who had been left behind after the 1941 invasion to perform forced labor for the occupying garrison. The surrender ceremony itself made no mention of that atrocity, which only came to light afterward.
QWhy was USS Levy, a destroyer escort, chosen to receive the surrender rather than a larger warship?
USS Levy was a Buckley-class destroyer escort, a small, fast vessel built primarily for antisubmarine convoy duty rather than fleet actions, and its presence off Wake Island in September 1945 reflected the mundane, mopping-up nature of accepting garrison surrenders across scattered Pacific outposts after Japan's capitulation. Ceremonies like this one did not require a battleship's deck; a modest escort ship with the right officers aboard was enough to make the transfer official.
QWhat did a Navy officer predict about Wake Island decades before Pearl Harbor?
In 1922, nearly twenty years before Japan seized the atoll, Lt. Cmdr. Sherwood Picking argued the island's real value lay in the air: "If the long heralded trans-Pacific flight ever takes place, Wake Island should certainly be occupied and used as an intermediate resting and fueling port." Pan American Airways and later the Navy built the atoll for exactly that purpose. Picking's report sat in Navy files for over a decade before anyone acted on it. By the time the prediction proved accurate, Wake had become a military outpost rather than merely a fueling stop, and that same strategic logic made it worth fighting over twice.
