September the 4th, 1945. Wake Island. The Japanese garrison comes out from underground. 1,200 men. Rifles stacked in neat rows on the coral. An American officer stands at a folding table with a clipboard. On it, a list 98 names. American civilians, construction workers, captured on this island in December of 1941.

still listed on paper as prisoners of war. Not one of them is standing on that airirst strip. 3,000 m away, the gates are opening at camp after camp. Men who haven’t eaten a real meal in years are walking out into daylight, being weighed, being counted, being matched name by name to the families waiting at home.

 Here on wake, the Japanese commander stands at attention. He salutes. He says nothing about the 98 names on the list in front of him. He has seen that list before. The answer wasn’t going to come from his mouth. It was already on the island, half buried near the shoreline, carved into a rock by a man whose name no one would ever know.

 If your father or your grandfather served anywhere in the Pacific, even on some island you’ve never heard of, even if his unit never made it into a single history book, go ahead and hit that like button. This one’s for him, too. December the 8th, 1941. Wake Island is a strip of coral barely 4 m long. Three eyelets shaped like a bent horseshoe sitting alone in the middle of the Pacific.

 closer to Tokyo than to Honolulu. The whole atal sits barely above sea level. Coral and crushed shell, a lagoon in the middle. Nothing growing taller than a man’s head. No fresh water to speak of. Everything that’s here, food, fuel, building material, the men themselves, came in by ship. There are Marines here, a few hundred.

 There are also more than a thousand civilians, men from Boise, Idaho, and towns like it, working for a construction company called Morrison Kudson. One of them is a man named Art Pratt. Pratt is 41. Before the war, he ran pack mule teams for the US Forest Service. Then he worked as head wrangler at a dude ranch in California.

 He came out to wake as a mechanic with the company. He’s been writing home about it. He’s been saving the pay. He wants to buy a ranch of his own someday with his wife and his kids waiting back in the States. For 16 days, the Marines and a handful of these civilians hold this island against a Japanese invasion fleet. They sink two destroyers.

 It is for those 16 days the only piece of American ground in the Pacific that hasn’t fallen. Then on December 23rd, the Japanese come ashore in force and the island surrenders. What happens next happens to all of them at once. 1,600 men, marines, sailors, pan-American workers, and more than a thousand civilian contractors are marched out onto the airfield.

 They’re made to sit down in rows on the open ground. Facing them a line of Japanese machine guns. Nobody tells them anything. They sit there in the heat waiting. Some of the men start saying quiet goodbyes to whoever’s sitting next to them. The order to fire never comes. Hours later, they’re marched off into captivity instead.

 But for however long they sat there, every one of them believed it was the last thing they’d ever do. Among the men sitting in that line, Art Pratt and a company doctor named Lton Shank, who spent the last several days treating the wounded from the fighting. None of them know yet what the next four years will look like, or that almost 2 years from now, some of these same men will sit in rows again in front of guns again, and that time the order will come.

 January 1942, a ship called the Nidamaru pulls up to wake. Most of the prisoners are marched aboard. Well over a thousand men, Marines, sailors, civilians, stuffed into the cargo holds, bound for China. Art Pratt isn’t on that ship. He’s part of a smaller group kept behind. The work isn’t finished. the airfield, the bunkers, the gun imp placements.

Somebody still has to build them, and the Japanese aren’t going to do it themselves. For the next 8 months, that’s the arrangement. Then, in September of 1942, another ship comes. 265 more men are called up, bound for Yokohama. A prisoner named Russell keeps a diary. On the day his friends are chosen to leave, he writes it down.

 265 going, 98 staying. And among the 98, Lou and Bill, men he says he sure hates to leave. Lou is Dr. Shank. He stays to keep treating the 98 men who are left. Years from now, Lton Shank will become the only civilian in American history ever awarded the Navy Cross. Right now, he’s just a doctor with 98 patients and no way off the island.

 There’s also in late 1941 two tugboats working out of Wake, the Arthur Foss and the Justine Foss. Both belonged to a small company out of Tacoma, Washington called Foss Maritime. Started decades earlier by a Norwegian immigrant widow named Thea Foss, who got into the business renting rowboats off a float house.

 On the morning the war starts, the Arthur Foss is 12 hours out from Wake, towing two loaded barges back toward Honolulu when the radio brings word. Pearl Harbor’s been hit. Wakes under attack, too. The Arthur Foss is painted white and green, visible for miles. Out on open water with no dry dock and no spray gun, just brushes and whatever’s on hand, the crew mixes the last of their white paint with engine grease and repaints the hull gray by hand.

 Underway, they cut the radio. They run for Pearl Harbor in silence, not sure they have the fuel to make it. They make it barely. The tanks are almost empty when they’re escorted in. The Justine Foss doesn’t get that 12-hour head start. She’s still at wake when the island falls. Her captain Tom McKinnis, her mate Ralph Van Valkenberg, both end up among the 98.

 A third man on her crew, a young deckhand named Drew Foss, grandson of the company’s founders, is hurt in the fighting. He’s sent to a different ship, a different camp in Japan. He spends the rest of the war there. He comes home. McKinnis and Van Vulcanberg don’t. The Arthur Foss does too in its own way. It’s preserved today as a museum ship on the Seattle waterfront.

12 hours and a different coat of paint being most of what separated her crews wore from the Justines. The 98 aren’t a unit, and they didn’t choose each other. They’re a cross-section. Men from 20 different states, about half of them married with children waiting at home. The youngest is 20. The oldest is 54.

 Art Pratt is one of them. What happens next isn’t what you’d expect. The Japanese garrison on Wake still has the supplies the Americans left behind in 1941. Warehouses of it. More food than the Japanese soldiers themselves are getting. The 98 are fed on it. By later testimony, something close to 3600 calories a day.

 There are air raid shelters dug for when the bombers come over. There’s housing. There’s a baseball diamond. It’s a rough field. Crushed coral for a diamond. Scrub brush past the outfield. The lagoon beyond that. No grass anywhere on wake. There never has been. From a distance on a Sunday afternoon, it could almost pass for a sand lot game back home.

 Up close, there’s the heat, and there are guards at the edges watching. On Sundays, when the work allows it, they play. Someone has a projector. They watch movies. The guards are thin on the ground and not especially interested. For a year, this is what the war looks like for Art Pratt. Mornings on a work detail. afternoons that every so often look almost like Idaho, a ball game, a film, mail that never comes but might.

He keeps thinking about that ranch. Then in July of 1943, a man named Jack Fenex is caught stealing food from the stores. There’s a brief investigation. A Japanese officer draws his sword. Fenix is beheaded. A Japanese doctor is brought in afterward to confirm that he’s dead. Nothing else changes. The work continues. The ball games continue.

97 men are left. I keep coming back to one detail. Whoever carved that rock had seconds, maybe less. And in those seconds, he didn’t write his own name. He wrote a number, 98, as if his own name mattered less than making sure the count was right. October the 5th, 1943. Aircraft from the USS Yorktown, come in low over wake. Bombs hit the airfield.

The gun positions, the bunkers, the ones Pratt and the others spent a year building under guard with their own hands. For the 97 men in the compound, it’s the loudest day they’ve had since the island fell. Anti-aircraft fire. Explosions across the runway. Smoke over the lagoon. The next morning, the planes come back.

By the afternoon of October 6th, the raids stop. The island is quiet again. Sakibara has been expecting an invasion for months. Submarines circling, reconnaissance flights. Now 2 days of carrier strikes. He doesn’t wait to find out if troops are coming. October the 7th, late afternoon, the kind of heat that builds all day on a place with no shade and no high ground, then breaks all at once when the sun starts dropping toward the water.

 Guards arrive at the prisoner compound. The 97 are told to fall in and march. They’re taken to the northern end of the island to a stretch of beach facing the open water. Their hands are tied behind them. Their eyes are covered. Lines of Japanese soldiers take up positions across from them. The machine guns open fire.

 Art Pratt is 41. He dies that afternoon on a strip of coral a few thousand miles from the ranch he’d been saving for. The bodies are pushed into a trench. Coral sand is shoveled over the top. The next morning, a Japanese soldier reports something. During the firing, in the noise, in the smoke, he thinks he saw a man break loose and run.

 An officer orders the trench reopened. The bodies are pulled out, laid in a row, counted. 96. One man is missing. He doesn’t get far. Somewhere near that stretch of beach on a slab of coral rock, someone carves a message. 98 USPW5-10-43. 98 the full count. Pratt and the others from the trench plus Jack Fenick back in July.

The numbers in the date don’t quite line up with the date everyone agrees on for the massacre. Nobody has ever been able to say for certain what the carver meant by them or exactly when it was carved. What’s certain is what happened to the man believed to have made it. Weeks later, he’s found.

 Not by a search party, by Sakibara himself. This time, there’s no officer sent ahead, no brief inquiry, no second man holding the sword. Sakibara does it himself with his own blade. His name is never recorded, not by the Japanese, not by anyone. Most of the men captured on wake in December of 1941, don’t end up among the 98.

In January of 1942, more than a thousand of them are loaded onto the Nita Maru, bound for prison camps in China and Japan. Partway through that voyage, five of them are pulled out on deck. A Japanese officer tells them it’s retaliation for the Japanese dead at Wake. All five are beheaded and thrown overboard.

 The rest reach China, then Japan. Wake is flat, hot and bare, coral, and scrub. No real seasons. The camps they’re sent to are nothing like that. mountains, cold winters, snow for some of these men for the first time in their lives, working outdoors in it. Regardless, they spend the next 3 and 1/2 years in slave labor camps, building a dam near Cebo, working a steel mill at Yawata, digging coal.

 Of roughly 1100 civilian contractors taken prisoner at Wake about 250 die before the war ends. 98 of those are the men who stayed behind. By that count the rest, somewhere around 150 more die elsewhere in those camps of disease, starvation, beatings. According to one account, in July of 1945, with the war clearly ending, the officers at one of those camps hold a formal dinner for the senior American prisoners.

 There’s a toast to lasting friendship between the two countries. When it’s his turn to respond, one of the Americans, a major by this point closer to a skeleton than a man, stands up. If you behave yourselves, he says, you’ll get fair treatment. By the same account, within weeks, the guards at these camps are gone. For a while, it’s Japanese children standing watch over the prisoners, not to keep them in, but to keep angry civilians out.

 The prisoners put together a flag of their own. American sewn from whatever cloth they have and raise it themselves. Supplies start coming down by parachute. Then American soldiers arrive and it’s over. These men go home, counted, weighed, matched to their families. The men from the start of this story. The 98 on Wake never got that chance. After October of 1943, the Americans never come back to wake, not to invade it, just to make sure nothing leaves and nothing arrives.

A submarine blockade closes around the atole. In January of 1944, the Marshall Islands, the base the Japanese have been using to resupply Wake, fall to American forces. After that, almost nothing gets through. By May of 1944, the garrison starts rationing rice. Over the next 14 months, the ration keeps shrinking from around a pound and a half a day down to roughly a third of that.

 The workday shrinks with it. 10 hours, then four. By the summer of 1945, it’s down to one. The airfield Pratt spent a year helping build goes quiet. No aircraft using it anymore, Japanese or otherwise. Weeds and scrub push up through the coral surfacing. The bunkers are still manned technically.

 There’s just less and less in them, and fewer men able to do much with what’s left. Men spend their time fishing, growing what they can in the coral sand, collecting bird eggs. Rats become food, by some accounts tens of thousands of them over time. For a while, the officers tell the men that supplies are coming. By the fall of 1944, the submarines mostly stop.

 The men go on believing it. Nobody with any rank tells them otherwise. And after a while, nobody with any rank says much of anything. In October of 1944, a year after the trench was filled in, while his own men are already going hungry, Sakibara is promoted. Rear Admiral. By the time Japan surrenders, the garrison that once numbered around 4,000 has been reduced to roughly 1,200 men. Nobody had to storm the beach.

August 1945. Word reaches Wake Island that Japan has surrendered. By this point, the island barely runs. The bunkers are still manned. There’s just almost nothing left in them, and almost no one left with the strength to use. What is the garrison here? Still over a thousand men, still armed, hasn’t fired a shot in almost 2 years.

 The Americans never came back to invade. They just sealed the island off with submarines and left it to sit. Now the war is over and somebody is going to come ashore and look around. So the Japanese go back to the beach. They dig up what’s left of the 98, move the remains down to a small plot near the American cemetery at Peacock Point, the same cemetery built for the men killed during the original battle in 1941.

They put up wooden crosses. They paint them. They rope off the area. It looks by the time anyone arrives like a cemetery that’s always been there. September 4th, 1945. Aboard the destroyer escort USS Levy anchored off Wake Sakyara signs the surrender. Ashore 1,200 Japanese troops come up out of their bunkers and lay down their weapons on the airirstrip.

Sakibara hands the island over to a Marine Brigadier general named Lawson Sanderson. An American officer has a list, 98 names. Nobody answers to them. Marines and a few journalists go ashore. They ask the Japanese a simple question. Are there any American graves on this island? The Japanese lead them to two common graves.

 And according to one account, a third one smaller with a name on it, Will Miles. Separately, working their way along the shoreline, someone notices a rock. Coral, roughly carved, half covered by sand and brush. 98 USPW5-10-43. Nobody on the American side put that there. A few weeks later, a new American commander arrives to take over the island.

 A captain named Earl Youngs along with a team from the US Strategic Bombing Survey. They ask about the 98 names that don’t match anyone standing on the air. By Jun Hans’s later account, the Japanese officers still on wake all told the same story. On the night of October 6th, 1943, during the carrier raid, a bomb scored a direct hit on the prisoner’s shelter.

 Half of them, they say, were killed instantly. The rest rose up that night, killed a guard, stole two rifles, fought their way toward the north beach, toward the channel. They refused to surrender. They were cut down. It’s a complete story, a date, a location, a sequence of events. It even has a kind of dignity to it. Americans going down fighting, weapons in hand, refusing to give up to the last man. It’s also not what happened.

 Nobody in this story was holding a rifle. None of them got the chance to refuse anything. Yungans starts having the remaining Japanese troops questioned one at a time about their part in this escape attempt. For a while, the story holds. Each man tells it the same way, the same details in close to the same order, like something rehearsed.

Then it doesn’t hold. On November 5th, 1945, 16 men, Sakyra among them, are put on a ship for Quadrilene. Back in the towns these men came from, nobody yet knows any of this. For 2 years, the families of the 98 have had nothing, no letters, no word, just a name on a list of men who were prisoners somewhere. The last anyone heard.

 Most of them get word around the same time. January of 1946, 4 months after the surrender on Wake, more than 2 years after the trench was dug, a letter from the American Prisoner of War information bureau. It comes the way these things come. [clears throat] An envelope in with the regular mail, a government return address.

 Nothing about the outside of it suggests what’s written inside. It gives a location. It gives a date. October 7th, 1943. It doesn’t explain anything else. Art Pratt’s wife, Marian, is one of the people who gets one of these letters. She’d kept writing to him the whole time. Letters to a husband who’d been dead since October of 1943, though she hadn’t known that until now.

She does not yet know how he died, just the place and the date. According to the family, one of Pratt’s sons later joins the army himself and serves in Korea. He’ll say it’s because of what happened to his father. At the time, what happened is still just those two lines from the letter. While letters like Mary and Pratt are reaching towns across the country, the 16 men from Wake are sitting in custody on Quadriline.

 On the way there, two of the officers had already taken their own lives. Each one left something behind. A written statement and in both statements the same name comes up. Sakyara December 21st 1945 the US Naval Air Base Quadrilain. The trial convenes Sakibara Tachibana and a third officer Lieutenant Torajiito before a military commission.

 The rehearsed story, the one about the bomb shelter, the stolen rifles, the last stand on the North Beach, starts to come apart, one officer at a time. [clears throat] Part of what the defense offers early on is testimony from a Japanese doctor about conditions on wake before October of 1943. The food, close to 3,600 calories a day, the baseball games, the movies, all of it, true, all of it entered into the record as evidence that the men had been treated well.

During the proceedings, another man breaks, Lieutenant. He kills himself, too. He also leaves something behind, a signed confession in his own hand describing what actually happened on October 7th, 1943. The investigators bring this confession to Zakibara. He reads it and then he says it himself for the first time.

 He gave the order. The trench, the 97 men, all of it. He says the responsibility is his and only his. The tribunal hands down its sentence. Death for Sakibara. Death for his subordinate, Lieutenant Commander Tatibana, the officer who on Sakibara’s order had marched the men to the beach that afternoon.

 Tatabana’s sentence is later commuted. He’ll serve life in prison instead, sent to Sugamo, the same prison holding Japan’s senior war criminals. Sakyaz is not. June the 19th, 1947. Guam. Saka is led out to be hanged along with five other men convicted of war crimes. He’s asked if he has anything to say. He says the trial was unfair.

 The sentence too harsh. Then he says four more words. I obey with pleasure. The 98 were moved again after that. Out of the small grave at Peacock Point across the ocean to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, the Punch Bowl. Their remains arrived unidentified, mixed in with other unidentified dead from the original defense of Wake back in 1941.

Repatriated together in 1946 and unable to be separated, they were eventually buried together under a single marker. It lists 178 names. A separate plaque nearby lists the 98 by name alone. Members of the Pratt family, among others, have continued trying over the decades since to learn more than those two lines from 1946 ever said.

Some have made the trip out to Wake itself to walk that stretch of beach. On Wake Island, the rock is still where it was found. People call it Pw Rock. It’s a remote stretch even now. Coral, low scrub, the sound of the surf, and not much else. Wake today has no permanent civilian population, just a small number of contractors and military personnel, and an airirstrip mostly used for refueling.

 Most people who’ve heard of the island have never set foot on it. The carving is still legible. 98 USPW5-10-43. If your father or your grandfather served in the Pacific, even somewhere small, even somewhere with a name you’ve never heard before today, tell us his story in the comments. The ones from the dinner table, the ones that never made it into a book.

 Don’t let those disappear either.