Wake Island is a tiny coral atoll in the central Pacific, about 2,100 nautical miles west of Honolulu. It consists of three islets — Wake, Peale, and Wilkes — arranged around a shallow lagoon. There is no civilian population and no public access. The island is run entirely by the U.S. military.
Visitors cannot come here. The atoll is an active U.S. Air Force installation administered by the Army Space and Missile Defense Command. A small rotating contingent of military personnel and civilian contractors maintains the runway and facilities. Supply flights from Honolulu arrive roughly every two weeks. If you're not on the manifest, you're not getting in.
History
The Spanish sighted the atoll in 1568. The British named it after Captain William Wake in 1796. The U.S. annexed it in 1898 and built a Pan American Airways seaplane base there in 1935, making it a stopover on the transpacific route to Asia.
Wake Island's defining moment came in December 1941. Hours after Pearl Harbor, Japanese aircraft bombed the atoll. A garrison of 449 U.S. Marines, backed by a handful of Navy and Army personnel and over 1,100 civilian construction workers, held out for two weeks. On December 11, shore batteries sank the Japanese destroyer Hayate — one of the first Japanese surface ships lost in the war — and Marine F4F Wildcats sank a second destroyer. The relief force sent from Pearl Harbor was recalled before it arrived. The island fell on December 23.
The Japanese held Wake for the remainder of the war, bombing it repeatedly from 1942 onward. In October 1943, Japanese commanders executed 98 American civilian prisoners who had been kept on the island as laborers — one of the worst atrocities committed against American civilians in the Pacific war. The surviving Japanese garrison surrendered to U.S. Marines on September 4, 1945.
Today
The U.S. military has invested heavily in Wake Island in recent years, modernizing the runway, drainage, and support infrastructure. The airfield serves as an emergency divert field for transpacific flights and supports missile defense operations in the Pacific.
The atoll is also part of the Wake Atoll National Wildlife Refuge and the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument. The surrounding waters hold over 100 species of reef-building corals and more than 300 fish species. Twelve seabird species nest here, including sooty terns, red-footed boobies, and great frigatebirds. The ecology is largely intact because almost no one lives here.