July 1935

"The Reality of Building a Pan Am Base on Wake"

Photos: 1. Wake buiding plans from the Pan Am Annual Report 1935 . 2. The railroad constructed to move supplies across Wilkes Island, where they were carried by barge to Peale Island and the new Pan Am base.

Wake was an atoll - a lagoon surrounded by three islands: Wilkes, Peale, and Wake Island itself. Its location was key to the success of the entire transpacific air route, and it was far and away the toughest part of the entire job for Pan Am.

Unlike Hawaii, Midway, Guam, or Manila, there was not a single vestige of human activity on Wake, other than a rusting anchor left from an 1866 shipwreck.

The s-42 survey flights were progressing across the Pacific at two month intervals: San Francisco to Honolulu in April, to Midway in June, with Wake's turn scheduled for August.

The SS North Haven had come and gone in May, leaving behind a construction crew and tons of equipment, and not a lot of time to prepare for the arrival of the Pan American Clipper, the survey aircraft that would arrive with no alternate place to land when it did.

Wake Island Map, c. 1930s, courtesy of Jon E. Krupnick, from "Pacific Pioneers, The Rest of the Story" (Jon E. Krupnick, 2000) p. 21.

Essential Jobs

The essential jobs were two: setting up the Adcock radio direction finding station to guide the plane to the isolated atoll, and equally critical, clearing the lagoon of as many of the coral heads that studded its water as possible. Hitting one during landing would be catastrophic.

The work went on at a feverish pace. Compromises to plans made months before in Pan Am's New York office had to be made on the spot. A big change was moving the site of the intended base itself from Wilkes to Peale Island. Innovations were just as important, like the improvised railroad that vastly eased the transfer of materials across Wilkes Island so they could be floated across the lagoon on barges.

Wake may have been an isolated spot in the vast Pacific, but the world looked on with fascination through the news reports that were published in the US and elsewhere. It was nothing less than pioneering for the New Age of Aviation.