Wake: America's shining star

COEUR d'ALENE - Each Veterans Day, Bonnie Gilbert visits Coeur d'Alene's Forest Cemetery and places flags on the grave of Obie Tumelson, a man she's not related to.

"I do it in memory of the guys from Wake," said Gilbert, a Coeur d'Alene historian and author.

Tumelson, like Gilbert's grandfather and father, was a civilian working in 1941 on Wake Island, a tiny coral atoll about 2,000 miles west of Hawaii in the North Pacific.

They were laboring on a defense project, building an air station for the U.S. Navy. The Boise-based Morrison-Knudsen was one of the lead companies on the project.

"There were more men from all around the area who were hired on and worked at Wake," Gilbert said.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, within hours, they began an assault on Wake. Gilbert's father, Ted Olson, and Tumelson were among 1,145 civilian contractors and about 550 military personnel, mainly Marines, on the island when the attack ensued.

"Wake was not just a drive-by shooting," Gilbert said.

The American workers helped the Marines defend the island as the siege dragged on for 16 days. At one point, they repelled a massive land strike, but ultimately, the small island fell to the Japanese.

"These were dark days for America, and Wake was a shining star out there for two weeks," Gilbert said. "It's right up there as one of the greatest, most honorable attempts to defend American soil, or coral, in this case."

Because the civilians helped fight to retain the United States' hold on the island, they became prisoners of war. Gilbert's father and Tumelson were among about 1,000 Wake workers sent to camps in Japanese-occupied China, performing slave labor for the Japanese. They each survived the ordeal, and made it home after the war. There were 115 American civilians from Wake who perished as prisoners.

Another group of civilians survived the initial island attack, but died later on Wake. Now known as the Wake 98, the nearly 100 men were retained by the Japanese and put to work on the island rebuilding the airstrip for the Japanese.

In 1943, Adm. Shigematsu Sakaibara, the Japanese commander on Wake, became concerned that a heavy bombing by Americans signaled that the island was about to be invaded and overrun by the U.S., Gilbert said.

The admiral marched the American workers down to the beach where he lined them up and shot them.

The story of Wake's civilian contractors and Marines is documented in "Building for War," a book by Gilbert published in December by Casemate Publishers.

Gilbert, originally from the Portland, Ore., area, holds a master's degree in history from the University of Oregon. She has lived in Coeur d'Alene since 2006 and now teaches history at North Idaho College.

Gilbert's account of the events at Wake is based on traditionally researched history, including extensive work in state and national archives, and Morrison-Knudsen's business records. Personal stories are woven throughout, extracted from family letters and diaries.

After her father's death in 1994, Gilbert said they found a box of scrapbooks with a letter and a few "cryptic" postcards her father had sent while imprisoned by the Japanese.

"He did not talk about that time with his wife and children, which was very common for the men of that generation," Gilbert said. "He did teach us to count to 10 in Japanese."

The real treasure trove for Gilbert was a box of letters one of her aunts found. It contained letters from her grandfather, Harry Olson, sent from Wake to her grandmother in 1941. They were "newsy," Gilbert said, documenting the contractors' race to build the base.

Her grandfather arrived on Wake in January 1941, one of the first to arrive and build the camp that would serve the workers as they constructed the air station. His son, Ted, would arrive later.

At the time of the attack, the older Olson was away from Wake, on a visit to Hawaii where he witnessed the assault on Pearl Harbor and aided in the rescue and recovery.

The events on Wake and the fate of the civilian contractors there led directly to the formation of the U.S. Navy Construction Battalions, also known as the Seabees, Gilbert said.

She is now searching for the family members of the Wake 98, the men who died on the beach in 1943.

Most of the remains of American casualties were found just after the war ended, in a mass grave on the island. They were moved to "Punchbowl," the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.

Additional remains were discovered on Wake in the spring of 2011, when beach erosion uncovered bones. JPAC, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, sent a forensic team to the island. They determined the bones to be Caucasian, Gilbert said.

Gilbert has been working with JPAC trying to find family members of the men who died on Wake, to get DNA samples that might identify the newly discovered remains.

They've been in contact with 20 families so far.

"With 98, that's not that many," Gilbert said.

Gilbert traveled to Wake in the fall of 2011. Public access to the atoll is restricted.

While there, she visited "POW rock," a boulder on the shore that bears an inscription believed to have been chiseled by one or more of the men who died on the beach: "98 US PW 5-10-43."

Gilbert maintains a blog, bonitagilbert.com, where she wrote about her Wake visit.

"Gathering shells and pieces of coral from this beach for the families back home, I looked out to sea, watched the surf break on the reef, and thought of the men whose last sight was this one," Gilbert wrote.

She recently blogged about those men and her efforts, with JPAC, to identify their remains.

"We honor the Wake 98 with this mission. They will not be forgotten," she wrote.

Gilbert will be signing copies of her book, "Building for War: The Epic Saga of the Civilian Contractors and Marines of Wake Island in World War II," at Hastings book store in Coeur d'Alene, 101 Best Ave., on March 3 from 1-4 p.m.

Information: bonita.gilbert@gmail.com and www.bonitagilbert.com