Wake Island: Exotic Travel Destination!

The idea of taking a massive flying boat across the Pacific Ocean, in the pre-WWII days, has a kind of romantic air to it. The thought of international travel to places like Asia, Africa, Europe and whatever little island nations that dotted the Paific, during these years of brewing turmoil, kind of make you think of the world still mysterious. Most of the modern world we live in has a similarity to it. World War II and the years following it brought rapid industrialization and modernity to almost the entire world, but also with it, while much of that has been incredibly beneficial, a kind of boring sterility.

Flying across the Pacific Ocean, today, is nothing extraordinary, at least not to us. While it is expensive to fly from San Francisco to the Philippines nowadays, it is nothing close to the cost of 1930’s travel to the same destinations. Now we can save the money to fly like that in a few months at most, while in the 1930’s to fly to places like China, Japan, Philippines or even Europe could be extremely expensive. A flight across the Pacific in the 1930’s was generally reserved only for the rich or famous, as a round-trip flight could cost 3x the annual salary of 1930’s Americans. Granted during the 1930’s America was in the throes of a Depression, and the average salary was only $474.00 during those dreary years. 

According to a Business Insider article published in February 2021, Pan Am, founded in 1927, used a unique marketing scheme to lure people into their flights. The 1920’s were years of prohibition in America, so Pan Am marketed to those yearning for a drink. They even partnered with Bacardi Rum to coax passengers into trips to Cuba, where alcohol flowed freely. Pan Am changed the history of air travel, and became the first major promoter of international travel. By the 1930’s, Pan-Am offered trans-Pacific flights, going from San Francisco to the Philippines.

In the 1930’s no airplanes were available to make massive legs of cross-ocean travel without several stops, and the risk would have been great for a standard fixed-wing airplane of the day, so Pan-Am decided to innovate. In 1930 the Glen L. Martin Company, of Baltimore Maryland built a massive flying boat, a vessel that could move 32 passengers over a distance of nearly 2500 miles, the Martin M-130 flying boat. This massive 4-engine aircraft was an essential addition to Pan-Am’s fleet, especially for Pacific travel, and after successful test flights, Pan-Am jumped on the opportunity and bought 3 of the new planes.

Flight across the Pacific in the 1930’s was difficult, as there were very few airfields available for airplanes to land, thus making the flying boat a major asset. The long flight across the Pacific required 5 stops, the first of which being a 2500 mile flight between San Francisco and Honolulu. Next stop was Honolulu to Midway (1260 miles), then Midway to Wake Island (1320 miles), Wake Island to Guam (1500 miles), and finally Guam to Manila, Philippines (1600 miles).  To cope with the long flights the M-130 hauled 3800 gallons of fuel. The planes were costly to operate as two engines had to be replaced in their entirety each trip from San Fran to Manila. 

The lumbering behemoth that was the M-130 was not a fast plane by modern standards. The big bird would fly at a max of 180 mph with a service ceiling of 10,000 feet. The M-130 would normally cruise at a speed of 130 mph, making a flight from San Fran to Hawaii last roughly 19 hours. These planes, later nicknamed the “China Clipper”, “Philippine Clipper” and “Hawaii Clipper” had to be luxurious in order to accommodate their high-end passenger base. Crew on board wore nice, professional-looking steward uniforms and as they were on a flying boat, the pilots and co-pilot dressed as officers on-board a luxury ocean-liner. This 5 crew unit would cater to their guests, and while the maximum passenger capacity was over 35 total passengers, flights would likely have had a much smaller contingent of passengers. 

Life on board was luxurious. The massive flying-boat had a lounge and three passenger cabins, one in-front and two behind the lounge. Each passenger cabin was capable of holding 8 seats or 6 sleeping berths. Passengers could sleep during the 6 days of flight, or they could play cards, eat in the lounge, smoke, drink and wealthy businessmen could get work done as they flew across the world. 

While the stop in Honolulu allowed passengers to stretch their legs in the civilized, modern city of Honolulu, the stops in-between landed passengers on some of the most remote places on earth. The first stop, after Honolulu, put passengers on a 2.4 square-mile atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Midway. 

The exotic, and tropical paradise-Midway Atoll

Midway Atoll would later become famous as the turning point of the Pacific Theater of WW2, but prior to the war, the small atoll was a desolate airfield in the middle of the vast ocean. Pan-Am charted their routes across the ocean using these little bits of land as a place to refuel, and allow passengers, and more importantly the crew, to rest prior to the next leg of flight. Pan-Am executives of course realized the high-paying passengers would need a place of luxury to ready themselves for more travel, so two “resorts” were built on Midway Atoll, as well as Wake Island.

When you look at Midway in photographs you can get a sense of the difficulty Pan-Am faced in trying to make a luxurious resort part of such a remote, and featureless place. Midway is long, thin, featureless and without any type of elevation. The ground is covered with scrubby grass, and the island is dotted with palm trees, and while it would give patrons a 360 degree view of the beautiful blue Pacific Ocean, it was hardly a picturesque place to visit.

The Pan-Am hotel of Midway Atoll. It would later be known as “Gooneyville Lodge” during WWII.

Pan-Am spared no expense in trying to make these desolate places a luxurious stop. A New York Times article from January 15, 1936 outlines the journey taken by the S.S. North Haven a ship carrying two prefabricated hotels on-board. Each hotel had 45 rooms in total, composed of two wings, and a central lobby area. The two hotels, one for Midway Atoll, and another for Wake Island, came fully equipped with 6 months supplies for immediate occupancy, as Pan-Am Pacific flights were quickly in demand. 250,000 gallons of fuel were tugged along to help power both generators at the hotel, and airplanes that would need to refuel in the waters outside the hotel.

The guys who built Pan-Am hotels during the North Haven expedition. While this picture is in black-and-white, I can imagine they are all ridiculously tan. This picture came from the photos of Bert Voortmeyer, a 20 year old kid who went on the expedition. If you can find it snatch up his daughter’s book, Riding the Reef: A Pan-American Adventure, with Love. This book is next to impossible to find, but it is an excellent narrative of the building of these hotels.

The Midway hotel, later known as Gooneyville Hotel during World War 2, was given amenities to make the stop feel like a tropical resort stay. Pictures of the luxurious hotel show men and women dressed in their finest, being served by waitstaff in white jackets. You can imagine the sweltering Pacific heat as these people sit under the buzzing ceiling fans, dressed in suits and dresses, and each man is wearing a cinched up tie. Sure, the hotel might have been central to a nice ocean breeze, but you can imagine the hotel probably baked in the sun on the featureless landscape. Either way, one can imagine the flight taken the next day was a welcome relief from the heat.

The major substance of this post however, is focused on the next stop of our Pan-Am flight. We’re on-board the China Clipper, and we’re tired from another 1320 miles of flying. This leg of the flight isn’t as long as that first night flying from San Francisco to Honolulu, but back then we were excited about this new experience, flying across the Pacific. By the third leg we are likely veterans of the Clipper service, and we’re itching to finally get to Manila. The Pan-Am employees excitedly tell us that we’re about to land at our next destination, an exotic and faraway place called Wake Island, a place we have likely never heard of. This is good news because last night, that stay at the flat slab known as Midway was quite disappointing. Sure, the food was good, and service was nice, but we are ready to stretch our legs and explore dammit!

The plane circles, and dips a wing, and everybody on the plane, in the luxurious lounge, is chattering excitedly as we are about to see our next stop…...and there it is! A hush rushes over the crowd. Down below is another slab of coral, a place that makes Midway look like a tropical paradise. From the air the island looks like the open mouth of a scrawny crocodile, the space between it’s open mouth is filled with the light blue of shallow water. While the hotel is on Wake Island, it is part of a group of islands known as Wake Atoll. On the northern end of the atoll is Peale Island, Wilkes Island is to the northwest, and Wake, the major substance of the atoll, taking up the middle.

This is Wake Atoll today. Imagine it is 1935, and the islands are not riddled with roads, and there is no airfield. Basically this is as desolate a place as you can get.

Wake Atoll had been a very dangerous spot for ships. The islands are surrounded by shallow waters, laden with coral. In 1866 a German passenger ship, known as the Libelle was crushed on the shallow coral shores, during a storm. The atoll is literally the middle of nowhere, thousands of miles from any civilization. The atoll is small, 3 square miles and the island, like Midway, was flat. The ground is covered with jagged bits of ancient coral, and the island is flat, just 20 feet above sea level. Nobody even lives there, no native populace, and that’s likely for good reason. The atoll offers no wild game, besides for some birds, offers no ground for growing anything. The water is so shallow, and dotted with coral it wouldn’t even be ideal for fishing except by the most experienced of fishermen. In the most stereotypical way of colonizing, the US planted a flag on the island in 1898, during the years of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars. 

The history of the island in the ensuing years doesn’t offer much. In 1934 the island was given to the Navy for a base, and the navy made it a bird sanctuary in 1935. That same year Wake, via the permission of the Navy, was set to be a stopping point for Pan-Am flights to the Philippines. During the North Haven building expedition 113 construction workers toiled in the Pacific heat to put up a luxurious resort-like hotel. 

The luxurious island of Wake! the Pan-Am hotel can be seen in the middle of the picture.

Building the Pan-Am “Village” as it was known was no easy task. With the thick coral shores, the crews of the construction teams had to blast their way to Wake Island, the decided upon location for the hotel. Next came the building of the village itself. The scrubby island first had to be cleared of scrub, and that took clearing with machetes. From there they first built a dock, made from California redwood, jutting out into a picturesque blue lagoon. Next came the village. This was made up of houses for staff, storage, and maintenance. A 50-foot antenna with a 2500 mile range was put up. The hotel itself was put up on the small island of Peale to the northeast.

The hotel was a modern hotel, made in the very modern style of the Art-Deco movement. They spared no expense making the hotel luxurious, putting in place screened porches, modern furniture, a bar, tennis courts and a swimming pool. Nowadays we see in any seaside tourist town the ads for glass-bottomed boat tours, and during the Pan-Am glory days guests could take tours out to see fish in the modern glass-bottomed boats. To help shake off the long flight cramps, guests could go shooting, both guns and archery. If you were truly adventurous, Pan-Am offered hunting expeditions! You could hunt the massively overwhelming number of rats that lived on the coral slab.

Waiters bring drinks to hotel guests, as they look out over the tropical sands to the Pacific Ocean!

Pan-Am was at first, happy with the hotel, but they quickly realized they were paying a large staff to sit around 5 days a week, as guests were only there a couple of days each week. Pan-Am recognized that Wake had a very unique bird population, so they decided to create a vacation package for bird watchers. Not many were willing to spend a long-term vacation at Wake Island, but there were some who did. 

Come fly to a tropical paradise! Like Wake Island (minus the mountains in the background!)

Wake Island spent the 1930’s as a destination for Pan-Am flights, and the new infrastructure opened up the minds of US Government officials: Wake would be an ideal naval and seaplane base. By 1940 the US had non-float airplanes that could fly the legs of each trip to Manila, so the US Navy plopped an airfield on Wake Island. The ensuing years did have Wake Island grow as a naval base, while also remaining a Pan-Am resort. 

As tensions grew between Japan, and the United States, Wake Island became a place of great interest. The greatest deterrents to Japanese expansion in the Pacific, were the US bases at Wake Island, Midway, Guam, Pearl Harbor and of course, the Philippines. Not ironically, each leg  of the flight between San Francisco to Manila was a key Pacific base. Japanese Naval doctrine immediately made the Philippines a target in any future action, as the Japanese believed they could lure the US Navy into a major action if they attacked the Philippines. This automatically made Wake a target. Japanese bases in Kwajalein, and Truk were just 600 miles from Wake Island, and these were major staging areas for the Japanese forces. Taking Wake Island meant that the US would be cut off from the Philippines by the air, and there would be little air threat to the Japanese for the early part of the war because of the strategy. 

The US buildup at Wake meant that Pan-Am passengers could see the influx of Marines, and sailors to the island in preparation for the war. The airfield was the home for Marine pilots, consisting of only 12 fighter planes. The base was garrisoned by a tiny force of roughly 450 Marines. Four days after Pearl Harbor was attacked, the Japanese made Wake a target, and that day a China Clipper aircraft was moored at her dock. The Pan-Am staff, and passengers quickly took off back for home, and while this blog post isn’t about the Wake Island battle, it did become a place of legendary bravery and resilience. 

We can imagine our days in the golden age of world travel, before World War 2 blew the world apart, and we can imagine flying into Wake Island. At the hotel we could laze away on a wicker chair, seated behind a screened in porch, maybe read a book from the library. Or we could go play a game of tennis, or swim in a pool that overlooked the gorgeous blue ocean of the Pacific. Maybe we could go get a few drinks at the bar, and brag about our exotic travels to other guests, or we could eat dinner before going to bed in our luxurious suite. Either way it is fascinating to imagine these old days of Pan-Am travel, and think about the untouched places that so many had never seen!

-Jesse

History on a Whim

Historian and Site Founder

PS. Check back tomorrow and I will load you up with some fun, and cool videos about Pan-Am’s golden age!

Sources:

Books:

Sloan, Bill. Given up for Dead: America’s Heroic Stand at Wake Island. New York: Bantam Books, 2003.

Voormeyer, Bret and Carol Nickisher. Riding the Reef: a Pan-American Adventure with Love. McLean: Paladwr Press, 2005.

Websites:

https://www.panam.org/enter (The Pan-Am Historical Foundation. A really cool site about this storied airline!)

http://www.midway-island.com/history/pan-american-airlines/

https://www.fws.gov/refuge/Midway_Atoll/Visit/Tour/Pan_Am_Hotel.html

https://www.historynet.com/martin-m-130-flying-boat-china-clippers-trans-pacific-flights.htm

https://simpleflying.com/pan-am-clippers/

http://www.aviation-history.com/martin/m130.html

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-pan-am-went-from-pioneering-air-travel-to-bankruptcy-2020-2