|
On December 7, 1941, while Japanese planes bombed the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, other Japanese forces mobilized across occupied China. Several foreign warships in Chinese waters were caught off guard, including the river gunboat U.S.S. Wake (PR-3). Having been built in China and commissioned into the U.S. Navy in 1927, the Wake had patrolled the Yangtze River for fourteen years to protect American missionaries and other national interests. Throughout this period, the Wake found itself in the midst of the Chinese civil war, and in 1937 the Wake served to enforce the international settlement following the Japanese invasion of China. The crew had planned to scuttle the Wake with explosives, but Japanese troops surrounded and seized the ship—the only American naval vessel captured by the enemy in World War II—and Captain Columbus Darwin Smith and his skeleton crew were taken prisoner, the first American POWs of the war. The American flag was lowered and the small gunboat continued to ply the Yangtze, but this time under the flag of the Japanese Imperial Fleet. While the Wake’s crew remained incarcerated for the duration of the war, Captain Smith was able to make a daring escape back to Allied protection where he revealed the fate of the Wake. At the end of the war in 1945, the Wake was found in Shanghai and retaken by the Seventh Fleet. When the United States withdrew, the gunboat was transferred to Nationalist China and renamed Tai Yuan. In 1949, the former Wake was captured by the naval forces of the People’s Republic of China, the fourth and final time that the flag changed. In Under Four Flags: The U.S.S. Wake and the First American POWs of World War II, historian Paul M. Edwards relates the entire story of this unique ship and the officers and men caught up in this extraordinary episode in naval history.
PAUL M. EDWARDS is Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of the Korean War, Graceland University, Missouri. He is author of many books, including Small United States and United Nations Warships in the Korean War and the Korean War Almanac.
RETURN
|
|
Under Four Flags: The U.S.S. Wake and the First American POWs of World War II