Olson and Rauzon • WAKE ISLAND RAIL 
685 
with kiwis ( Apteryx ) of New Zealand, as suggest¬ 
ed by Devereux, which may in turn have led to the 
vernacular name “peewee” and the belief that the 
bird originated somewhere to the south. 
These three ranking military officers were 
among the last Americans on Wake Lsalnd who 
lived to tell their stories, Devereux having spent the 
entire war in a prison camp in China. As far as they 
knew, the rail was present and doing fine up until 
they were removed from Wake Island following 
the surrender of the island in December 1941. 
Years later, when queried about the possible former 
presence of albatrosses on Wake Island. Devereux 
responded: “To the best of my recollection we had 
frigate birds, tern and a small brown flightless bird, 
which I understand was peculiar to the island” 
(Devereux in litt. to C. E. Carlson, USFWS. 27 July 
1959; Smithsonian Institution Archives. J. W. 
Aldrich Papers). This is further indication that as 
far as Devereux was concerned the rail was a living 
species up until December 1941. 
The Japanese military occupied Wake Island in 
December 1941 and surrendered it in September 
1945. During that period and for a good while 
afterwards, there was. understandably, no infor¬ 
mation at all regarding the natural history of 
Wake Island made available to the rest of the 
world. That did not inhibit speculation about what 
might be happening there. Less than a year after 
the Japanese occupation, Bryan (1942:214) pre¬ 
dicted the demise of the Wake Island Rail: “It is 
not at all unlikely that this species has become 
extinct, due to the experiences through which the 
island has passed,” Vaughn’s notes (1945:27) on 
the birds of Wake Island were not published until 
June 1945. as the war still raged, but an editorial 
note remarked that ”Mr. Vaughn’s observations 
may well become a first and final chronicle, for 
the interesting birdlife of Wake may have become 
completely extirpated as a result of the Japanese 
occupancy.” 
The nearly 4 years of Japanese occupation were 
marked by brutal deprivation and death by 
bombing and starvation. Habitat was destroyed 
to build barracks, revetments, air raid shelters and, 
eventually, for garden plots in attempts to grow 
food. Bombing removed additional habitat be¬ 
cause as the war intensified. Wake became the 
target of hundreds of sorties, mostly carrier based, 
beginning in February 1942 and ending in August 
1945 (Cohen 1983:77). This eventually made 
supply ships too vulnerable to stand off and ferry 
provisions to the troops; even attempts by 
Japanese submarines to float containers of food 
to shore at night proved unsuccessful. “In all, 
about 4,400 Japanese troops were stationed on 
Wake, but by the time of the island’s surrender, 
deaths from air raids and malnutrition had reduced 
the number to 1,242” (Cohen 1983:77). 
During the Japanese occupation. Wake Island 
was supplied mainly from Kwajalein Atoll, 
Marshall Islands, which fell to the U.S. in January 
1944. Food rationing did not begin on Wake 
Island until May 1944, and rations were progres¬ 
sively reduced until reaching an all time low in 
July 1945. An attempt was made to supplement 
staples by growing vegetables and by fishing, but 
as fishing gear wore out and men weakened “the 
catch dropped to such a low level that it was not 
considered worth the effort. In addition to fish, 
some men caught and ate island birds, but the 
yield here also dropped in the last months, as men 
became weakened from malnutrition. Rats were 
also eaten whenever caught. The Japanese com¬ 
manding officer. Admiral Sakaibara, said that on 
one occasion the island garrison made a run on 
rats and in one single day killed 40.000 and ate 
them” (information from USSBS 1946). 
Perhaps no place on earth would have been less 
suitable than Wake Island to sustain an isolated 
population of thousands of humans, whose 
numbers would certainly have been greater than 
the number of rails. If tens of thousands of rats 
were caught for consumption what chance did a 
few hundred flightless rails have? In addition to 
loss of habitat and direct predation, it is safe to 
speculate that, because of human disturbance, any 
semblance of successful breeding activity by rails 
would probably have been impossible. By war’s 
end the rails were gone. 
Greenway (1958:216) quoted a 1949 commu¬ 
nication by station manager T. D. Musson to the 
effect that he had been familiar with Wake Island 
since 1946 and had never seen the rail. Bailey 
(1951a, b) searched for the rail unsuccessfully 
from 11 to 15 May 1949 and was told that none 
had been seen since the American reoccupation. 
“Rats, or possibly the starving Japanese troops 
themselves, may have exterminated them” (Bai¬ 
ley I951a:36). “The war caused the destruction of 
the majority of the birds on Wake, including the 
unique flightless rails which were once so 
numerous, but apparently the Sooty Tern \Ony- 
chaprion fuscata) colony was protected so the 
birds would supply the staging soldiers with 
eggs '’ (Bailey 1951b:57). 
