Скачать или смотреть THE FINAL FLAG LOWERING: SEPTEMBER 4, 1945 🔍

❓ "How does a commander surrender an island he has held through years of starvation?" By September 1945, Wake Island was a graveyard of ambition. The Japanese had captured it in December 1941 after a heroic American defense, but for the rest of the war, the U.S. simply bypassed it, leaving the garrison to rot. When the USS Levy arrived to accept the surrender, Sakaibara’s men were so starved they had only 17 days of rations left. Over 1,200 of his soldiers had already died of hunger and disease.

The photograph from that day shows Sakaibara, a man of rigid military bearing, signing the papers that handed the "Alamo of the Pacific" back to the Marines. But beneath the formal ceremony lay a dark secret that the Americans were already uncovering.

The 98 Who Never Left: In October 1943, fearing an imminent American invasion that never came, Sakaibara ordered the execution of 98 American civilian contractors who had been kept as forced labor. They were marched to the beach, blindfolded, and machine-gunned. One man escaped the initial slaughter, carved "98 US PW 5-10-43" into a coral rock to leave a record, but was later recaptured. In a final act of brutality, Sakaibara personally beheaded the man with his samurai sword.

During his war crimes trial in 1947, Sakaibara remained defiant. In a statement that stunned the courtroom, he argued that the U.S. had no moral authority to judge him after dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, claiming his execution of 98 men was "military necessity" compared to the thousands killed by the A-bomb.

Sakaibara was found guilty and hanged in Guam on June 19, 1947. His last words were reported as, "I obey with pleasure," a chilling end for the man who oversaw the occupation of one of the Pacific's most storied battlefields. Today, Wake Island remains a remote U.S. territory, a silent monument to both the gallantry of its 1941 defenders and the tragedy of those who never came home. Subscribe to see the historical stories they didn't teach you in school.