Wartime History
Emplaced in a turret on the northern coast of Peale Island at Wake Atoll.
Wreckage
Abandoned since the war. It
is often reported that this was a British made gun,
captured by the Japanese in Singapore and relocated
to Wake Atoll. This is incorrect.
References
8-inch
coastal defense guns in Micronesia by Dirk Spennemann
"As so often
in Micronesia, the mythology about the 'Singapore'-guns
also engulfed the 8-inch guns. As the guns on
Eneen-Kio were identified by aircraft reconnaissance
as British technology, wartime assessments first
feared and then believed such guns might have
been transplanted from Singapore (OPNAV 1945a:
54). The same is purported by Cohen's book on
Wake Island (Cohen 1982:103), where he also confuses
them with 7-inch guns. In the same volume the same
guns are reported to have come from Hong Kong (Cohen
1983:95). The reality is that the guns came from
obsolete Japanese naval vessels, which had been
purchased from the U.K. and Italy in the years
before World War I"
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Last Updated
November 6, 2019
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