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  8" Coastal Gun 
Japanese Navy

Click For Enlargement
Click For Enlargement

Kirby Crawford 1967

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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8" Gun
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