| Wake Island (also known as Wake Atoll, part of the United States Minor Outlying Islands) - Wake Island, which is actually three islands surrounding a lagoon, is an unincorporated territory of the United States, administered by the Office of Insular Affairs, which is a division of the U.S. Department of the Interior. There is a US Air Force base on Wake, with missiles ready for launch, and access is strictly limited. The nearby republic, the Marshall Islands, also claims sovereignty over Wake Island, as does another group of independent Marshall Islanders, called the Kingdom of EnenKio. Both claims which originate from the Marshall Islands, involve stories going back centuries, which state that their ancestors had inhabited the island group in ancient times, but no physical proof has been presented by anyone to date. The US took it over as an empty territory in 1899, and it was used as a Pan American Airways stop-off on the US-China route from 1935 until World War II broke out. It was then turned into a permanent military base, was violently taken over by the Japanese during the Battle of Wake Island, and after their WWII surrender, it went back to being a permanent US military base. |
