Service History
She was launched on 28 May 1927 as Guam by the Kiangnan Dock and Engineering Works in Shanghai, China, and commissioned on 28 December 1927. Her primary mission was to ensure the safety of American missionaries and other foreigners. Later, the ship also functioned as a "radio spy ship," keeping track of Japanese movements. However, by 1939, she was "escorted" by a Japanese warship wherever she went, as China fell more and more under Imperial Japanese control.
In January 1941, she was renamed Wake, as Guam was to be the new name of a large cruiser being built in the U.S. In March 1941, Columbus Darwin Smith—an old China hand who had been piloting river boats on the Yangtze River—was asked to accept a commission in the U.S. Navy and was appointed captain of Wake with the rank of commander.
On 25 November 1941, Cdr. Smith was ordered to close the Navy installation at Hankow, and sail to Shanghai. When Pearl Harbor was attacked on 7 December 1941, Shanghai immediately fell to Japan. Smith was in command on 8 December 1941 (7 December in Hawaii), when the Japanese captured the ship, which was tied up at a pier in Shanghai. Smith had received a telephone call the night before from a Japanese officer he knew. The officer asked where Smith would be the next morning as he wanted to deliver some turkeys for Smith and his crew. The Japanese did the same to other American officers and officials so as to determine where they would be on December 8th. However, Commander Smith received word from his quartermaster about the Pearl Harbor attack and rushed to the ship only to find it under guard by the Japanese. Surrounded by an overwhelming Japanese force, the crew attempted unsuccessfully to scuttle the craft. Wake surrendered, the only U.S. ship to do so in World War II.
Commander Smith and his crew were confined to a prison camp near Shanghai, where, coincidentally, the U.S. Marines captured on Wake Island were also later imprisoned.
The Japanese gave Wake to their puppet Wang Jingwei regime in Nanjing, where she was renamed Tatara. In 1945, at the end of the war, she was recaptured by the U.S. The U.S. gave the ship to the Chinese nationalists, who renamed her Tai Yuan. Finally, the ship was once again captured by Communist Chinese forces in 1949.
As of 2010, no other ship of the U.S. Navy has been named Wake, though a Casablanca-class escort carrier launched in 1943 was named Wake Island.
Read more about this topic: USS Wake (PR-3)
Famous quotes containing the words service and/or history:
“The general who advances without coveting fame and retreats without fearing disgrace, whose only thought is to protect his country and do good service for his sovereign, is the jewel of the kingdom.”
—Sun Tzu (6th–5th century B.C.)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)