My dad always cursed it…the hell in paradise, now I (sort of) know why

Palmyra atoll, in 2000

I was watching the Clint Eastwood Iwo Jima film when I decided to look up where dad served during World War II, a tiny island that he referred to as something like  hell in a poem he dug out of his scrapbook and gave me some years ago (another story I won’t go into).

Found some interesting links, using the Google, and now I know why he generally does not speak highly of his time there.  You would think being stationed on a tropical island would be great, but one story talks about how the beaches are beautiful but useless because they are a breeding ground for sharks, and this story notes how remote the island is, even in modern times, not only because of location, but because its airport runway is coral and can only be used by certain types of planes:

http://military.rightpundits.com/2008/04/23/researchers-stranded-on-palmyra-island/

Apparently, a lot of the WW2 era buildings are still there and being used — it’s considered a “research outpost”, so being stationed there was kind of like being on Deep Space Nine back in 1943 or early 1944, which is when I think Dad first arrived (underage because he lied in order to volunteer for duty).  Imagine if you spent your high-school junior year in someplace that remote.  The whole island looks to be about as big as the Logan Square neighborhood in Chicago (literally), and I seem to remember dad saying that the Japanese were staked out on one side of the island and the U.S. on the other.  It is 6 feet above sea level at its highest point, although the trees get up to 15 feet at some points.

Another bit of interesting trivia at:
http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/04/local_couples_stranded_on_paci.html

“Palmyra is, technically, an atoll, not an island, Martin said,
explaining that an atoll is a ring-shaped coral reef or a string of
closely spaced small coral islands. Generally, an atoll is what remains after the center of a volcanic island sinks, producing an interior lagoon. Palmyra has 56 islets, he said, and its highest point is 6 feet above sea level.
The journey to Palmyra was one of several the Nature Conservancy offers regularly to donors, board members and companies that support the private organization’s preservation work, Martin said.
The conservancy owns Palmyra, which no humans have inhabited except for sailors during World War II, Timmons said. Because it’s on the equator, he said, Palmyra is an ideal spot for studying global warming and the El Nino phenomenon.”

Seems like that would be a pretty cool trip to make, almost worth making the donation to the Nature Conservancy just to see where Dad served.  It’s 1,000 miles southwest of Honolulu, and would definitely be the farthest south I’ve ever been, despite trips to the southernmost points of Mexico (which is already sometimes unbearably hot).

Also found this:
http://www.janesoceania.com/palmyra_images/index.htm

I wondered if Dad knew any of these guys, there were only about 5000 guys who were stationed there during the whole war, and probably not nearly that

Marines on Palmyra, WWII

many at one time.   Not enough ground to stand ’em all on!

Also a brief history of the island, which apparently was “owned” by a family, who let the U.S. use it during the war, and then filed suit and got it back only after a Supreme Court ruling:

http://www.janeresture.com/palmyra/

It’s also surrounded by one of the few remaining pristine coral reefs in the world, due to its remote location, and has long had a reputation for being haunted or the location of strange paranormal activity.  Many planes have crashed there, and pirate ships wrecked there (not a surprise, due to the topology of the area and the fact that it is at the meeting point for the west and south jet streams, making it difficult to judge wind conditions).

You can only visit there with the approval of the Nature Conservancy, which now owns the island.  There apparently is a recent initiative to make this a protected national park akin to the Grand Canyon.

Quite an interesting diversion, meant to be a moment’s map check which turned into a little more than that, giving a little more life to the many war stories I’ve heard my dad tell over the years about his time there — stories which actually got better over the years, and which helped me as a writer learn how to tell stories in an engaging way.

I’ll have to ask him about some of this next time we talk, Palmyra always had a sort of mystical aura about it, the far-away place where Dad did his war duty, but now it has even more mysticism, now that I know it’s a legendarily obscure and isolated base — even by today’s always-connected standards — with a reputation to rival that of the Bermuda Triangle.