The Second World War ended 63 years ago on August 15, 1945. That momentous event was preceded by the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945). However, except for military historians and history buffs, most people do not know how those bombs got to the island of Tinian in the Northern Marianas from where they were flown northward and dropped on those two Japanese cities in early August 1945. The US Navy transported those bombs from the US aboard the Heavy Cruiser USS Indianapolis to Tinian in July 1945. After unloading its lethal cargoes, the USS Indianapolis proceeded to join other US ships in the Philippine Sea. Enroute, however, the Indianapolis was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine north of Palau, which resulted in much loss of lives. Many years later the Japanese Submarine commander, who sank the USS Indianapolis, told a newspaper interviewer that it was pure luck that he got his big catch. He said it was a moonlit night when he surfaced and saw this big ship right before his torpedoes. He fired. He said he was sorry that many men lost their lives in that engagement, but that’s how things happen in wars, the Japanese captain explained. Because of the classified mission of the USS Indianapolis, the loss of the vessel was not immediately noticed for several days. When the alarm was finally raised, search planes flying out of Peleliu in Palau located the hapless survivors floating and swimming in the open sea halfway to the Philippines from Tinian, but their ship was nowhere to be seen. The USS Indianapolis was gone. Hundreds of its sailors perished, too. Even by wartime measurement these losses were staggering but they were immediately dwarfed by what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The hundreds of US seamen from the USS Indianapolis who lost their lives became only tragic footnotes in a larger human tragedy that unfolded at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Around this time in 1969, Micronesian leaders led by Lazarus Salii, Chairman of the Micronesian Political Status Commission, met President Richard Nixon on Guam for a private meeting. Before this special meeting, President Nixon had witnessed the Apollo 11 splashdown in the Pacific and greeted the triumphant US Astronauts after their historic space flight to the moon (July 20, 1969) and back to Earth. Palau and the Marshall Islands eventually elected to go on their own outside the Federated States of Micronesia, which now consists only of Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei, and Kosrae. President Haruo Remeliik appointed Lazarus Salii in 1882 to negotiate for a separate Compact Arrangement with the United States. The Palau Compact was signed in the early eighties but it failed to garner the constitutionally mandated 75 percent voter approval in six referendums called to ratify it. Finally, in 1992, President Ngiratkel Etpison called a popular referendum to amend the constitution to lower the Compact approval margin to a simple majority of the votes cast. The proposed constitutional amendment was approved and so was the 7th referendum to approve the Compact. The treaty took effect in October 1994.
