This story is from the book "Pacific Alamo: Battle for Wake Island". It recounts the reactions of the surviving POW's captured at Wake. Here is one description of what happened after the Japanese Surrender:
. . .The Americans in Japan's Hakodate Prison Camp #3, including Gunner Hamas and other Wake Island Marines, held and emotional ceremony. Fifteen men weaved together bits of red, white, and blue cloth into a crude Stars and Stripes, and as one man sounded Morning Colors on a bugle left by the Japanese guards, the entire camp assembled. For the first time in four years, stilled service men watched their country's flag rise to the top of an improvised flagpole fashioned from a cut young tree. Men who had not lost their composure after the battle or during the difficult moments in the prison camp unabashedly stood at attention while tears streamed down their faces. The flag for which they had fought and for which some of their friends had died, was at last once again flying proudly over their heads.
Wukovits, John , Pacific Alamo: Battle for Wake Island (New York: Penguin Group), p. 245.
