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Concept
Woleai
Summary
Woleai, also known as Oleai, is a coral atoll of twenty-two islands in the western Caroline Islands in the Pacific Ocean, and forms a legislative district in the Yap State in the Federated States of Micronesia and is located approximately west-northwest of Ifalik and northeast of Eauripik. Woleai is also the name of the largest of the islets constituting the atoll, lying to the northeast.
The population of the atoll was 1,081 in 2000, on an area of 4.5 km2.
The islands constitute a double atoll forming the number eight, with a total length of and up to wide; however, most of reef on the southern rim is submerged or poorly developed. The northern and eastern rims have several relatively large islets. The western lagoon is deeper and larger than its eastern counterpart. Both components are part of the same seamount. The total land area for both components combined is only .
The Austronesian ancestors of the Micronesians who make up the indigenous population of the Caroline Islands arrived in the islands 0-200 CE. Woleai subsequently became culturally unique among the Caroline Islands because of a script in use among some speakers of the Woleaian language prior to 1913. Woleai was among islands to the southeast of Yap that became tributaries of the Yapese Empire from about 1500 CE.
Woleai came under the control of the Spanish Empire in 1686, governed along with the rest of the Caroline Islands as part of the Spanish East Indies. Spain sold the islands to the German Empire in 1899. In 1914, in the early weeks of World War I, the Empire of Japan seized German possessions in the Pacific, including Woleai. Assigned a League of Nations mandate to administer the islands after the war in accordance with the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, Japan subsequently administered Woleai under the South Seas Mandate.
In 1944, as Allied forces closed in on the Mariana Islands during World War II, a contingent of 6,426 troops from the Imperial Japanese Army's 50th Independent Mixed Brigade and the Imperial Japanese Navy's 44th Base Guard Unit and 216th Base Construction Unit heavily fortified Woleai.
Official source
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