evidence: Sadly, if the Pratas atoll was "US territory," its new owners lavished it with neither the dignity nor tender care due sovereign property. The Americans departed on May 29 as quickly as they arrived, carting off canned Japanese vegetables, war souvenirs, neglected codebooks and any naval documents left unburnt. The Australian commandos set explosive charges to the rest of it. The Pratas was a dismal pall of smoke as the Bluegill set sail at 4:40pm that afternoon. [...] Seven decades later, it is tempting for military and naval historians to rue missed opportunities, especially given the unforeseen prominence of the hundreds of atolls, islets, reefs and sandbars of the South China Sea. Pratas Island, occupied for a single day in 1945 by a handful of American sailors, was a mere footnote-of-a-footnote in the military-industrial holocaust that was the War in the Pacific, a war in which the US was the principal victor and the sole occupying power of defeated Japan. Today, by everyone’s common agreement, it belongs to a republic of China, but which one? And so, now, it is simple fun to imagine what the 21st century controversies in the South China Sea would have been like if Pratas had remained "US territory" for more than one day in 1945.