US forces took Kwajalein from Japan in early 1944 and retained the atoll as a base, later converting it into the principal target and tracking range for American ballistic missile testing. Marshallese residents of Kwajalein island were moved to Ebeye, a small island in the same atoll, where housing was built for a fraction of their number; from the early 1960s residents of the mid-corridor islands were also evacuated as impact zones were established. Ebeye became overcrowded, with chronic problems of water, sanitation and disease, while its residents supplied much of the workforce for the base a short ferry ride away. Landowners protested by sailing back to and occupying their islands in the 'Operation Homecoming' actions of the early 1980s, securing improved land-use payments. Land use is now governed by the Compact of Free Association, first agreed in 1986 and extended in 2003 and again in 2023, under which the United States leases the atoll to 2066; displaced mid-corridor communities have not returned. The nuclear test relocations at Bikini and Enewetak are covered separately in the atlas.
The United States took Kwajalein Atoll as a military base and missile range and moved its Marshallese population onto the small island of Ebeye
No reliable count of the atoll's Marshallese inhabitants at the 1944 seizure survives; the Marshall Islands as a whole held only some 10,000-11,000 people at the end of the Japanese administration, and Ebeye was then largely unpopulated. The subsequent trajectory is documented: residents were moved to a planned settlement on Ebeye with housing for half their number, whose population reached about 3,000 in 1968, some 12,000-15,000 by 2008-11, and 8,416 at the 2021 census, against 9,789 for the whole atoll.
There was no direct death toll from the relocations. Overcrowding on Ebeye produced repeated epidemics, including a polio outbreak in 1963 and cholera in 1978, with deaths documented at the time; these were consequences of the concentration rather than of killing.
Marshall Is.