Battle of Wake Island

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Wake Island began within hours of Pearl Harbor, on the 8th of December 1941, when 36 Japanese bombers swept in from bases in the Marshall Islands and destroyed eight aircraft on the ground. What followed was a 15-day siege that pitted a small Marine garrison, four surviving fighter planes, and more than a thousand civilian construction workers against the full weight of the Japanese Empire's Pacific offensive. How did a handful of defenders manage to sink two Japanese warships and turn back an entire invasion fleet? And what happened to the men who were left behind when the island finally fell?

• 2. The Atoll Before the Storm

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  Wake Island sat at the center of competing ambitions long before the war reached it. Pan American Airways had operated a seaplane base and hotel on the atoll since 1935, one stop on the first commercial air route across the Pacific. The flying boats were among the largest fixed-wing aircraft of the day, and a ticket was expensive, but the service cut the travel time to Asia and Australia dramatically.

  In January 1941, the United States Navy began construction of a military base on the same atoll. About 1,221 civilian workers for the Morrison-Knudsen Civil Engineering Company arrived to build an airfield, a seaplane base, a submarine base, and a channel through Wilkes Island for submarines to reach the lagoon. Many of those workers were veterans of major civilian construction projects, including the Boulder Dam, Bonneville Dam, and Grand Coulee Dam. Others had come simply because they needed the money.

  The 326-foot dredge Columbia arrived in April 1941 and immediately set to work. The Marines arrived in August of that year, with 450 officers and men of the 1st Marine Defense Battalion under Major J.P.S. Devereux. They were short on equipment; notably, their air search radar units had not yet arrived. Forty-five Chamorro men from the Mariana Islands and Guam also worked at the Pan American facility, which kept running right up to the day of the first Japanese air raid.

• 3. The First Raid and the Repulse

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  On the 7th of December 1941, a Sunday, Major Devereux had ordered the garrison's first practice drill, which went well enough that he sent the men to rest and relax. The next morning, a China Clipper flying boat had already left for Guam when it received word of the attack on Pearl Harbor and turned back.

  Hours later, 36 Mitsubishi G3M3 medium bombers hit Wake, destroying eight of the 12 F4F-3 Wildcats on the ground. The four Wildcats that survived were in the air on patrol but missed the attacking formation in poor visibility. Twenty-three of the 55 Marine aviation personnel were killed, 11 were wounded, and nine Pan Am employees also died. The remaining Pan American staff were evacuated aboard the Philippine Clipper, which had survived the raid with only bullet holes; it required three takeoff attempts before getting airborne and flew to Midway, then Honolulu, then San Francisco over three days.

  The five Chamorro workers who were in the hospital when it was bombed on the 9th of December died the following day. The surviving Chamorros agreed to help fortify the island when the military commander asked, and 33 of them survived the war; in 1982 they were granted veteran status for their contributions.

  The first Japanese amphibious assault came on the morning of the 11th of December. Battery L on Peale islet sank the destroyer Hayate at a range of 4,000 yards with at least two direct hits to her magazines; she exploded and went down in under two minutes, becoming the first Japanese surface warship sunk in the war. Four Wildcats then sank the destroyer Kisaragi by dropping a bomb on her stern where the depth charges were stored. The Japanese invasion fleet withdrew without landing, having lost 407 men, and Wake's garrison had inflicted the Japanese military's first setback of the war against the Americans.

• 4. The Race to Resupply

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  News of the successful repulse reached the United States mainland, and with it came a misleading radio broadcast revealing that the Wake garrison was "very small." The defenders could hear that broadcast, and found it disconcerting that their numbers had been publicized while resupply had not yet arrived.

  A relief plan began to take shape at Pearl Harbor. A planning officer realized that if a seaplane tender that had survived the Pearl Harbor attack were converted for transport, and the people on Wake brought no possessions, it could carry even 1,500 people. Admiral Fletcher's Task Force 14 was assembled around the carrier Saratoga, which departed Pearl on the 16th of December 1941 with the seaplane tender Tangier carrying the 4th Marine Defense Battalion, fighter squadron VMF-221 with Brewster F2A-3 Buffalo fighters, radar equipment, ammunition, and supplies.

  A PBY arrived at Wake on the 20th of December with mail and secret orders to begin evacuating civilians. It also took out Lieutenant Colonel Walter Bayler, the last Marine to leave Wake before its capture, because he was one of the few officers with experience establishing air-ground communications networks and knowledge of the still top-secret U.S. radar program. The Japanese intercepted the PBY's radio transmissions and moved their second invasion attempt forward by one day.

  On the 21st of December, 49 aircraft from the Japanese carriers Hiryu and Soryu attacked Wake. On the 22nd, a follow-up carrier raid of 39 planes downed both remaining Wildcats. With communications disrupted, Task Force 14 was recalled on the 23rd, the very morning the Japanese landed. The Saratoga delivered VMF-221 to Midway on Christmas Day and reached Pearl Harbor on the 29th.

• 5. The Fall and Its Aftermath

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  The second Japanese invasion force landed at 02:35 on the 23rd of December, composed of ships from the first attempt plus 1,500 Japanese marines, with reinforcements drawn from the forces that had just struck Pearl Harbor, Guam, and the Gilbert Islands. Lieutenant Robert Hanna's 3-inch gun destroyed both Patrol Boat No. 32 and Patrol Boat No. 33 before the Japanese marines bypassed his position and attacked the airfield. A counterattack led by Captain Platt drove a Japanese company back to its landing area, but the outcome could not be reversed.

  Commandant Cunningham had received word that the relief expedition had been recalled. With field phone lines cut by Japanese landing forces, Major Devereux assumed his strongpoints on Wake's south shore had been overrun, and Cunningham issued orders to surrender. The 15-day siege cost the U.S. 49 Marines killed, two missing, and 49 wounded; three Navy personnel and at least 70 civilians were killed, including ten Chamorros. Another 433 U.S. personnel were captured, along with the majority of the civilian contractors.

  Captain Henry T. Elrod of VMF-211 was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. He had shot down two Japanese G3M Nells, contributed to the sinking of the Kisaragi, and led ground troops after no flyable U.S. aircraft remained. A special decoration, the Wake Island Device, was created to honor all who fought in the island's defense.

• 6. The Voyage of the Nita Maru

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  At the battle's end on the 23rd of December, 1,603 people, including 1,150 civilians, were taken prisoner. Three weeks later, all but roughly 350-360 were loaded onto the Nita Maru, later renamed the Chūyō, for transport to prisoner of war camps in Asia.

  The ship's conditions were recorded in stark terms. The prisoners were under the authority of Toshio Saito, who encouraged cruel treatment. The POWs were given too little food and water, held in unsanitary conditions in the ship's holds, and systematically beaten. On the 17th of January the ship arrived in Japan, where the prisoners were displayed to the press.

  Admiral Kajioka had refused a request by one of his officers to execute POWs during the voyage, but that officer went directly to Saito. On the 22nd of January, Saito selected five men at random and had them brought on deck. He told them in Japanese: "You have killed many Japanese soldiers in battle. For what you have done you are now going to be killed... as representatives of American soldiers." They were beheaded; the bodies were used for bayonet practice and thrown overboard.

  Those who survived the voyage were taken to Woosung in Japanese-occupied China, where they spent several years. In 1945 they were moved by train through Manchuria to Japan to work in a coal mine. One of the last Wake POWs to die before repatriation was struck by a supply container dropped by an aircraft attempting to deliver food to the camp. The survivors were eventually taken to Guam for medical recovery before being returned home.

• 7. War Crimes on Wake

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  On the 5th of October 1943, American naval aircraft raided Wake. Two days later, the Japanese commander Shigematsu Sakaibara ordered the beheading of a prisoner caught stealing food. Sakaibara had arrived by aircraft to command Wake in December 1942, and he and 97 other prisoners had been kept on the island to perform forced labor. Fearing an invasion after the October raid, Sakaibara ordered all of them killed.

  The prisoners were marched to the northern end of the island, blindfolded, and shot with a machine gun. One prisoner escaped and returned to the site, carving the message "98 US PW 5-10-43" into a large coral rock near the mass grave before he was recaptured. Sakaibara personally beheaded that man with a katana. The inscription remains visible on Wake Island today.

  When Japan surrendered and the remaining garrison on the island stood down on the 4th of September 1945, the Japanese initially claimed the prisoners had been killed in a bombing attack. That account unraveled when Japanese officers left written statements revealing the truth, and Sakaibara eventually confessed. Sakaibara was executed by hanging in Guam on the 19th of June 1947. His subordinate, Lieutenant Commander Tachibana, received a death sentence that was later commuted to life in prison. The remains of the murdered civilians were eventually reburied at Section G of the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as Punchbowl Crater, in Honolulu.

• 8. Three Years Under Japanese Rule

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  Japanese forces held Wake Island for the duration of the Pacific War, fortifying it against an American counterattack that never came in the form of a landing. The U.S. Navy chose a submarine blockade over an amphibious invasion, a decision that proved devastating to the garrison. By May 1944, with their main resupply base in the Marshall Islands captured by the Allies, the Japanese on Wake began rationing food. Fishing, growing vegetables, bird eggs, and rats all became essential sources of nutrition; the source records that sometimes tens of thousands of rats were eaten to stave off starvation. About 75% of the Japanese occupiers died.

  The blockade and the hunting pressure the garrison placed on local wildlife is believed to have driven the Wake Island Rail to extinction. This small flightless bird was found nowhere else on earth.

  In June 1945, the Japanese hospital ship Takasago Maru was permitted to visit the island and departed with 974 patients. The destroyer USS McDermut, which stopped the ship to inspect it, recorded firsthand that about 15% of the evacuees were extremely sick. The remaining Japanese garrison formally surrendered on the 4th of September 1945 to Brigadier General Lawson H. M. Sanderson and a detachment of United States Marines, aboard a destroyer escort in a brief ceremony, three days after Japan's formal surrender was signed aboard the battleship in Tokyo Bay on the 2nd of September 1945.