The defence of Wake Island

At dawn on 11 December 1941 a Japanese invasion force appeared off the southern shore of Wake atoll: a light cruiser, six destroyers, two transports and two old destroyers converted into landing ships. The Japanese were certain that three days of bombing had destroyed the island’s defences. The US Marines let them close to within a few kilometres and only then opened fire. Within an hour the destroyer Hayate had blown up after being hit by a coastal gun, and the destroyer Kisaragi had sunk after an attack by American fighters. The force turned back without putting a single soldier ashore. It was the only Japanese landing to be repulsed in the first months of the Pacific War.

An atoll halfway across

Wake is a small atoll made up of three islets, Wake, Wilkes and Peale, enclosing a shallow lagoon, some 3,700 kilometres west of Hawaii and about a thousand kilometres north of the Japanese bases in the Marshall Islands. From 1935 it was a stopping point for Pan American flying boats crossing the Pacific to Asia. In 1941 the navy began building an air base and a submarine base there, and Admiral Husband Kimmel, commander of the Pacific Fleet, who since February had been pressing for the fortification of the islands thrust out towards Japan, had the atoll garrisoned by Marines.

In December some 450 men of a detachment of the 1st Marine Defense Battalion under Major James Devereux were stationed on Wake. They had six 127 mm (5-inch) guns, taken long before from an old battleship and set up in three batteries, twelve 76 mm (3-inch) anti-aircraft guns and several dozen heavy machine guns. There were too few men, however, to man all the positions, and the battalion had not been given a radar. On 4 December the carrier Enterprise delivered to the island twelve Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters of Major Paul Putnam’s squadron VMF-211. On the atoll there were also 68 sailors and a few army personnel, and above all more than 1,100 civilian workers of construction firms working for the navy. Since 28 November command of the whole island had been held by Commander Winfield Scott Cunningham, a naval aviator.

8 December: the air raid

Wake lies on the Asian side of the date line, so news of the attack on Pearl Harbor arrived there on the morning of Monday 8 December. The Pan Am flying boat Philippine Clipper, which had just taken off for Guam, turned back. Devereux put the garrison on alert, and Putnam sent four fighters out on patrol. The other eight stood on the airfield, because there were no protected revetments for them.

Around noon some thirty-odd Mitsubishi G3M bombers arrived from the base on Kwajalein atoll. They came in low, hidden by cloud and by the noise of the surf, and neither the patrol nor the gun crews spotted them. Bombs and fire from the aircraft’s machine guns destroyed seven Wildcats on the ground and badly damaged the eighth. Of the squadron’s 55 personnel, 23 were killed and 11 wounded. The fuel tanks went up in flames, and the Pan Am base was also hit, killing employees of the airline, among them Chamorros from Guam employed to service the flying boats. Philippine Clipper, riddled with holes but still airworthy, took off the Pan Am staff, except for the Chamorros, and flew via Midway to Hawaii. The next day the bombers destroyed the hospital, and on 10 December they struck Wilkes, where the explosion of the builders’ dynamite store destroyed part of the ammunition. At night the garrison moved the anti-aircraft guns to new positions, leaving wooden dummies in the old ones.

11 December: the landing repulsed

The attack on Wake was led by Rear Admiral Sadamichi Kajioka, commander of the 6th Destroyer Squadron, from his flagship, the light cruiser Yūbari. He had six old destroyers, two patrol boats converted from destroyers to carry the landing force, two transports and several hundred men of the navy’s special naval landing forces. He was covered by the light cruisers Tenryū and Tatsuta. The sea was rough, and during the night of 10–11 December it proved impossible to lower the landing craft. Kajioka decided to shell the island from his ships first.

The ships closed the shore before dawn and the cruisers opened fire. Devereux, followed by Cunningham, forbade any reply until the targets came closer, so as not to reveal the positions of the batteries to an enemy whose guns had the longer range. The Japanese took the island’s silence as proof that the bombing had done its work. When Yūbari had closed to about four kilometres off Peacock Point, Battery A opened fire. The Americans were convinced that they had hit the cruiser several times. Japanese records speak of lighter damage, but the ship laid a smokescreen and withdrew to the south.

Battery L on Wilkes islet took on the destroyers, which were steaming along the shore at a range of about 3.5 kilometres. After the third salvo, at about 6.52 a.m., Hayate vanished in a huge explosion, broke in two and sank within minutes before the defenders’ eyes. Only one sailor from her crew was saved. She was the first Japanese surface warship sunk in the Pacific War. Fire was shifted to the next ships, and Battery B on Peale engaged further destroyers. At about seven Kajioka ordered a withdrawal.

At that point the four surviving Wildcats, which had taken off on patrol at dawn, joined the fight. Captains Henry Elrod, Herbert Freuler and Frank Tharin and Major Putnam bombed and strafed the retreating ships, returning to the island for fresh bombs. They hit Tenryū, Tatsuta and the transport Kongō Maru. A little later there was an explosion aboard the destroyer Kisaragi, which was carrying depth charges on deck, and she sank with all hands. American historians most often credit her to Captain Elrod’s bombs, although the exact circumstances cannot be established. Two fighters were damaged, and Elrod’s aircraft crashed on landing.

More than three hundred men were killed aboard the two destroyers. Japanese figures speak of about 400 killed and wounded in all in this operation; American estimates in the post-war years were higher. The defenders had four wounded and, according to some sources, one killed. Kajioka returned with the rest of his force to Kwajalein. Japanese officers later admitted that the plan had been too optimistic and had relied too heavily on land-based aircraft.

“Send us more Japs”

News of the victory reached the United States at a time when nothing but bad news was coming in from the Pacific. The press seized upon the defenders’ supposed reply to the question of what they needed: “Send us more Japs.” The phrase became famous, but probably no one sent it deliberately. According to the explanation accepted by most historians, the words came from the random padding added at the beginning and end of coded messages to confuse the enemy, and both commanders, Cunningham and Devereux, denied ever having written anything of the kind. In reality Cunningham was sending Pearl Harbor long lists of the spare parts, gunsights, radars and ammunition he needed.

The following days and the failed relief

The bombers from the Marshalls returned almost daily. The fighters dwindled: mechanics under Lieutenant John Kinney assembled serviceable machines from the parts of wrecked ones, but by 20 December only two were left. The airmen several times reported sinking submarines, which Japanese records do not confirm. One Japanese submarine, Ro-66, did sink near the island on 17 December, but after a collision with another Japanese submarine. It is sometimes stated that several Japanese warships were sunk or damaged on 20 December. There was, however, no fighting at sea that day: an American PBY flying boat landed on the lagoon with orders for Cunningham, who was to prepare for the evacuation of most of the civilians. Japanese warships were sunk only on 11 December.

Meanwhile a relief expedition was being prepared at Pearl Harbor. On 15 and 16 December Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher’s Task Force 14 sailed with the carrier Saratoga, carrying the fighters of squadron VMF-221 bound for Wake. The seaplane tender Tangier carried men of the 4th Defense Battalion, guns, ammunition and radars, and was to take the civilians off the island. The force was slowed by an old, slow oiler. Kimmel did not see the end of the expedition: on 17 December he was relieved of command of the Pacific Fleet. His interim successor, Vice Admiral William Pye, a cautious man aware that the carriers were the only striking force the fleet had left, turned the force back on 22 December, Hawaiian time, when it was still several hundred kilometres from Wake. The Japanese were by then on their way with a second, much stronger landing force.

Significance

The repulse of the landing on 11 December did not change Wake’s position, but in the United States, stunned by the disaster at Pearl Harbor and the loss of Guam, it became the first good news of the war. For the Japanese it was a humiliation, all the greater because the offensive as a whole, launched with the signal “Niitakayama nobore”, was going according to plan. The navy decided to return with much larger forces, and the Combined Fleet command sent to Wake two carriers from Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo’s force, which was returning from Hawaii. On 23 December the atoll fell. The lesson the Japanese drew from Wake was that the defenders’ air strength had to be completely destroyed before a landing. The Americans remembered the defence of the island as a symbol of resistance in the first weeks of the war: the film Wake Island reached the screens as early as 1942, and the myth of “the Alamo of the Pacific” long obscured the decisions that had left the garrison to its fate.