The Japanese take Guam

Before dawn on 10 December 1941 Japanese naval infantry came ashore on Guam, the largest island of the Marianas and the only one of them that belonged to the United States. After a brief exchange of fire in the main square of the capital, Agana, the island’s governor, Captain George McMillin, judged further resistance pointless and at about six in the morning surrendered the island. Guam was the first American territory to be occupied by the enemy in this war. On the same day another Japanese detachment took Makin atoll in the British Gilbert Islands and set up a seaplane base there.

An island left undefended

The United States had taken Guam in 1898 during the Spanish–American War. A year later Spain sold the rest of the Marianas to Germany, and in 1914 they were seized by Japan, which after the war received them as a League of Nations mandate. American Guam thus found itself in the very middle of Japanese Micronesia: the nearest Japanese island, Saipan, lay little more than two hundred kilometres to the north.

Under the Washington Treaty of 1922 the United States undertook not to extend the fortifications on its islands in the western Pacific, so Guam was not fortified. By 1930 its only coastal battery had been dismantled, and when in 1938 the navy proposed building fortifications, Congress rejected the idea for fear of provoking Japan. Even after Japan renounced the naval treaties, Guam remained practically defenceless. In the war plans it was placed in a category for which no defence was envisaged: in the event of war the garrison was to destroy the military installations and surrender. In the spring of 1941 minor work began on the harbour and a seaplane base, and in October the families of service personnel and more than a thousand construction workers were evacuated to the United States.

In December 1941 the island had more than 23,000 inhabitants, most of them indigenous Chamorros. The governor, who was also the commander of the base, was, as had always been the case since 1899, a naval officer, Captain George McMillin. At his disposal he had about 270 sailors, most of them unarmed, a Marine company of about 150 men from the barracks at Sumay under Lieutenant Colonel William MacNulty, and 246 poorly trained local soldiers of the Insular Force Guard, the island guard. This entire garrison had about 170 Springfield rifles, a dozen or so Lewis machine guns and a dozen or so Browning automatic rifles (BARs). There was not a single gun, unless one counts the light guns of the minesweeper Penguin, nor any airfield or aircraft.

Bombs from Saipan

News of the attack on Pearl Harbor reached McMillin before five in the morning on 8 December. On Guam, which lies on the Asian side of the date line, it was already Monday, while in Hawaii it was still Sunday 7 December. At about half past eight Japanese aircraft from Saipan appeared over the island. They bombed the Marine barracks at Sumay, the naval workshops at Piti, the radio station, the fuel tanks and the Pan American hotel, which served passengers of the flying boats that crossed the Pacific. Penguin left harbour and fired at the attackers, probably shooting down one aircraft, but she was herself badly damaged and her crew scuttled her; one officer was killed. The raids continued until the afternoon and were repeated on 9 December, when bombs also fell on the governor’s palace in Agana (Hagåtña) and on the surrounding villages.

On 8 December, Washington time, in his address to Congress, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt listed the attack on Guam among the blows with which Japan had opened the war: “Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam.” No one in Washington had any illusion that the island could be held. The nearest American forces capable of helping were thousands of kilometres away, and in those days Washington was preoccupied with the consequences of the disaster in Hawaii and with the situation in the Philippines.

The landing of 10 December

On the evening of 9 December the invasion force sailed from Saipan. Its main strength was the South Seas Detachment (Nankai Shitai) of Major General Tomitarō Horii, about five thousand army troops, made up chiefly of the 144th Infantry Regiment of the 55th Division, which had come to the Marianas by way of the Bonin Islands. It was accompanied by a naval infantry company from Saipan, about 370 strong, and covered at a distance by the four heavy cruisers of the 6th Cruiser Division. The force was out of all proportion to the task: Japanese intelligence had overestimated the island’s garrison. Operations in the central Pacific as a whole were directed by the commander of the 4th Fleet, Vice Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue.

During the night of 9–10 December, a few hours before dawn, the naval detachment landed on Dungcas Beach north of Agana and advanced on the town. The army’s main forces landed simultaneously at several other points: in Tumon Bay in the north, near Merizo in the south-west and in Talofofo Bay on the east coast. At about 4.45 a.m., in the square in front of the governor’s palace in Agana, the Plaza de España, a handful of Insular Force Guard soldiers and Marines opened fire with rifles and machine guns. The brief fight that took place there was the only significant engagement on the island.

McMillin knew that his men had nothing with which to fight several thousand troops supported by warships, and that every hour of resistance would mean casualties among the people of Agana. At about 5.45 a.m. he ordered the Marines to cease fire, and at six he formally surrendered the island. Word of the surrender spread slowly, and in some places firing continued for a while. The crew burned one of the two small patrol boats in the harbour; the other fell into Japanese hands.

According to US Marine Corps tallies, 13 Marines were killed and 37 wounded in the air raids and the fighting on 10 December. The navy lost eight men, and the Insular Force Guard four killed and more than twenty wounded. At least a dozen or so civilians were also killed. The Japanese reported one killed and six wounded. At least one Marine was killed by the Japanese after the surrender.

The Gilbert Islands

Some chronologies state under 8 December that the Japanese occupied the Gilbert Islands, including Tarawa atoll. It was not so. The operation was directed by Rear Admiral Kiyohide Shima, whose minelayer Okinoshima had sailed on 6 December from Jaluit in the Marshall Islands with a naval infantry detachment on board. During the night of 9–10 December the Japanese landed on Butaritari atoll, then known as Makin, in the north of the British colony of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. They took the New Zealand coastwatchers prisoner, and within two days built a base in the lagoon for seaplanes that were to patrol the sea south-east of the Marshalls. In the following days they also occupied nearby Little Makin, and in the weeks after that two other atolls in the northern part of the archipelago.

Tarawa the Japanese merely visited. On 10 December, a few hours before Makin was taken, two destroyers arrived there. The sailors rounded up the Europeans, forbade them to leave the atoll without the permission of the Japanese commander, destroyed the boats and looted a trading company’s store, and then sailed away. The Japanese garrisoned Tarawa only in September 1942, after the American raid on Makin, and then began fortifying the islet of Betio. In October 1942 they executed the captured New Zealand coastwatchers and several civilians there.

Significance

Guam and Makin were small but necessary parts of the Japanese plan. The capture of Guam removed an American outpost from the very middle of Japanese Micronesia and cut the route by which American aircraft and the telegraph cable crossed the Pacific to the Philippines. Makin pushed air reconnaissance out to the south-east, towards the routes linking the United States with Australia. Islands that the Americans had not fortified for fear of provoking Japan fell within two days. Of the American islands of the central Pacific, only the garrison of Wake atoll was still fighting; the battle there had been going on since 8 December.

The Japanese renamed Guam Ōmiya-jima, the Island of the Great Shrine. The American prisoners were shipped to camps in Japan in January 1942. The Chamorros lived through two and a half years of occupation, during which attempts were made to Japanise them, and towards its end they were forced into heavy labour on fortifications, confined in camps and subjected to massacres. Throughout this time they hid the navy radioman George Tweed, the only one of six American sailors who fled into the jungle after the surrender whom the Japanese did not catch. Chamorros suspected of helping the fugitives were interrogated, tortured and killed. The Americans retook Guam in July and August 1944 during the battle for the Marianas. The Gilbert Islands remained in Japanese hands until November 1943, when the US Marines took Tarawa and Makin in one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific War.