America's Forlorn Hope

US Marines Defend Wake Island:
Dec 8-23, 1941

by Mike Joslyn

Because Wake atoll is west of the International Dateline, its calendar is always one day ahead of Pearl Harbor's and the continental United States'. For example, the date of the attack on Pearl Harbor is traditionally cited as December 7th, while at Wake, the date would be December 8th. To prevent confusion, all dates are given as they would be recorded at Wake, including those for events occurring in Hawaii or the Continental U.S.

I'll probably end up eating fish and rice.

    --Maj. James P.S. Devereaux
    On his prospects as incoming commander, 1st Marine Defense Battalion Detachment, Wake, January 1941

In the three and half centuries between its first sighting in 1586 and its transfer to the U.S. Navy in 1934, Wake atoll was visited by few men, and desired by none. Its three islands contained 2600 acres of scrub, sea birds, and after the first handful of visiting ships thousands of rats. It had no fresh water and its lagoon was choked with treacherous coral heads. The U.S. Navy did a thorough survey of Wake in 1840; but despite that (or perhaps because of it), America didn't even bother to raise the flag there for another fifty-eight years.

This oversight was rectified on the fourth of July, 1898, when troops of the Philippine Expeditionary Force landed briefly to hang a small flag from a dead tree, but this was a formal act and not a flareup of U.S. interest. Wake languished through another four decades of occasional shipwrecks and further Navy surveys. The unanimous conclusion of surveyor and statesman alike was that the lack of water, isolation, and exposure to powerful typhoons rendered it useless in the absolute. Then, after 350 years of benign neglect, the threat of the Imperial Japanese Navy propelled Wake to a position of vital strategic importance.

Japan's reward for fighting on the Allied side in the First World War was all of the German colonies in the Pacific, including the Marshall Islands. The Marshalls are, at their closest to Wake, less then 500 miles away. In contrast, Midway is a thousand miles distant, while Pearl Harbor is another thousand beyond that. The League of Nations Mandate governing Japan's use of the Marshalls prohibited a military build-up there, but when Japan withdrew from the League in 1933, those restrictions became a moot point.

By 1935, access to the area was denied to all foreigners, and the Japanese began a furious program of building "cultural and industrial facilities:" their euphemism for airfields and naval bases. As their main bastion at Kwajalein atoll was a mere 600 miles away, Wake was obviously a very good place to watch for the approach of the U.S. Navy, and a very bad place to be watched from. In the course of their reconnaissance, the Japanese discovered U.S. efforts to turn Wake into a seaplane base, and that development clinched the matter. The 4th fleet -- responsible for the defense of the Marshalls -- was instructed to seize the solitary atoll on the outbreak of war.

The U.S. Navy, thanks to a depression-strapped budget, did not have the latitude of its Imperial Japanese counterpart. They did have, however, a civilian company willing to do the spade work on a potential military installation at Wake. Pan American airlines wanted to establish a way station at the island for their "Clippership" route to Manila, and the Navy was more than happy to put the atoll at their disposal. By 1935, Pan Am was flying into Wake on a regular basis.

With the ramps and some facilities in, Pan Am had given the Navy a start on its own seaplane base, but it was only a start. Navy planners convinced Congress in 1938 to plow seven and a half million dollars into Wake in an effort to create a base-complex that could handle land-based fighters and submarines, in addition to PBYs. Since it was still peacetime -- and much to the detriment of its later defense -- construction on docks and barracks forged ahead, while fortification was neglected entirely.

As bulldozers carved roads and taxiways out of the brush on Wake, the strategic presumptions which had started the building boom on Wake suddenly reversed themselves. Japan was no longer considered the principle threat; Germany would take first priority in a two front war. By July of 1941, U.S. planners determined that if war with Japan broke out U.S. forces would have to fall back to a line running from Alaska through Hawaii to the Panama canal. Everything to the west, including Wake, would be written off.

"If Wake is defended, it would require extended Japanese operations in an area where we might be able to get at them."

    --Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, CinC US Pacific Fleet
    in a letter to the CNO, April 18,1941

Admiral Kimmel saw Wake in a different light. Nine months before Pearl Harbor was attacked, he predicted that the Japanese would feel compelled to take the atoll, and he proposed that the U.S. ambush the Japanese as they attempted to do so.

For the trap to work, however, Wake had to be able to hold out long enough for it to snap shut. With that in mind, Kimmel urged the chief of naval operations to reinforce Wake with a Marine Defense battalion. Between the first of August and November 2d, 388 Marines of the 1st Defense Battalion stepped off transports onto landing craft waiting to take them to the beaches of Wake.

On October 15, they were joined by the man who would lead them into battle and ultimately surrender them Major James Devereaux. The Marines joined 73 unarmed Navy and Army Air Force troops (involved with communications and running the naval sea plane base) and about 1200 construction workers (also unarmed). The Army and Navy personnel would become fully engaged in the defense of Wake, but only about 120 of the construction workers would answer the call to the colors. The rest would flee into the bush after the first Japanese air raids, dragging pilfered supplies with them.

The Marines arrived at Wake with their full complement of anti-aircraft and naval guns, but they were short of everything else, particularly men. The five inchers were fully staffed, but only half the 3" anti-aircraft guns had crews, and more than a third of the machine guns went unmanned. Vying with the manpower shortage as the Marines' biggest headache was the deficiency in supporting hardware; only one AA battery (Battery D on Peale island) had all the necessary height and range- finding gear to engage enemy planes with any hope of success. Battery E, stationed on Wake island, had range finders but no height-finding equipment, and the completely unmanned Battery F on Wilkes island had neither. Worse still, the long-promised early warning radar was still in its crate back at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked.

One thing which Wake had in abundance, thanks to the civilian construction crews, was earth moving equipment. Unfortunately, with war only weeks away, the Navy refused to release any of it; the Marines were left to left to claw their own defenses out of the unyielding coral rock with pick and shovel. This exhausting work was interrupted, in turn, by the frequent arrival of B-17s on their way to the Philippines. Since the refueling facilities were still being built, the bombers had to be refueled by hand from 50 gallon drums, manhandled ashore by Marines, usually in the middle of the night.

To the general relief of the garrison, one gaping hole in the defense of Wake was plugged on December 4th, when twelve F4F Wildcat fighters of Marine Fighter Squadron 211 (VMF 211 in Marine terms) touched down at the air strip.

America's Forlorn Hope US Marines Defend Wake Island: Dec 8-23, 1941

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