America's Forlorn Hope

IJN Invasion: Round Two

by Mike Joslyn

Once again, the weather soured as Kajioka's fleet approached Wake. Rough water and torrential rains pelted his ships. Perhaps, in the resultant gloom, the tense Japanese lookouts began to see things: a torpedo-armed PBY dipping out of the clouds, a PT boat making its final run-in, or maybe even Wake itself, rising up where it wasn't. Whatever it was, the Japanese began firing at something, because the Marines could see the flashes of their gunfire over the horizon at around 1:00 AM on the morning of December 23.

"The honorable first order of Charge! was given, and the daring officers and men ... went bravely down to the surface of the sea."

    --Kayoshi Ibushi, IJN combat correspondent describing the forming up of the Japanese landing wave, December 23, 1941

Forty-five minutes later, a similar panic seized Marine lookouts on Peale island. With units being roused all over the atoll, Devereaux put in a call to Lt. Woodrow Kessler, commander of Battery B. Kessler denied that any landings had taken place on Peale, but he did report lights bobbing offshore; (not surprising -- the dead-tired Marines had been reporting lights offshore every night for quite awhile). Unaware of this, second lieutenant Arthur Poindexter, in command of Devereaux's mobile reserve of twenty-three men and four .30 machine guns at Camp 1, began to roll out for Peale. Devereaux ordered him to return to Camp 1.

Over on Wilkes, machine gun officer Captain Wesley Platt started deploying his men to repel a landing. After sending two of Battery Us gun sections (the equivalent of two rifle squads) to the north shore of Wilkes, he took the remainder of the battery and strung it between the middle of the island and Battery F, handing extra ammo and grenades to his men as they left for their foxholes. Platt then manned Battery F with a pick-up collection of sailors, civilians and Marine searchlight operators. The 3" guns were depressed to fire at the beach, a mere 100 yards away, and the shells were fused to explode a few seconds after leaving the muzzle.

At 2:00 AM, the 2d Maizuru clambered down Jacob's ladders into their landing craft, and the two Patrol Craft revved up their engines to make 12 knots: sufficient to run them permanently onto the coral reef. One hundred men from the Takano company were slated to assault Wilkes island, while the rest of the Japanese naval troops were landing on Wake island south of Camp 1 and the airfield.

A half hour later, Battery A spotted the two patrol craft headed for the beach at the west end of the airfield. In response, Devereaux ordered Poindexter to move the mobile reserve to between Camp 1 and the western end of the airstrip. At the same time, observers on Wilkes reported barge engines droning over the pounding of the surf One of Wilke's .50 machine guns opened up, taking the first shots of the American defense at the incoming Takano unit.

Fifteen minutes after the first Japanese touched down on the reef, Captain Platt requested permission to illuminate the beaches with his searchlight. Instantly granted, the light switched on, revealing not only the two boats landing Japanese troops on Wilkes, but also the two Patrol Craft grounded south of Wake island. The silhouetted ex-destroyers would have been short work for Batteries A and L, if they could have fired on them. Unfortunately, sandy hummocks blocked the line of fire down the beach.

In fact, only one artillery piece could fire at the invaders: a 3" anti-aircraft gun facing the beach south of the aircraft park- but there was no crew. It suddenly occurred to the man in charge of the airfield machine gun complement--2d Lt. Robert Hanna--that this one weapon had become vitally important, and he rushed a scratch crew of one Marine and three civilians to man it. Devereaux seconded Hanna's quick- thinking deployment by ordering Major Paul Putnam and the last 20 survivors of VMF-211 to fight there as infantry.

Back on Wilkes, Battery F was already blasting away at the Japanese landing barges in front of their guns. Further east, 2d Lt. John MacAlister dispatched two men -- one of them Sgt. Bedell of Battery L fame -- to grenade the boats. Unfortunately, they only managed to hurl a single grenade before Bedell was killed and his fellow grenadier was wounded. The Japanese fanned out north and west to take the two batteries on the island, overrunning Battery F in the process and driving the Marines there toward McAlister. The Japanese forced their way another 125 yards towards the coastal battery until they were stopped by one of the Marine's .50 machine guns. This was the high-water mark for the Japanese on Wilkes, for now they found themselves caught in the crossfire between McAlister and on their right and the machine gun on their left.

At this point, the Navys prohibition against borrowing civilian ditch-digging equipment cost the Marines most of their communications network. The miles of telephone cable left unburied were now systematically cut by Japanese troops. By 3:00 AM. Devereaux had lost touch with Wilkes, Battery A, and Hanna's command post. In trying to reestablish these severed links, the Marines made another unpleasant discovery: the inter-island radios didn't work. Devereaux's world was now limited to Peale island and the 600 yard circle around his headquarters where the phones were still in operation.

The loss of communications with the south side of Wake also meant a loss of communication with the mobile reserve. Devereaux struggled to create another mobile reserve from the uncommitted Marines on Peale, and informed that island's commanding officer- Captain Bryghte Godbold -- that the 40 men of his Battery D were now Wake's last reserve. (Batteries B and E were left intact; B to fire on naval targets later and E because it was the last fully manned and effective anti-aircraft battery on all of Wake.) At the same time Devereaux ordered nine of this scratch reserve to be sent by truck to his command post.

By 3:15, ten Marines (the section and Corporal Leon Graves) and a jittery civilian truck driver arrived at the battalion HQ Graves was ordered to go to the road junction about 600 yards south of the airstrip and then to head west on foot to link up with Hanna. They reboarded the truck and drove Off, their fate a mystery for the next hour.

South of the airfield landing apron, Lt. Hanna and his amateur gun crew sighted down the bore of their 3 inch gun at PC 33. The range proved to be less then 500 yards and the first round was right on target, killing two and wounding seven. Fourteen more rounds were put into PC33, setting it afire. Now both patrolcraft were fully illuminated, and Hanna started to work over PC32. In a desperate effort to stop him, Uchidds company surged forward, pressing Putnam's wrench-jockeys turned riflemen into a box around Hanna's gun.

The burning patrol craft also lit up the beach for Poindexter and the original mobile reserve. They could now see the Japanese from PC32 trying to filter north between them and the western end of the airfield. One of their machine guns rattled away at the intersection, trying to keep the Japanese from using the dense scrub there to attack the airfield and the reserve from behind. With this barrier of fire in place, Poindexter left the reserve position to find out what the machine guns back at Camp 1 were shooting at.

Not surprisingly, the machine gunners at Camp 1 were doing what every other Marine on the south side of Wake was doing: shooting at the Japanese. In their particular case, it meant pouring the fire of four .30 weapons into the two Japanese barges which had landed 90 feet away. While the bullets were simply bouncing off the metal sides, no one inside the barges was particularly eager to wade through this hail of fire. The barges vacillated between pulling off and ramming forward again in a vain attempt to find their way through the reef and onto the beach.

Poindexter and three volunteers waded out to hurl hand grenades into the open barges, causing heavy casualties, but to avoid hitting Poindexter and his grenade teams, the machine guns had to cease their firing. Prodded by the grenades and tempted by the lull in the machine-gun fire, seventy five Japanese boiled over the sides and rushed into the bush east of Camp 1.

A lot had happened in the hour since the Japanese first set foot on the beach. Their drive on Wilkes had been contained and their beachhead south of the airfield barely so. East of Camp 1, they were streaming into the bush headed for Battery E. What the Marines didn't know was that troops from a third landing between Hanna and the eastern tip of the island were now also forming up to attack.

What was happening in the scrub between Battery A and the airfield was singularly unimportant to Major Putnam and the Marines arrayed around Hanna's gun. They were fighting for their lives where they stood. Putnam turned to his men and told them "this is as far as we go."

Meanwhile, Corporal Graves and his nine man section piled out of their truck to find that they'd been taken only a third of the way to their drop-off point. In spite of this, Graves headed off the road in search of Lt. Hanna and almost immediately ran into rifle and machine gun fire that killed one Marine. Unable to get through, he reversed his direction and made his way back to the battalion headquarters.

After an hour of steady firing, Battery E came under attack at 4:00 AM. Staccato machine gun bursts, interrupted by the occasional grenade and 70mm howitzer round, seemed to be coming from the opposite shore of a little inlet southwest of the battery. To prevent the situation from deteriorating any further, Lt. William Lewis ordered one of his gun sections to push down the nearby road and keep the Japanese from getting any closer. They managed to get about fifty yards before they were forced to hit the dirt, but, true to their orders, they held back the Japanese in an ongoing fire fight until the surrender.

Battery A was also now under attack. The range section formed a skirmish line at the rear of the battery, and they, too, held their own until the end of the battle. Frustrated in this assault, the Itaya company attacked in force up the eastern road at around 4:30, but were held at bay by the crossfire between machine guns at the eastern end of the airfield and on the beach.

While Devereaux was still in touch with the machine gunners fending off the Itaya company, this was the only combat that he could still monitor. Assuming the worst, he began to make arrangements for a last ditch defense of his headquarters. In the process, he passed his grim assessment of the situation on to Commander Winfield Cunningham (technically Wake's Commander, but mostly concerned with the naval air base until now) and Cunningham relayed a terse summary to Hawaii: "enemy on island, situation in doubt." Doubtful indeed, as Hanna's gun and its ad hoc riflemen were now surrounded, and Poindexter's mobile reserve was falling back on Camp 1.

A half hour before dawn, the Battalion executive officer, Major George Potter, put every Marine he could lay his hands on into a final defensive line south of the headquarters. He managed to scrape together forty men to defend a front of 750 yards. Meanwhile, Devereaux ordered the last reserve on Wake, Battery D's remaining thirty men, south to reinforce Potter.

As Devereaux made what seemed to be his final dispositions, he received a telephone call from Lt. Kessler reporting Japanese flags flying on Wilkes, including a particularly large one smack in the middle of Battery E The Marine commander concluded that Wilkes had fallen, shortly to be followed by the rest of Wake. In the matter of Wilkes, Devereaux was mistaken. On Wilkes, the Japanese were being annihilated.

Almost simultaneous with Kessler's revelation, Captain Platt was forming up eight riflemen and two machine guns to attack the Japanese from the west. Unknown to Platt, twenty-five of MacAlister's men were also counterattacking from the east. Attacked from both sides, the Japanese collapsed. Thirty of them cowered under a single searchlight truck as Marines slaughtered them. The remaining Landing Force troops were hunted down, one by one, and killed. The Japanese had lost 100 men in a battle which had cost the Marines nine of their own. Just a few minutes too late, Platt began to yank Japanese flags out of the ground on Wilkes Island.

Devereaux's appraisal notwithstanding, at sunrise, the Marines were still in possession of virtually every Japanese objective. Poindexter's 40 men and ten machine guns were hanging onto Camp 1, none of the batteries had fallen, and Wilkes was secure. The battalion headquarters, however, was being directly threatened. The machine guns which had been holding the Japanese at arms length were now forced to withdraw to Potter's line to avoid encirclement.

At a quarter to 7:00 AM, Battery B fired the last shots in Wake's struggle with the Japanese fleet. Four salvoes damaged the destroyer Mutsuki, chasing it out to sea, while the rest of the fleet maintained a respectful distance from the coastal batteries. The ships were not providing the Landing Force with much assistance, however. The real firepower arrived after 7:00 when the dive bombers and fighters of the two Japanese carriers began to orbit Wake island. All three islands were strafed and bombed wherever Marines could be seen moving around.

To Devereaux, its seemed obvious that Wilkes had fallen, and he had no reason to assume that the positions south and west of him on Wake island were any better off. With Potter's line flanked and his own headquarters about to be overrun, he phoned Cunningham to check the status of the relief force. Cunningham replied that no relief could be expected, and Devereaux requested permission to surrender. With Cunningham's assent, Wake officially bowed to the inevitable at ten minutes after eight, December 23, 194 1.

While the atoll was officially surrendered at 8:00 in the morning, it took Devereaux another five and half hours -- walking across the length of both Wake island and Wilkes -- to convince all the Marines that their war was over. Back at the batteries, they were filling gun barrels with handfuls of grenades and detonating them. All over Wake, Marines were pitching their rifle bolts into the brush, shooting range and height finders, and eating all of the food they could find. It was the last adequate meal most of them would have for nearly four years, but at least they had the satisfaction of knowing that the Japanese wouldn't be eating it.

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

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