The Young sergeant peered over the sandbags, trying to force his eyes to see the shapes of men moving toward him in the growing light of dawn. He could hear them, a lot of them, crunching through the thick undergrowth. But the Japanese were well-trained. There was no talking, nothing to give a hint if he was facing dozens of the enemy, or hundreds.
Nothing had gone right since his company came to this lonely fly-speck of a Pacific island, hundreds of miles from the nearest real land. Wilkes was so low that a good wave could wash right across, and half his Battalion still hadn't arrived to help in its defense. And they were the ones with the grenades and the mortars.
Japanese bombers had been flying over for days, trying to smash the big coastal defense guns, and wrecking havoc with their smaller protective fortifications. And, worst of all, if they had to abandon their positions, the whole squad would have to wade across the 50-yard channel to the main island.
And, Wake itself was hardly better. Wake Island was about as far from anywhere useful as you could get in the Pacific, a horseshoe- shaped fly-spec that sat 450 miles from the nearest neighboring island that you could see on a map. There wasn't enough water or food to feed a squad, let alone an army.
Now the sky was getting lighter, light enough to make out the shapes of landing craft that had hit the beach during the darkness. It looked like a solid wall of them, stretching from one end of the island to the other. That would mean thousands of Japanese soldiers against less than 150 American soldiers and the handful of construction workers who had picked up rifles to join them.
The sergeant tightened his grip on the sub-machine gun in his hand, and looked out over the shallow channel connecting Wilkes to the main island.
He wished that he had never heard of the little island that could become his only refuge, if there was a way to get through the Japanese troops that stood between him and the channel. He wished that he had never heard of Wake.
Wake Island The Game
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© Copyright 1996 by Mike Vogell and Phoenix Military Simulations.
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