Able Marines rushed to help the wounded. M.T.Sgt. Andrew J. Paskiewicz, injured in the right leg by shrapnel, painfully hobbled around to the wounded and dying men at the airstrip to offer comfort. Pfc. Joseph E. Borne pulled up to the airstrip in a truck in which to place the dead, but was not ready for what greeted him. “At the airport, I have never before or since seen such devastation—dismembered bodies everywhere, planes on fire, the smell of burnt flesh; moaning, groaning and suffering everywhere. I immediately became sick…and thought I’d never stop throwing up.”27
Borne set aside his revulsion and helped others drag bodies to the truck. Some were so shredded by Japanese bullets and bomb fragments that the men crumbled to pieces in their hands. Steam from the roasted bodies gagged Borne, and one enlisted man’s body contained so many bullet holes that they could not even grab hold of him. They had to slide a mattress underneath the perforated remains and carry it to the truck in that manner. Civilian laborer Joseph Adamson had a more difficult task at the airfield—he sadly collected the remains of his son, Louis, who died in the bombing.
Since Devereux could not rule out the possibility that the enemy might soon attempt a landing, he ordered that the dead be taken to a large freezer in one of the civilian buildings. When time permitted, he would see that they were properly buried, but at this moment more important items called for his attention.
The wounded flowed into the civilian hospital at Camp 2 all day long. Civilian Theodore A. Abraham Jr., in charge of hospital records, saw some men arrive on foot, some on the backs of buddies carrying them in, and others disgorge from trucks. The wounded and dying streamed in far into the night, overtaxing facilities that were designed for peacetime injuries. Abraham dropped his clerical work and pitched in, but he found it hard to concentrate in a room with so much activity and pathos—the moans of the wounded blended with the scent of burned flesh and blood-soaked clothing to produce an image that haunted the young man. Some, like the civilian who witnessed the carnage at the airfield, lay on a cot in a total state of shock.
Two physicians supervised the hospital work. The Navy doctor, Lt. (jg) G. Mason Kahn, and the civilian physician, Dr. Lawton E. Shank, assisted by eight members of the civilian medical staff, labored through the night to patch up the wounded. Finally, nearing dawn of December 9, they treated the final man.
Murray Kidd had already been lying in the hospital from ptomaine poisoning when Marines carried in the first wounded. “They didn’t have room for us, so they fixed up a barracks right next to it and we got in there. Some of the men were pretty well shot up.”28 Kidd, whose ailment seemed trivial compared with the hideous wounds he witnessed, was more than willing to yield his spot to the others.
Four men from VMF-211, too severely injured to help, died in the hospital that first night. Among the four was nineteen-year-old Sgt. Maurice R. Stockton and Lieutenant Conderman, the youth who tried to refuse help at the airstrip so others could benefit.
“We’ll Take the Next Ship for Pearl”
While the military hastily prepared for a second Japanese strike, at the Pan American installations at Peale Island, Captain Hamilton inspected the Clipper to determine if the plane was able to fly. The bullet holes that punctured the fuselage worried him, but when he checked closer, he learned that, miraculously, nothing vital had been hit. He hurried over to Cunningham and asked permission to evacuate his crew, the passengers, and the station’s twenty-seven white personnel. Taken aback, Cunningham asked why Hamilton had not included the company’s Chamorro workers from Guam, but the captain replied the plane had no room for them. “I knew the plane had limited space, but it seemed to me an unfortunate time to draw the color line,”29 wrote Cunningham.
Other individuals could have departed with the Clipper but chose to stay on Wake instead. A Pan Am employee offered to sneak aboard his friend, civilian John Wiggenhorn, but confident of rescue by the Navy, Wiggenhorn declined. J. O. Young and a handful of other workers walked over to the Clipper’s berth, where the pilot and crew prepared for their takeoff. The pilot turned to the group and said, “There is room for a few more, do any of you want to come with us?”
He had no takers. Most of the group believed they had little to fear and boasted that “Uncle Sam will be after us in a few days,” or “We’ll take the next ship for Pearl.”30 Young declined the offer because he did not want to leave his uncle.
The group hopped a truck piled high with ammunition and headed over to Wilkes Island, where they helped the Marines unload the material. After a quick search, Young located his uncle and learned that he had emerged from the bombings unscathed. The two dug a foxhole barely large enough for them to lie in, then covered it with wooden planks and sandbags. Young believed he would be quickly evacuated, but in case that did not happen, he wanted to have a shelter that would keep them safe during bombing attacks. From then until the battle’s end, Young never left Wilkes.
Two other men intended to fly out, but were stranded on Wake when the airplane departed without them. Herman Hevenor, the government auditor, failed to receive word of the departure, and Pan Am carpenter August Ramquist missed the plane because he was helping transport wounded men to the hospital.
Now loaded with five passengers, twenty-seven Caucasian employees, and eight crew members, the Clipper left at 1:30 P.M. Captain Hamilton twice failed to lift the heavily laden airplane from the lagoon, causing concern among the passengers that some might have to yield their seats to lighten the load. The forty individuals inside the Clipper silently waited as Hamilton gunned the engines for the third attempt. This time the aircraft slowly lifted from the surface, climbed to flying altitude, and veered northeast for Midway Island.
After refueling the airplane at Midway, Hamilton flew to Pearl Harbor, where authorities quizzed him and the other people about conditions at Wake. Hamilton then set course for San Francisco, where newspaper reporters and the public welcomed him as one of the war’s early heroes.
“We Were Definitely on Their List for Elimination”
What had gone wrong in the attack? The United States government and the military shared the blame in leaving the defenders at Wake shorthanded and undermanned, but they operated in a restrictive time.
One item alone could have had an enormous impact on Wake’s outcome. Radar had been developed sufficiently for use by the military. Wake, with its crashing surf drowning out noise, could have benefited from its installation, but the device never made it there. Devereux and Cunningham checked the manifests of each ship that arrived at Wake in hopes of finding the revolutionary invention among their items, but they always turned away disappointed.
“The radar could have made a big difference,” stated Pfc. James O. King, one of Devereux’s communications clerks. “Had it been installed, there is no way all eight fighters would have been caught on the ground like they were. With those additional planes, who knows what might have happened in the future course of the battle?”31
Ethnic stereotyping also played its part. Most men on Wake carried the same prejudices as those exhibited by the rest of the military throughout the Pacific—that the United States had little to fear from an Asian nation. The typical prewar racial stereotype lulled the men on Wake, and to some degree at Pearl Harbor, into a false sense of security. Americans learned a hard lesson that day—their opponents were far from the pushovers they imagined.
As December 8 closed on Wake, the military and civilians still looked ahead with optimism. The Japanese had struck and would probably soon hit again, but the next time they would be ready. Not realizing how badly damaged was Pearl Harbor, the Wake defenders expected that a relief force would soon dash out with more men and aircraft.
A more pessimistic Major Devereux concluded that the Japanese would stage repeated bombing attacks until they thought they had weakened the atoll, at which time their naval forces would move in for the kill. He hoped, however, that his men could repel any landing attempts until reinforcements arrived.
What neither Cunningham nor Devereux knew was that their superiors at Pearl Harbor had already begun the debate over sending help to Wake. Admiral Kimmel, still stunned from the devastating Pearl Harbor attack, received a new war plan from Washington stipulating that the Pacific Fleet’s main task was to defend Hawaii and the West Coast. The island posts at Wake, Johnston, and Palmyra were to be reinforced if possible, but not at Hawaii’s expense. Wake, lying the farthest distance from Pearl Harbor, dangled in front of the Japanese as a sacrificial lamb.
Every man played the same guessing game. They asked themselves and each other from where had the Japanese come, and when would they strike again. Most correctly figured the enemy had to take off from the Marshalls, 620 miles south, since that was the closest enemy base, but they had no idea when they would again attack. Putnam and Kinney, the most knowledgeable officers in aviation matters, calculated the average aircraft speed and the distance from Wake to the Marshalls, deduced that the Japanese would take off at dawn when it was light enough for operations, and concluded that the enemy would appear over Wake sometime about noon the next day.
Lieutenant Kessler figured that December 9 would unveil the likely course of events and, with it, their fates. He told the men in his gun crew on Peale Island, including nine civilian volunteers, that if the Japanese failed to bomb Wake Island again, that meant the enemy had administered a onetime punishment and had gone on to bigger fish. However, if they returned for a second raid, the men on Wake may as well start digging in, for it indicated that “we were definitely on their list for elimination.”32
In the momentary lull, Marine Pfc. Verne L. Wallace finally had time to read a letter from his Pennsylvania girlfriend that had arrived just before the air strike. The words drew a rueful smile to his lips. “As long as you have to be away, darling,” she wrote, “I’m so very, very happy you are in the Pacific, where you won’t be in danger if war comes.”33
“I Used to Hear a Lot of Guys Pray”
“Don’t Those Sons of Bitches Know That’s Dangerous?”
Not only did the Japanese attack on December 9, but they also mounted a third straight raid on December 10. Almost on schedule, the Japanese returned shortly before noon on December 9. Americans stopped their work when they heard three shots relayed throughout the atoll, the signal that an air attack was under way, and rushed to their gun positions and bunkers. Twenty-seven bombers, glistening in the midday sun, roared in from the south, bombing and strafing as they stitched a lethal pattern on Wake’s surface. Machine-gun bullets peppered the water tower, forcing the two men posted as lookouts to take refuge on the opposite side of the tank.
Pfc. John Katchak of Pennsylvania became the first Marine of the Wake Island Detachment to be killed when a bomb landed almost on top of him at Battery A at Peacock Point. The explosion eviscerated the young man, whose body was further torn to pieces when the bullets in his cartridge belt ignited from the heat. So little remained that fellow Marines gathered the pieces, tossed handfuls of dirt on top, and fashioned a rude mound as a hasty memorial.
“It was impossible to recover the body,” Lieutenant Barninger wrote in a 1945 report, “and so surrounded by all the reverence and sympathy men have for a fallen messmate I spoke the burial service over him. It was crude, but if ever a body was committed to the earth and a soul to God with more depth of feeling or in closer kinship with the Almighty it was in a similar circumstance.”1 Throughout the battle, Katchak’s burial spot served as an inspiration to the defenders.
After helping the Marines fire at the invaders, Young and Read rushed to their reinforced foxhole as bombs erupted within yards of their position. Shaken, dazed, and numb, the men looked out as black, rancid smoke enveloped them. Another civilian, Charles Mellor, picked up a still-hot piece of shrapnel, looked at the departing Japanese, and shouted, “Don’t those sons of bitches know that’s dangerous?”2
Bullets and bombs inundated Hans Whitney’s gun emplacement, causing the men to huddle closer to the coral for safety and comfort. When the planes left, six men lay dead, and Whitney writhed on the dirt with a shrapnel wound to the left hip.
Joe Goicoechea thought the entire Japanese air force had pinpointed him, as it seemed that every bomb and bullet dropped and fired at Wake headed directly toward him. With Marine Corporal Marvin and the others, Joe hid behind the gun shield, but the bullets still managed to find him. A piece of shrapnel wounded Marvin in the head, and a bullet punctured Goicoechea’s ironworker’s helmet, knocked it off, and hit the man next to him.
“I got hit in the face with shrapnel. There was nobody there to fix us, so we took care of it ourselves. It all hurt, but you just block out the pain. The guy next to me was hit real bad. His blood was on me. He had a big hole in his back—blood was just spurtin’ out. We thought I was bleeding, but he was.”3
Some civilians died when they panicked. Instead of jumping into one of the ditches that had been dug, they ran around trying to evade the bombs and died.
Mistakes like that irritated Sgt. Johnalson Wright, whether made by civilians or Marines. Determined to instill pride at his gun, as soon as the raid ended, Wright castigated the civilian crew manning one gun for not firing as many shots at the Japanese as the Marines. He bellowed that if they could not improve, they may as well not be near him. He stormed away, while the civilians huddled with Bowsher for additional training.
To most Wake Islanders, December 9 and the hospital are synonymous, for that was the day the Japanese hit the hospital. Death and injuries are a part of war, but amidst the bleeding and dying rests a sanctuary for those unable to fight. Combatants normally recognize the need for hospitals and consider them off-limits. Not so this day. Men who had already been wounded, or lay in the hospital from a work injury or an illness, now suffered even more. They lay helplessly in their cots, assuming the large red cross painted on the roof would shield them from enemy attack, even from such a ferocious foe as the Japanese, who had stunned world opinion with their atrocities in China and elsewhere. They paid for their incorrect assumptions.
The Japanese pilots so thoroughly devastated the hospital near Camp 2 that one man watching with Devereux quietly muttered, “Them poor bastards.”4 Bullets ripped through the sheet metal roof to splinter cots and the floor, forcing Lieutenant Kahn to dive under a bed for protection. When he emerged untouched a few seconds later, Kahn noticed that a pair of shoes resting next to him had been torn apart by bullets.
Murray Kidd, who thought he had it better than Goicoechea or Rosandick out in the field, rested in a cot set up on the porch of the barracks next door. The staff originally told him and a few other patients to occupy the cots on the corner, but Kidd thought that spot would be too hot once the sun rose. “Let’s move back a little bit where there’s more shade,” he mentioned to other patients. A few, including Kidd, shifted to cots a short distance away.
That small decision saved his life. A bomb hit the corner in which Kidd had been resting and killed the men in the first two cots. “I was in the next cot,” Kidd explained. “The explosion flipped me over and tossed the cot on top of me. I never heard the bomb coming down. I don’t remember anything except for this big boom! I couldn’t hear for three hours afterwards.”5 A rattled Kidd, slightly wounded by bomb fragments, quickly put on his clothes, veered toward the brush, and took refuge in a dugout being built by some friends.
He made another fortunate choice in running toward the brush. Other civilian patients ran outside and crawled under a Caterpillar tractor, thinking it had to be safer than the flimsy hospital walls. A direct bomb hit demolished the vehicle and killed every man.
As the flames spread, healthier men risked their lives to save those unable to move. Seventy-year-old construction worker Owen G. Thomas dashed into the fire to free two Marines trapped by the wreckage. Dr. Shank and Lieutenant Kahn repeatedly ran inside to move patients and to retrieve the precious supplies of medicine and medical equipment. Dr. Shank, who had endeared himself to civilians and milit
ary with his professionalism and affable nature, saved so many lives in those few moments that he was later recommended for a Medal of Honor.
The attack outraged both military and civilian camps. The men recalled all those stories of the Japanese raping and murdering thousands of Chinese, and now had no doubt about their veracity. An unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor had been followed with a bombing on helpless men in a hospital. This war, only a few days ago so distant in their thoughts, had taken on a personal nature.
Now without a hospital, Cunningham selected one of the safest locations on Wake to house the wounded, in reinforced ammunition bunkers that lay in a neat row along the eastern end of the airfield. Each bunker, twenty by forty feet in size, held about twenty beds and contained a generator for power. Medical assistants equally divided the supplies between the two places, and Dr. Shank set up shop for the civilians in the bunker at the northern end while Lieutenant Kahn occupied the southern bunker for the military. In this manner, Cunningham hoped to prevent both hospitals from being destroyed by a single bomb. Two days later, Cunningham moved his command post into one of the middle bunkers with the Army radio unit led by Captain Wilson. Devereux switched his command post to a spot along the lagoon about four hundred yards east of the Marine camp.
Both physicians had plenty of men to tend, but each day the numbers dwindled. At least thirty civilians died in the attack on Camp 2, while seven Marines perished at various locations. The loss of life pointed out a serious predicament—the Japanese could afford to lose men and equipment, while the military on Wake could not. If a Japanese pilot died, another took his place, but each man and each gun lost at Wake irretrievably reduced the American garrison. More crucially, it reduced their ability to repulse the inevitable invasion attempt.
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