Pacific Alamo

by John Wukovits

  In the midst of the preparations, the wounded Goicoechea took advantage of a brief lull and ran across the bridge to the hospital to find out what happened to Murray Kidd. After a hasty search, he located his friend in his new dugout and shared experiences with him. They had barely begun talking when a medic asked Goicoechea if he could help retrieve bodies. Healthy workers were a precious commodity on Wake, and few could afford to relax for long. Goicoechea spent several hours laying bodies and body parts into the back of a truck.

  “I had to help pull them out of the wagon, a leg here and an arm there. A piece of shrapnel does strange things. It just cuts you all up.”12 These sights, as gruesome as they were, did not bother Goicoechea as much as the Marine body he later came across in the coral sand, covered with crabs as they feasted on the carcass.

  After checking on Kidd and learning he was safe, Joe Goicoechea returned to his spot at Battery D and tried to ignore the pain caused by his wounds. As Goicoechea talked with Corporal Marvin, also manning his post in spite of injuries, a naval officer strode up and ordered several of them, including the wounded Goicoechea and Marvin, to dash into a burning warehouse to remove whatever they could salvage. “You lead the way, and we will follow,” Goicoechea instantly shot back. The officer refused, but still ordered the men into the warehouse. Knowing that Marvin and the other Marines had to obey orders, even though he sensed they agreed with him, Goicoechea angrily yelled, “You go to hell!”13 Much to their relief, the officer turned away.

  As December 10 ended, the men of Wake could be proud of how the first three days unfolded. They had withstood repeated enemy attacks without collapsing, which is something that could not be said elsewhere in the Pacific. They also knew, though, that the Japanese had no intention of turning aside. Sooner or later the bombings would cease, and in their place would come trained soldiers armed with rifles and bayonets. Then the struggle would be up close, where they could see the faces of the men with whom they would engage in a life-and-death battle. Until then they waited and hoped that help would arrive from Pearl Harbor before the Japanese.

  At least some men had the comfort of family. J. O. Young and his uncle, Forrest Read, waited with Marines on Wilkes Island, where they worked for Gunner McKinstry. The two Idaho men did not talk about home much, for that made matters worse, but they had each other, and that made things easier to bear. “Lonely, homesick and scared,” wrote Read later, “I was very happy to share a dugout with my nephew, J. O. Young.”14

  “So Far the News Has All Been Bad”

  While the Wake defenders waited for the Japanese, Franklin Roosevelt saw little in which to take hope. Reports of the devastation to men, ships, and material in Hawaii painted a gloomy picture, and people around the country reacted with dismay and despair. Conditions in his own White House had changed—blackout curtains adorned his windows; more guards, including Military Police, walked the halls; and plans had been drawn for a bomb shelter underneath the residence. Outside, soldiers carried rifles with bayonets attached, and sandbags appeared in front of government buildings, reminding him of the city of London during the infamous Nazi bombing attacks.

  Roosevelt had to counter the flood of rumors that inundated the nation in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, but he had little good news with which to answer. His wife, Eleanor, was heading to California for a scheduled trip when the pilot received a report, later proved erroneous, that San Francisco was under attack. Newspaper reporter Robert J. Casey noticed how worried the residents of Hawaii looked in those early days because they believed the Japanese would arrive at any moment. He wrote that “citizens who had believed the vast power of the United States unassailable and themselves secure” had become “men who now believed Heaven knew what, with faith behind them, hope crumbling and despair not far ahead.”15

  Citizens in both Hawaii and the mainland forty-eight states wanted to believe that their nation would quickly strike back, but hour after hour, nothing but bleak news and dreary bulletins poured in. One man in Washington, D.C., was so frustrated with the military’s inability to answer the Japanese that he did the only thing he thought he could do to hit back at the enemy—he chopped down four of the beautiful Japanese cherry trees that lined the Tidal Basin.

  Gloom hit at even the highest levels of government. Presidential aide Harry Hopkins angrily lashed out at those figures who contended the West Coast was lost and that our military lay impotent. Robert Sherwood, a noted author, wrote of the prevailing attitude at the time: “In going about Washington in those first days, it sometimes seemed that maybe the Nazi and Fascist propagandists were right, that maybe our democracy had become decadent and soft, that we could talk big but that there were too many of us who simply did not know how to stand up under punishment.”16

  The attitude typified how much of the nation felt after war’s initial three days. Few doubted the nation would ultimately prevail, once it had time to assemble a potent military, but they wondered how it would hold on in the face of repeated calamities. Another acclaimed writer, Vincent Sheean, warned in a radio broadcast across the country, “Let us get ready for a series of shocks.”17

  Roosevelt, who countered the specter of millions unemployed and widespread hunger in the bleak days of the Depression by reminding his nation that they had nothing to fear but fear, now offered a mixture of hope and honesty. Talking to the press shortly before delivering a radio address to the nation, Roosevelt stated that every citizen had to do his or her part for the United States to triumph in a world at war. “We must share together the bad news and the good news….” He then cautioned, “So far the news has all been bad…”18

  What neither Sheean, Roosevelt, nor the nation counted on was the speed with which good news arrived. Unknown to them all, a small group of American military personnel, aided by a handful of civilian workers, waited in the wings on a tiny Pacific atoll. Wake was about to become the stage for the nation’s first dramatic action of the war, and in the process offer hope to a nation mired in gloom.

  “The Island Was to Be a Cake Walk”

  “The Enemy Would Soon Fold”

  On December 8, as Japanese aircraft riddled Wake’s defenders, Rear Adm. Sadamichi Kajioka stood on the bridge of his flagship, the light cruiser Yubari, in the vanguard of a unit of ships from the Marshall Islands. The fifty-two-year-old Navy veteran had gained a reputation as a dependable officer who gradually, if unspectacularly, rose through the ranks. Now a rear admiral, he faced the most important task of his career—seize Wake from the United States.

  Japan needed the atoll to complete the first phase of its military operations. Control of Wake and other American possessions, such as Guam and the Philippines, following so quickly after the stunning annihilation of United States naval power at Pearl Harbor, assured Japanese naval dominance throughout the Pacific and endangered United States supply lines to Australia. Aircraft based at Wake could not only keep a constant watch for any American advance westward from Hawaii, but they would also pose a continuous threat to the Hawaiian Islands.

  Kajioka’s force of sixteen ships represented the final piece of Japan’s far-flung offensive. Every other part of the Japanese plan either had been successfully completed or was well under way. Only tiny Wake, an insignificant dot in a Japanese-dominated ocean, remained to be swept aside.

  The Japanese expected few problems, if any, from the assault. After all, they encountered a feeble response everywhere else. Allied forces mounted ineffective defenses throughout the Pacific, and the Japanese carrier aircraft darted in and out of the supposedly impregnable bastion at Pearl Harbor with surprising ease.

  Sub-Lt. Shigeyoshi Ozeki, a young naval surgeon assigned to the Wake invasion force, typified the optimism with which the Japanese embarked upon the Wake expedition. “We were told that westerner[s] were weak and lacked the spiritual and mental fortitude that we possessed,” he later wrote. “We were guaranteed victory in our ‘Holy war’ to rid the Barbarians from Asian soil and the respect and prominenc
e that Japan should be alloted [sic] as a major power in Asia…. The island was to be a cake walk; with no enemy planes in the area our bombers would converge on the island and destroy its defenders before we had a chance to board the landing barges.”1

  Seishi Katsumi, who spent more than twenty years in the United States and attended Columbia University in New York before returning to Japan in 1941 to work as a civilian interpreter during the Wake operation, tried to warn a group of officers that their view of the United States contained dangerous misconceptions. He knew the Americans. He asserted that their fighting spirit equaled that found in the vaunted Japanese Army, and he urged that they approach Wake with caution. The officers, filled with enthusiasm over the coming victory at Wake, reacted with silent disdain.

  They had a right to that cocky attitude, not only because of an unbroken string of victories elsewhere, but also because they steamed toward the atoll with a potent unit of ships. In addition to Rear Admiral Kajioka’s flagship, the light cruisers Tenryu and Tatsuta, six destroyers, and three submarines escorted four troop transports. Though most of the ships were older, they packed a deadly concentration of firepower to deal with any opposition. Thirty-six bombers and twenty-four flying boats based out of the Marshalls provided the aerial offensive punch. Planners considered adding an aircraft carrier to Kajioka’s arsenal, but they thought so little of Wake’s defenses that they dismissed the notion.

  The only part that bothered Kajioka was the number of soldiers allocated to seize Wake. Against what military intelligence estimated as 1,000 Marines and 600 civilians on Wake, he had 450 Special Naval Landing Forces, the Japanese equivalent to Marines. He decided that if needed, he would order some of his six destroyers run aground and use their crews as soldiers.

  Kajioka considered that option a long shot, however. For three days, from December 8 until December 10, Japanese bombers had pinpointed every military target on Wake. They destroyed the airfield, and with it any American air defense, he assumed, on December 8. Over the next two days, aircraft wiped out antiaircraft batteries, seaplane facilities, and other installations. He believed that the enemy had been so weakened that he could take Wake within two days by landing 150 men on Wilkes and 300 on Wake. Everyone, including Kajioka, expected such a simple operation that his commander had not even given him a deadline for occupying Wake—he assumed it would happen as a matter of course. All his men had to do was file into the landing barges, wait for cruisers and destroyers to bombard the few remaining defenses, then move ashore, and take the atoll.

  When Sub-Lieutenant Ozeki questioned Lt. Kinichi Uchida, commander of one of the companies assigned to hit Wake’s beaches, about the December 11 attack, Uchida told him not to worry. “He assured me, much like a father would assure a frightened child, that the enemy lacked any aircraft and would soon fold under our ruthless assault.”2

  Ozeki relaxed as the flotilla droned toward Wake. His commanding officer was right—the United States could not hope to withstand the forces now coming toward them. Ozeki performed his chores content that “we could toss a few shells at the island and we’d be greeted by a white flag.”3

  “Well, There They Are”

  Six hundred miles north, Lieutenant Hanna on Wake Island and Corporal Johnson on Wilkes waited in their improvised foxholes and bomb shelters. Over on Peale, Joe Goicoechea tried to sneak in a few moments of sleep in between strengthening his position and moving guns. No one knew when the Japanese would arrive, but the military veterans sensed it was only a matter of time.

  Until the fighting erupted, the men—many of them hardly out of high school—grappled with different emotions and questions. The Marines, Army, and Navy personnel wanted to avenge the deaths of their friends and inflict punishment on the enemy. The civilians feared what would happen if they were caught in a battle for which they had no training. Devereux and Cunningham wondered whether the civilian volunteers could bear the incredible strain of bombardments, bullets, grenades. Would they stand their ground amid charging soldiers intent on killing them? J. O. Young worried that he would never have the chance to return to Boise to marry Pearl Ann, while others just hoped to see another Christmas.

  Shortly before 3:00 A.M. on December 11, Marine lookouts on Wilkes Island thought they noticed movement far out to sea. Their eyes could have been playing tricks, for the early morning darkness and the casual sways of the ocean caused men to imagine all sorts of things, but they were pretty sure they had spotted something. To be on the safe side, they informed their commander, Captain Platt, who immediately relayed the information that ships had possibly been sighted to Major Devereux’s command post.

  The commander, who had been asleep, walked out of his dugout and down to Wake’s beach to take a look for himself. He strained through binoculars to detect signs of motion, but at first nothing out of the ordinary caught his eye. As he swept the ocean from right to left, suddenly, in the distance, the vague outlines of ships appeared on the horizon. “Well, there they are,”4 he muttered, and headed back inside. He knew the Japanese had arrived, for no American task force stood anywhere in the vicinity of Wake.

  Devereux issued an order to all his officers to assemble their men and under no means open fire until he gave the word. He then contacted Commander Cunningham, who approved the plans and added orders of his own for the civilians to hide and for Putnam’s aviators to take the four remaining aircraft of VMF-211 into the air as soon as possible.

  At Peacock Point on Wake Island, Lieutenant Barninger snatched his binoculars and stood on top of his dugout directly behind his 5-inch guns to locate the enemy. While he scanned the horizon, Gunnery Sgt. Anthony Polousky prepared the battery for the coming battle. The Marines, including Cpl. Franklin Gross, did not worry him; they knew what to do. His concern centered on the group of civilian volunteers needed to fill in the gaps at their gun position. Sergeant Polousky grabbed John R. Burroughs and pointed out the powder magazine where shells and powder canisters were stored in separate stacks. “If we go into action,” the Marine emphasized to the civilian, “pass up two shells—one for each gun. Then two powders—understand?”

  Before Burroughs could answer, Polousky rushed to another spot, where he told Johnny Clelan and other civilians to take the shells and powder canisters passed out by Burroughs, and “Send a powder and a shell to gun No. 1, then a powder and a shell to gun No. 2—keep alternating.”5 Polousky had no time to answer any questions; he had to trust they understood his hasty instructions. The Japanese could start shelling any minute, and Polousky had his own responsibilities to handle.

  Several miles out to sea, Admiral Kajioka gave the order for the assault force to climb into the landing craft. He had chosen the beaches along the atoll’s southern shore as his landing zone because of rough surf on Wake’s northern coast, but luck did not hold with him this night. Gusts of wind churned the water and shoved the landing craft against the troop transports, which made maneuvering into them more difficult for soldiers weighed down with equipment. Sub-Lieutenant Ozeki saw three men slip and disappear into the darkened waters, and several boats almost swamped in the heavy seas. “The face of heaven was against us from the beginning,”6 wrote Ozeki, who thought the landing craft looked like kites being thrown about by a typhoon. Faced with disaster, Kajioka decided to wait until he could move closer to shore, where the seas might be calmer, before embarking the landing force. In the meantime, he intended to reduce the distance from Wake and bombard the atoll. He wanted as few of those Marine guns responding as possible when his men stormed ashore.

  Kajioka hoped to achieve surprise at Wake, just as his compatriots did at Pearl Harbor, but he had no idea what would occur when he took his ships toward the atoll. Kajioka, aboard the Yubari, led the column of warships in, followed by his two cruisers and six destroyers. Off to the right steamed two troop transports loaded with 450 soldiers eager to kill Americans.

  As the ships closed to within nine thousand yards, all appeared quiet on Wake. When Kajioka spotted
no indications of American movement and received no fire, he thought that maybe the air attacks of the previous three days had accomplished more than anyone thought. December 11 just might be another resounding victory for the Japanese to post alongside their other triumphs—and another debacle for the United States to absorb.

  Word rapidly spread throughout the atoll that ships had been sighted, and in the excitement some construction workers assumed the ships were American vessels from the United States Navy steaming to their rescue. “Look,” a friend said to Hans Whitney as they stood on the beach. “Our Navy is at last coming after us.”7

  Whitney doubted his buddy, but others wanted to have nothing to do with any fighting and were more than ready to leave Wake. They had signed on to erect buildings, not hoist arms in combat, and in their opinion the government had a responsibility to extricate them from danger. Encouraged by the sightings, they filtered to the beach, suitcases in hand, waiting for the rescue ships to move in and rush them back to Hawaii. Nearby Marines shattered their illusion with frantic shouts to find shelter—fast.

  “The Shells Were Shaking the Ground”

  At his command post near Camp 1, Devereux concluded he had only one hope of survival. Since the more powerful Japanese guns could hurl shells much farther than Wake’s 5-inch batteries, they could stand beyond the range of Wake’s guns and fire at will, slowly eliminating every major point of resistance until the atoll was reduced to rubble. In that case, Marines, Army, Navy, and civilians could do nothing to respond. They could only wait for such a bombardment to end and hope they were still alive.

  Devereux believed his only chance was to trick the opposing commander into thinking he had either achieved surprise or that the aircraft raids had smashed Wake’s defensive capabilities. If he could pull that off, possibly the Japanese officer would carelessly bring his ships closer to shore, well within range of Wake’s three 5-inch batteries.