He headed toward Wake with a more powerful force this time, in both ships and men. In addition to the nine vessels he brought up from the Marshalls, the aircraft carriers Soryu and Hiryu, both veterans of the Pearl Harbor campaign, steamed north of Wake and launched the carrier raids that had so alarmed the defenders. To the east, six cruisers and six destroyers took up station to intercept any American naval flotilla that might sally forth from Hawaii. Kajioka literally ringed Wake with Japanese vessels. Instead of the 450-man landing force he transported on December 11, he now boasted 2,000 soldiers.
Kajioka learned from his earlier mistakes. Rather than steam into view of Wake during daylight, he intended to sneak in under cover of darkness to avoid Wake’s deadly batteries, and he eliminated the opening barrage that hallmarked the December 11 attack to increase the possibility of surprise.
He planned to throw his two thousand troops against Wake in three groups. The first, consisting of seven hundred Special Naval Landing Forces commanded by Lt. Kinichi Uchida in Patrol Boat 32 and Special Duty Lt. (jg) Yakichi Itaya in Patrol Boat 33, both converted destroyers, would crash onto Wake’s southern beaches below the airfield, almost exactly at the point where Lieutenant Hanna and Corporal Holewinski waited. After brushing aside the beach opposition, the men were to sweep across the island and eliminate pockets of resistance. In the meantime, two hundred men led by Special Duty Ens. Toyoji Takano would rush ashore aboard smaller landing craft in two locations—near Camp 1 at the far western tip of Wake, and in the middle of Wilkes Island. Once these units established a beachhead, a third force of eleven hundred troops would land after sunrise to finish sweeping the atoll.
That should have been more than sufficient to seize Wake, but Kajioka took no chances this time. To draw attention from the southern shores of Wake and Wilkes, he ordered two cruisers to bombard Peale as his men approached the other islands, hopefully pulling some of Devereux’s men away from Wake and Wilkes and toward Peale. Should his two thousand men fail to gain a toehold, he intended to issue rifles to the crews of his six destroyers, run them aground on Wake, and add their numbers to those already fighting the Americans. Kajioka risked his reputation on this invasion, so the loss of a few destroyers meant little if it guaranteed a victory.
On the other side of the beaches, Major Devereux faced the dilemma of trying to meet a landing assault with limited resources. Since he had to keep half his men at the 5-inch guns to answer any naval fire and at the 3-inch guns to counter air attacks, he had only around two hundred servicemen and civilian volunteers to contest whatever force Kajioka mustered.
Hamstrung by small numbers, Devereux could not adequately guard every yard of the atoll’s shores, so he had to guess Kajioka’s most probable landing spot. Since the coral reef surrounding Wake jutted closest to shore along the southern beaches of Wake, he figured his opponent would choose that spot. That is where he would come ashore if he were the Japanese admiral, for it would place the Japanese near Wake’s most important military feature—the airfield. Accurately predicting that Kajioka would likely split his invasion force into separate groups, Devereux stretched his line south along the airfield and toward Camp 1. Thinking that Kajioka might also send men against Wilkes, Devereux ordered his commander on Wilkes, Captain Platt, to post his defenders along the same shore.
Captain Platt faced the same quandary as Devereux—where to station his few men. He placed most of his approximately seventy men in the northern half of the island, near the 5-inch and 3-inch batteries. Four .50-caliber machine guns guarded the beaches above the new channel that split Wilkes almost in half, while two additional guns below that channel kept watch on Wilkes’s southern half. In case the Japanese decided to sweep around Wilkes’s northern tip and try to enter the lagoon, Platt placed two machine guns, under Corporal Johnson, near the northern lagoon shore.
Platt told Marine Gunner McKinstry, commander of the 3-inch guns of Battery F that guarded the northern half, that in a landing attempt he was to fire at the enemy as long as he safely could, then fall back as infantry and establish a line near the new channel. Since the beach sloped so sharply in front of McKinstry’s 3-inch guns, he would not be able to use the guns once the Japanese landed, so his contributions to the battle would come more as an infantry commander than as a battery officer.
Major Devereux walked around the island on the eve of December 23, visiting gun positions and talking to his Marines. Instead of weary men with pessimistic attitudes, he found a determination that bolstered his hopes about the inevitable battle. “It was an unspoken thing, an intangible, but it was as real as the sand or the guns or the graves,” he wrote after the war. “My men were average Marines, and they had bitched and griped among themselves like any soldiers. Now their nerves and bodies had been sapped by two almost sleepless weeks. Now the chips were down for the last roll of the dice, and they knew it, and they knew the odds were all against us, but now they were not grumbling. There seemed to grow a sort of stubborn pride that was more than just the word ‘morale’.”1
“Island Is Sighted”
Corporal Johnson felt he had an omen. Many times during the siege he wondered if he would live to see his birthday, and here he was, at midnight on December 23, celebrating his twentieth birthday, his exit from the teenage years. This was hardly the manner in which he hoped to enjoy it, for he had just completed four hours of watch, and in another four hours he had to again man his post for a second stint. He planned to use the brief interlude as his quiet little party.
When civilian volunteer Leo Nonn replaced Johnson at midnight, the corporal noticed that something seemed to bother him. Johnson asked the construction worker, whose contributions during the siege had been impressive, what was wrong. After a few moments Nonn wondered how Johnson felt about the carrier aircraft blasting the atoll.
Johnson knew what was on Nonn’s mind—the presence of carrier aircraft indicated an imminent invasion—but he did not want the civilian to stand four hours on watch with that specter haunting him. Instead, Johnson told Nonn the planes probably came from a Japanese squadron on its way somewhere else, and the planes simply used Wake as target practice. “I wanted to get his mind off it. I also told him I had lived to see my birthday and we were going to have a hell of a party tomorrow. I said I was gonna call Dan Teters [and invite him], which I knew I couldn’t do.”2
The ploy worked. Nonn headed to his post, and Johnson returned to his dugout to catch a little sleep. He had no idea what he would tell Nonn later in the day when he could not pull off the party.
Corporal Johnson would speak to Nonn much sooner than expected, for during the civilian’s watch Kajioka moved in. About 2:00 A.M. on December 23, tired lookouts posted along the atoll’s northern portions reported seeing flashes far off in the distance, as if a naval battle had ensued. One of Lieutenant Kessler’s men saw what he thought were lights in the water north of Peale. Worrying that they could be landing craft swaying in the waves, Kessler forwarded the information to Devereux’s command post. Cpl. Robert Brown immediately awoke the major.
“The enemy are reported on Toki Point, sir,” he told the sleepy officer.
“Any confirmation?” asked Devereux.
“No, sir.”
Devereux then rang Lieutenant Kessler on Peale. “Any boats beached?” he inquired of his battery commander.
“Negative.”3
Devereux believed that what his men spotted was, at most, an enemy feint to the north to draw his attention from the likely beaches to the south. Devereux called for general quarters and prepared for battle. On Wilkes, Captain Platt ordered the men of Battery L under Lieutenant McAlister to deploy as infantry along the lagoon beaches.
Private First Class Gatewood thought the sighting was the Japanese fleet positioning itself to bombard the atoll. Others hoped that the United States Navy had suddenly arrived and engaged a Japanese unit, since the flashes reminded them of nighttime training exercises at sea, or that a relief force was battling its way t
hrough to the atoll. Lieutenant Hanna and Corporal Holewinski could not see anything from their places south of the airfield, nor could Major Devereux, but all knew that these numerous sightings meant that something was about to happen.
The light show lasted one hour. What the men detected was Kajioka’s cruisers trying to move above Peale Island and bombard it as a feint to the main thrusts against Wake and Wilkes. In the darkness, however, the ships lost their bearings and fired on a stretch of ocean far to the north, accomplishing little more than disrupting the sharks. The inauspicious start was not what Kajioka hoped for.
With Devereux’s call to be on the alert, Leo Nonn woke Corporal Johnson, who shook his head to clear his mind and asked if it were already time for his next watch. Nonn replied that it was only 2:30 A.M., and that Johnson had to come to the machine gun because of possible landings at Toki Point. Johnson hurried up to the gun and strained his eyes and ears to pick up signs of activity, but he noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Just as he prepared to relax, the sound of machine guns clattering in the distance arrested his attention. He knew from the direction that the .50-calibers along the southern beaches had opened up. That could mean only one thing—the enemy had landed on Wilkes.
Out at sea, Sub-Lieutenant Ozeki donned his battle gear in complete darkness. Admiral Kajioka did not want to take a chance of alerting the Americans and their dangerous guns, so he forbade the use of light. Ozeki claimed that no one wanted “to be on the receiving end of more ‘love letters’ from Wake’s trigger-happy defenders.”
Fumbling about in the darkness and with the ship swaying from heavy winds and churning seas, Ozeki had trouble locating his shoes. He asked other soldiers near him to help, but they just whispered for him to be quiet. Figuring that someone had stolen his shoes, Ozeki grabbed the only item available, a pair of rubber thongs, and slipped those on his feet.
As Ozeki walked to the assembly point, the flip-flop noises made by the thongs seemed comical, as if he were a clown attempting to maneuver with oversize fake feet. No one around him said anything until he stepped on deck, where the officer assigned to check each man glanced at the thongs and then mumbled, “The honorable lieutenant surgeon is an idiot!”4 Ozeki tried to hide his embarrassment and told himself that he would not have to wait long to retrieve another good pair of shoes. Once he hit the beach, he could take his pick of shoes from the feet of dead Japanese soldiers. If he died before replacing the thongs, then he had no worries anyway.
On a second Japanese vessel, a young journalist, Kayoshi Ibushi, waited with the soldiers for the order to begin the run into Wake. A sudden storm jostled the nervous young Japanese and caused others to become physically ill. “The angry waves tossed the ships around as if they were toys,” Ibushi later wrote. “Suddenly a blinking light was seen on a destroyer up ahead. It was the signal ‘Island is sighted.’ Our course was changed, and our speed gradually reduced. The island appeared faintly in the darkness. The admiral ordered, ‘Break off and land the naval party.’”5
Officers and men, wearing white sashes as a sign of courage, leapt into the landing barges, followed by correspondent Ibushi. The Japanese youth then waited silently as the craft churned toward shore. The larger ships, including Kajioka’s flagship, remained outside of Wake’s range.
“If I Couldn’t Be Seen, I Quite Likely Couldn’t Be Hit”
After fifteen days of waiting, the fight for control of the atoll started around 3:20 A.M. Gunner McKinstry contacted Captain Platt at his command post in the island’s midsection when he thought he heard the sound of motors approaching from the sea.
“Can you see anything?” asked Platt.
“Not a damned thing, but I’m sure it’s there.”
“Then fire,”6 said Platt. The commander also ordered the .50-caliber machine guns along that section of beach to commence firing at the sounds. As it was still pitch dark, Platt could not see anything ahead of him, but he hoped the light created by the .50-caliber tracer shells would let him know precisely where the enemy was.
When that did not help, Platt ordered a nearby searchlight crew to illuminate the beach directly in front of the 3-inch guns. The bright light captured Takano’s one hundred soldiers just as they poured ashore from a landing craft. In less than a minute, a Japanese bullet knocked out the searchlight, but Platt glimpsed enough to let him know the Japanese headed straight toward McKinstry’s 3-inch guns.
The Japanese, after firing a red rocket as a sign to Kajioka that they had landed, charged forward with fixed bayonets. McKinstry tried to fire the powerful 3-inch guns at the enemy, but he could not lower the weapons enough to have any effect—the Japanese had already moved in too close for those guns to be helpful. Instead, McKinstry relied on the .50-caliber machine guns to ward off the enemy. A furious volley of machine-gun bullets temporarily halted the attack, as bullets splattered into the coral sand, pinged against the landing barges, and smacked into Japanese. In the darkness, both sides fired at opposing gun flashes as they could not yet see their foe.
The Japanese quickly seized the upper hand, and in some places along the outer fringes opponents engaged in bitter hand-to-hand fighting. When the Japanese started to move around McKinstry’s flank and lob hand grenades at the Americans, the veteran Marine, about to become trapped and worried about the unarmed civilians in his command, decided to pull away from the gun position and head toward the new channel, as Platt earlier ordered him to do. He realized that the enemy, now alerted to the location of the 3-inch guns by the gun flashes, would quickly direct their efforts toward the spot. After shouting to his civilians to scatter into the brush and wait for daylight, and after telling his Marines to remove the firing locks from the guns to make them useless for the enemy, McKinstry supervised an orderly withdrawal eastward through the brush to join T. Sgt. Edwin Hassig and a group of searchlight operators. Once there, McKinstry established a skirmish line near the new channel and prepared for more fighting.
Platt attempted to contact Lieutenant McAlister, who had formed a defense line near the new channel, but his communications had been severed by the fighting. He ordered the .50-caliber machine-gun crews along the beach to maintain a steady volume of fire for as long as possible, while he tried to ascertain the situation confronting him. Already, he could pick up the sounds of fighting where McAlister should be.
J. O. Young heard the sounds even better. He stood right in the middle of the action. He and five other civilians, including his uncle, Forrest Read, passed 3-inch shells to McKinstry’s gun crews while the landing barges neared shore, but once the Japanese stepped on land and began sprinting forward, McKinstry shouted for everyone to fall back. Without a rifle to defend himself, Young rushed toward the new channel in search of a safe place.
Forrest Read felt secure near the 3-inch guns and wondered why McKinstry had ordered them back, but trusting the Marine veteran’s expertise, Read rushed away, clutching three hand grenades. As Read stumbled through the brush, he hoped the darkness would help protect him, figuring that “if I couldn’t be seen, I quite likely couldn’t be hit.”7 He began to doubt his logic when tracer bullets zipped by and momentarily lit the area.
Read, separated from his nephew, headed toward McKinstry’s skirmish line beside the new channel, located a crop of coral rocks that provided a decent hiding place, and squeezed into a hole as far as he could go until only his feet protruded from the makeshift dugout. McKinstry had already placed his Marines to the immediate right of Lieutenant McAlister’s nine men and commenced a barrage of fire and hand grenades to check the enemy’s advance. Japanese bullets kicked up clouds of coral sand all around the two Marine lines, but few did any damage in the dark.
Adrenaline and terror energized J. O. Young in equal measure as he hunted for his relative. He hated to be separated from Uncle Forrest just as the fighting took on a heightened brutality, but the darkness impeded his chances of locating the man. Finally, he spotted something familiar—a pair of boots sticking out of the rocks
that he immediately recognized as belonging to his uncle. He shouted to the man in the hole, using his uncle’s nickname, Comanche, then grinned when his relative, dirt smudged and grimy, appeared. The two asked if the other was all right, then, relieved to once again be in the company of family, located a more accommodating and safer hiding place.
After advancing 150 yards to the 3-inch gun position, Takano’s troops halted, dug in, and placed flags around their position so that when daylight arrived, Japanese aircraft would not bomb the sector. Takano’s men maintained a steady volume of fire throughout the night, but stubborn resistance on the left from a .50-caliber machine gun along the beach manned by Pfc. Sanford K. Ray and one other Marine, as well as the opposition mounted by the McKinstry-McAlister line to Takano’s right, prevented Takano from making additional progress.
The Marines’ stout defense on Wilkes blunted the enemy’s assault, but most battlers realized they faced an awkward, almost impossible predicament. They could fight with every ounce of fiber and determination, but they had no reinforcements to bolster their lines, while the Japanese could pour in many more to replace the soldiers killed. All they could do was fight valiantly and take solace from the fact that they performed their duties.
“We knew we would never see the sun set on that day,” explained Pfc. Max J. Dana, who manned a machine gun near Private First Class Ray, “because Marines don’t surrender and Japanese don’t take prisoners. I assumed I was going to be dead that day, and we intended to do the best we could.”8
“Loaded With Lurking Japs”
One of McAlister’s troops, Cpl. Bernard E. Richardson, had been at his post since first being awakened from a deep slumber by Sgt. Henry A. Bedell’s gruff, “Wake up, Rich! Wake up! Japs! They’ve landed!” As Richardson related in an extraordinary memoir he wrote after the war, he slowly shook the cobwebs from his head, lay for a few moments longer in the foxhole he and Pfc. Robert L. “Red” Stevens had so meticulously shaped, then crawled out and smacked into Sergeant Bedell, who had returned to make sure Richardson was awake. As the pair hurried over to the grenade dump, crouching as they ran to make smaller targets, Richardson was “startled completely awake by the whine of rifle fire and the terrifying streaks of tracer bullets.”9 He checked his Browning automatic rifle and the heavy magazine belt pulling at his waist to make sure he could instantly return fire if necessary.
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