Pacific Alamo

by John Wukovits

  At the dump, Bedell passed out grenades to nine men, including Richardson and Stevens. He reminded the group that as they headed to the channel, they were to keep low and zigzag. Then, as Japanese tracers brightened the area, Bedell raced off.

  Richardson and the other eight made their way back to the channel, where they found Sergeant Bedell already waiting for them. He placed each man in a separate foxhole with the curt warning to stay there until he returned.

  In the darkness, Richardson took a few moments to get his bearings. The half-dredged channel rested to his left, the invasion beaches stood to his front, and open territory lay to the rear. Happily, the presence of another Marine in a foxhole only a few yards away reassured Richardson.

  The darkness played tricks with Richardson’s weary mind as he waited in his foxhole. Alone with his thoughts, the Marine tried to control the fears that assaulted him as he imagined all sorts of horrors approaching in the pitch blackness. “My mind, already a little fuzzy from the grueling routine of the past two weeks, painted vivid pictures of the underbrush loaded with lurking Japs. Time and again, I imagined Japs surrounded me, though, actually, I could neither see nor hear any. Artillery fire became heavier. The misty rain eased almost to a stop.”10

  He saw the searchlight beam sweep the beach before being shot out, then waited anxiously for something to happen. By the sounds, staccato bursts from one side met by steady pumpings and grenade explosions by the other, he knew that a battle raged along the beaches of both Wilkes and Wake, but so far his line received little gunfire. Amidst the din of distant battle and the roaring surf, Richardson strained his eyes and ears to pick up the telltale indications of movement. Anything out of the ordinary, such as leather boots scraping against rock, twigs cracking, or safety bolts closing, in his words, “might mean the end of me”11 if he failed to notice them.

  While Richardson and the other eight Marines dug in and waited for their sergeant to return, Sergeant Bedell rushed back to the beach area, where he learned that landing barges had been spotted close to shore. Lieutenant McAlister ordered Bedell to send two men down to throw hand grenades into the barges, a near-suicidal mission since they would have to move within close range before pitching the grenades. Bedell selected nineteen-year-old Pfc. William F. Buehler to accompany him, ordered him to grab some hand grenades, and stuffed others into his own pockets.

  The pair cautiously advanced toward the beach, surprisingly without drawing fire in the darkness. When they moved to within thirty-five yards, they rose and started tossing their grenades toward the landing craft. Within a few minutes Bedell slumped to the beach from enemy fire, gasped for air, and died.

  By the time of Bedell’s death, Buehler had already thrown his supply of grenades at the Japanese, so he turned back to rejoin the other Marines. One hundred yards of open terrain lay between Buehler and safety with his unit, but the youth dropped close to the ground, tried to ignore the bullets that kicked up sand near him, and started crawling for his life. “I don’t recall being under fire so much when we went down to the beach, but when I was moving back I was,” explained Buehler after the war. “I was crawling, face down low, when I felt a tug at my foot. Later I saw that a machine gun bullet had cut through the leather of my shoe and grazed the top of my foot. If that bullet had arrived a split second sooner, it would have hit my head.”12

  For ten minutes, McAlister and the others waited to learn how the two courageous Marines fared. Finally, Buehler returned to report that Japanese gunfire pushed him back before he could determine if they damaged the landing craft. He added that Sergeant Bedell, nicknamed Bullhorn because of his booming voice, had been killed.

  “Get the Hell Over Here! They’re Killing Us!”

  Two men on the island, both lacking details about the battle’s course, now took matters into their own hands and, by their combined efforts, helped turn events on Wilkes in the Americans’ favor. For much of the fighting, a frustrated Captain Platt operated from his command post in Wilkes’s midsection completely in the dark, since the Japanese severed his communications line. Around 4:40, he decided to leave his command post and take a look for himself, a move that surprised few Marines since the popular officer had a reputation for ignoring danger.

  He walked from his command post a short distance to machine gun Number 11 on the beach north of where Takano landed, checked on the men there, and then swerved to the sounds of firing to his east. Shortly after 5:00, with the sun’s first rays lighting the sky, Platt crept close enough to the 3-inch position to observe the enemy. He noticed that instead of advancing to the right toward the Marines near the new channel, the Japanese had gathered around the American antiaircraft guns. In their concern for resistance from the east, where Platt knew McKinstry’s and McAlister’s men should be, the Japanese had completely ignored the rear, precisely where Platt now stood. He instructed Sgt. Raymond L. Coulson to retrieve a .30-caliber machine gun from the lagoon side of Wilkes and to meet him as quickly as possible for an assault on the Japanese rear.

  As Platt headed back to prepare for the charge, he met another group that had been doing its own reconnoitering. Two Marines and six civilians, led by the just-turned twenty-year-old Corporal Johnson, had completed their own remarkable odyssey from the lagoon side of Wilkes across to the scene of fighting.

  In the battle’s opening hours, Johnson guarded Wilkes’s northern coast with two .30-caliber machine guns and his seven men. He heard the firing in the brush behind him, the heavier roar of the American rifles clearly distinguishable from the faster crack of the smaller-caliber Japanese weapons, and debated whether to leave his post and join the fray or to remain in case the Japanese tried to slip by into the lagoon. Since the Japanese had cut his communications with Platt, Johnson faced the decision on his own.

  “I had a great amount of fear because after the enemy got on the island they were in the bush behind us. Two times I was extremely afraid on Wake, and this was one. I could tell where they were fighting at,” Johnson explained later, “but the lines were always cut. Should I go in there firing? I wanted to, but I wondered if I would hit my own men. I decided that the other Marines knew where we were, so the best thing was to stay at the lagoon. It would have been easy to turn the machine gun around from the sea and spray the whole area, but I kept facing the sea.”13

  When daylight arrived without the Japanese endangering his position, Johnson tried to contact Platt for instructions. Once again he could not get through, but he managed to communicate with another machine gunner, Sergeant Coulson. Johnson explained that, other than sporadically firing a few tracers over the lagoon to see if any enemy rafts came in, they had engaged in no fighting. When Johnson asked Coulson if he thought Platt wanted him to change his position, Coulson shouted, “Platt may be dead. Get the hell over here. They’re killing us!”14

  Johnson asked Coulson to alert other machine gunners along Wilkes’s southern beaches that he intended to advance along the coast before swinging inland and joining the Marines battling the Japanese. Johnson assigned two men to carry each of the machine guns, another two men to handle the ammunition belts, and the remaining two civilians to bring the Marines’ rifles and ammunition. Then, “looking like Mexican bandits,”15 the group set out on their trek along Wilkes.

  They carefully advanced around the northern coast and down to machine gun Number 9, Private First Class Ray’s gun, encountering nothing but a few dead Japanese who obviously had met stiff resistance somewhere, for the entire lower half of one Japanese soldier’s face—nose, jaw, and mouth—was missing. When they moved closer to the combat area, Johnson saw someone at the gun, waving toward the brush. Johnson took that as a sign that the enemy had infiltrated the brush, collected his band of eight men, and issued orders to attack.

  Johnson, acting more like a twenty-year Marine veteran than a twenty-year-old, told Pfc. Marvin P. McCalla, the only other Marine with him, that the Japanese must be trying to outflank gun Number 9 by heading through the brush
. Johnson picked up one machine gun, put McCalla on the other, and advanced toward the enemy. First Johnson and his civilian helpers rushed forward while McCalla covered them with fire; then McCalla and his civilians sprinted up while Johnson kept the Japanese pinned down. Johnson drew no fire, but when McCalla moved out, Japanese rifle shots lit up the brush. Since the Japanese uniforms blended perfectly with the foliage and camouflaged his targets, Johnson randomly sprayed the area with .30-caliber bullets until he heard screams and noticed a lessening of opposition. He then waited for McCalla to join him.

  Together again, the eight Americans plunged into the brush. Johnson and McCalla answered Japanese fire with their own guns as they surged forward, stopping momentarily when they stumbled across four dead enemy soldiers. Johnson, who most likely killed them with his earlier burst, thought it odd that the Japanese wore split-toed canvas shoes.

  The group continued forward, encountering more dead. Finally, after safely leading his gritty group across Wilkes, Johnson joined Captain Platt and his Marines.

  Platt and Johnson joined forces around 5:35 A.M. Bolstered by Johnson and his seven men, Platt could now stage a stronger counterattack than he originally thought possible. He placed fourteen men in a 130-foot line, positioned Johnson with one machine gun at one end, McCalla and the other gun at the other, and kept three Marines behind to act as a reserve in case his line bent in front of enemy resistance. He ordered Johnson and McCalla to continue their alternating advance once the enemy discovered their presence, and reminded the men to shoot only at clearly identifiable targets, since McKinstry’s and McAlister’s Marines had to be somewhere in the area. He added that they should shoot short, well-aimed bursts, and to keep moving toward the Japanese.

  Platt stood behind Johnson, a .45 in each hand, and ordered the line to advance without firing—if they were fortunate, the enemy would not spot them until too late. Surprisingly the line moved to within fifty yards before the Japanese, busy repelling an attack from the other side, realized another American force had closed in from the rear.

  Platt was astonished by the ease with which he moved toward the enemy. He later credited the Japanese preoccupation with the other American unit, their tendency to bunch together in one spot, and their lack of aggressively pursuing the Americans with giving him such a golden opportunity to counterattack. The Japanese company lacked initiative and audacity, qualities that Platt possessed in abundance.

  Once the Japanese turned their fire on Platt’s men, Johnson and McCalla implemented their alternating advances, each man peppering the front immediately ahead of the other. Marines and civilians, their heartbeats racing madly and their faces so black from the grime of battle and the gunpowder that Johnson could barely recognize them, moved amidst popping rifles and the staccato rhythm of machine guns. Every once in a while Johnson heard a high-pitched scream, and guessed that his bullets had found their mark.

  Johnson had to cease firing a few times because his gun jammed. When it did, he opened the top plate, extracted the guilty shell, shut the plate, and resumed firing. He hoped the gun would not jam while a bayonet-wielding Japanese charged toward him.

  Platt’s counterattack steadily closed on the enemy, who collapsed on the 3-inch guns and a searchlight truck nearby. Johnson, his machine gun barrel glowing with heat from constant use, noticed a group of about twenty Japanese crowding together under the cramped confines of the truck, a vehicle about twenty-two feet long and six feet wide. “They reminded me of a bunch of suckling pigs on a farm,” Johnson recalled.

  Believing the Japanese might want to surrender, Johnson tried to think of a word he could use to convey that notion to the trapped enemy, but a Marine distracted Johnson’s attention. “The guy [Pfc. Severe R. Houde] next to me said, ‘They can’t hit anything.’ I told him to get down.” The words had barely issued from the Marine’s mouth when a bullet struck and killed the young soldier. In the same burst, a bullet grazed Johnson’s right arm and others kicked particles of coral into his face.

  “The bullet had to come from under the truck, and I—I guess it was an emotion, a controlled emotion,” said Johnson. “It was either kill or be killed and I was there to kill ’em.” He later added, “It was a machine gunner’s dream.”

  Johnson fired his machine gun at the collected Japanese under the truck until one 250-round belt emptied; then he loaded another and continued to shoot. He started at one end of the truck and methodically pumped rounds underneath until he reached the other end, at which time he repeated the process. All the anger, the rage that had accumulated since December 8 gushed out of the youngster, who exacted a heavy price from the enemy. “I sat behind the machine gun and loosened bursts, and every fourth round was a tracer and I could see where my bullets were going. You could see the bodies contort and their arms flail up in the air. I must have fired 375 to 400 rounds into the bodies under the truck.”16

  The attack virtually ceased with Johnson’s one-man offensive. In the sudden calm, a corpsman moved up to tend to Johnson’s injuries. When the corpsman tore off Johnson’s shirt, blood gushed down his arm, but the wound was not too severe. The corpsman then used a pair of tweezers to pluck the coral from Johnson’s face.

  While the corpsman treated him, Johnson looked back to see two Japanese soldiers with their hands raised in surrender, the only survivors of the twenty who took shelter underneath the truck. Johnson asked his most dependable civilian, Leo Nonn, to take the pair of Japanese under guard to Captain Platt for interrogation.

  As he gazed about him at the destruction and death, Johnson concluded that his seven men had behaved splendidly under difficult conditions. The corporal, less than one day removed from being considered a teenager, remarked later, “I was surprised at some of the younger ones. They all performed well.”17

  “Be Sure the Dead Ones Are Dead”

  While Platt and Johnson counterattacked the enemy from the west, McKinstry and McAlister organized their own offensive punch from the east. Takano’s men, trapped in the middle, had no chance.

  Corporal Richardson, who had been ordered by Sergeant Bedell to remain in his foxhole near the new channel, started the action from the McKinstry-McAlister side. He had listened to the sounds of fighting for too long now, so he crawled over to Pfc. Gordon L. “Gunny” Marshall to ask for his advice. The pair lit cigarettes and discussed the matter. Even though the sun had not yet risen, enough light filtered in that they could see the shadows of numerous ships off Wake, “big ones and little ones, waiting only for dawn to move in and finish us off,” wrote Richardson in his memoir. That settled the issue. “We knew this and admitted it to ourselves and to each other. Isolation was now unbearable, inactivity impossible.”18

  Richardson and Marshall collected six other men as they slowly advanced around a bend toward the beach. Resting on the sand, half still in the water, loomed an empty landing barge. Not far inland to their right were the 3-inch guns, now manned by Japanese soldiers. As the eight attempted to move into a better position, the group encountered McKinstry and additional men, including Forrest Read and J. O. Young, who also had crept forward to charge the Japanese. Around 6:00 A.M. the third American unit in the vicinity of the guns, the men led by Lieutenant McAlister, arrived.

  McAlister and McKinstry now commanded about twenty-five men, strong enough to mount a frontal assault on the 3-inch position. They split into two forces, a smaller unit led by McAlister that veered out in a flanking attack, while McKinstry took the larger group and attacked head-on. The Americans had barely begun moving forward when an enemy patrol appeared. Seeing the larger force, the three Japanese soldiers hid behind a huge coral boulder. The large, red-bearded McKinstry closed on the boulder but was halted by McAlister’s admonition to send one of his men instead.

  “I’ve got ’em, Gunner,” offered Cpl. William C. Halstead. The corporal rushed the boulder, leapt on top, and pumped rounds into the three stunned Japanese before they had a chance to open fire.

  With that opposit
ion removed, the attack proceeded. J. O. Young grabbed a rifle from the body of a dead Marine, while Forrest Read stayed close to McKinstry to pass along hand grenades for the gunner to throw at the Japanese. The unit of Marines and civilians formed a rough line at a right angle to the beach and cautiously approached the enemy until they were spotted. Then all hell broke loose. As Richardson recalled, “Jap voices lifted in shrill, strange battle cries. Gunny [Marshall] answered with an angry tortured rebel yell. It was a release from the tensions of the silent night. We picked up Gunny’s cue and drowned the enemy voices. Then, as unexpectedly as the screams had sprung from us, they died away and ceased. We inched along, firing and feeling our way.”19

  The Americans, after venting their anger, advanced slowly. Richardson cursed when his loaded ammunition belt dropped down over his hips and sagged to his ankles, further impeding his movement. As he awkwardly stumbled toward the enemy, he wondered what idiot back in the States had designed a belt to carry ammunition instead of a shoulder bag.

  The Americans engaged in a furious melee that included hand-to-hand fighting. Pfc. Artie Stocks saved Pfc. Henry H. Chapman’s life when he shot a Japanese as the enemy soldier prepared to run Chapman through with his bayonet. Private First Class Halstead, who only moments before had killed the three Japanese, slumped dead at McKinstry’s feet when an enemy bullet struck him down. Corporal Richardson eased into the firing position he learned during training and slowly aimed at another enemy soldier. “The patch of cloth raised and enlarged. I held my breath, squeezed the trigger and killed the first game I had ever stalked—a human being.”20