Pacific Alamo

by John Wukovits

While Lieutenant Hanna and his group battled in the center of the maelstrom, Devereux took quick steps to shift reinforcements to the embattled Marines and civilians around the 3-inch gun. Already hamstrung from a lack of personnel, the major risked weakening other positions on the atoll, but he felt he had to rush aid to Hanna, holding a crucial sector of beach, or quickly lose the fight. He ordered Major Putnam to take the remnants of VMF-211, now serving as infantry, and fight his way through to Hanna from the airfield. He told Captain Godbold to send nine men down from Peale, and requested that Lieutenant Lewis fire the 3-inch guns of Battery E as close over the invading Japanese as possible.

  The tactics had an immediate effect on the enemy. While Hanna’s group mounted a heavy volume of rifle and pistol fire, shrapnel from Lewis’s exploding shells rained metal fragments on the invaders from as close as fifty feet above. Corporal Marvin, now with Battery E after being switched from Peale, could not see what they fired at because of the darkness, so they aimed where they thought the ships and Japanese would be and set the fuses to explode above them.

  Hit from two sides, many Japanese fell wounded or dead before they left the beach. Kiyoshi Ibushi, the Japanese war correspondent who accompanied the troops, wrote that “Shells burst directly over our heads, and there was a continuous and intense horizontal fire from the high-angle guns…. We hugged so close to the ground that our helmets dug into the earth.”10

  Major Devereux altered earlier orders given to Lieutenant Poindexter to take the Mobile Reserve and head up to Peale Island. Instead, around 2:45 Devereux told Poindexter to set up his guns and men between the airfield and Camp 1, about a half mile to Hanna’s west. Within ten minutes, Poindexter positioned his men in a line to the west of Hanna, where he engaged Japanese troops in a heavy firefight through the night.

  Poindexter’s men, helped by the illumination from Japanese Very lights, inflicted severe casualties on the Japanese. At first, the enemy advanced cautiously, but as the night went on, they became bolder. Civilian laundry worker John M. Valov spotted a group of shadowy images less than fifty yards away and fired into it. The Japanese moved toward him, but machine-gun fire from other Americans halted their advance and forced them back toward the beach.

  When he heard the sounds of fighting to his rear at Camp 1, Poindexter left G.Sgt. T. Q. Wade in command at the line while he rushed back in his truck to investigate. When he arrived, a Marine pointed seaward, where Poindexter spotted a landing barge that had drifted off course from the Wilkes fighting, as well as Patrol Boat 33 churning toward shore. He directed the Marines near Camp 1 to concentrate their fire on the craft, which forced the barge to back off and try to land several more times, but the metal sides deflected most of the ammunition.

  According to one Marine, Poindexter was either “crazy as a bedbug or the bravest guy alive.” A native of Madison, Wisconsin, the twenty-four-year-old 2d Lt. Arthur A. Poindexter joined the Marines in November 1939, following his graduation from the University of Kansas. Popular with both officers and enlisted men, Poindexter earned a reputation for fairness and for keeping his word. “He was a straightforward guy who gave you no bullshit,” said his close friend, Lieutenant Hanna.11

  Poindexter proved his worth during this action. He organized two teams of volunteers to wade into the water and toss hand grenades into the barges. Poindexter ordered the other Marines to hold their fire so he and his group could creep within hand grenade range, even though he knew the command meant that the Americans would have to advance in the open without covering fire. One team consisted of Sgt. Gerald Carr and civilian R. R. “Cap” Rutledge, while Poindexter and Navy M1c. James Edward Barnes formed the second.

  The four, each carrying six hand grenades, crept out of the brush toward the two enemy vessels and slid among coral outcroppings until they reached the shoreline. As waves lapped at their feet, the men lobbed their grenades at the two targets, but they all fell short. Poindexter rushed back to the brush to retrieve more grenades, then made a second attempt from closer range. Poindexter and Barnes waded ten yards out, stopped, and hurled their grenades into the barge, killing or maiming every occupant.

  Back at the airfield, Putnam posted Lieutenant Kliewer and five enlisted men at each end of the strip with orders to detonate a series of mines planted to destroy the airfield should the enemy appear to be taking Wake. Putnam then took twelve other Marines, including Captain Elrod, to help his fellow Marine, Lieutenant Hanna.

  Before Putnam traveled far, civilian John P. Sorenson, a hard-nosed construction worker twenty years older than Putnam, arrived with twenty-two civilian volunteers ready to fight. The offer moved Putnam, but he told Sorenson to head for the safety of the brush instead. “If you’re captured in combat, your chances are mighty poor. You can’t go with us.”

  The warning meant nothing to the bulky individual. “Major, do you think you’re really big enough to make us stay behind?”

  Putnam tried once more to rebuff what he called in his report the “humorous defiance to the squadron commander’s advice and request that they leave the combat area and seek security.” Putnam had once bitterly complained about the lack of civilian assistance, but he now had trouble finding the right words to express his appreciation to Sorenson. “I’m proud of you. I’d be glad to have you as Marines. But take off. Join the other civilians.”12 Putnam led his Marines away, but close behind followed the stubborn Sorenson and his band of civilian soldiers.

  Putnam arrived alongside Lieutenant Hanna just as the Japanese closed in. Putnam immediately placed his men along a line extending from Hanna’s gun to the airfield.

  The Japanese, still enjoying the advantage of numbers, tried every maneuver to overwhelm the Americans. They attempted to swerve behind Putnam and outflank Hanna—but each time, accurate American fire pinned them down. Bayonet charges dented Putnam’s line, but failed to puncture it. Americans and Japanese engaged in one of war’s most fearsome acts—hand-to-hand fighting. They grappled with one another, shot each other from inches away, plunged bayonets into stomachs, gouged skin and twisted arms, bit hands and strangled necks.

  Due to the courage and directions of their leaders, plus the fighting spirit of the Marines and civilian volunteers, the Hanna-Putnam line held, but each sortie by the Japanese further depleted their ammunition and, more important, their numbers. Hanna did not know how much longer he could hold out or, for that matter, survive.

  “I Reckon We Can Make Out a Little Longer”

  Besides the main action around Hanna’s gun and the subsidiary fighting along Poindexter’s line, military personnel and civilians battled the Japanese at three other locations on Wake. In the first contested area, Cpl. Winford J. McAnally and about ten men contested the eastern end of the airfield against Horie’s seventy soldiers. During their skirmish, a strange apparition materialized at the end of the airfield that some Americans compared to men from Mars. Two Japanese soldiers, wearing large goggles to shield their eyes and carrying tanks on their backs, started to advance. “What the hell’s that?”13 asked one Marine. McAnally had never seen anything like it, but he was not going to waste time analyzing the sight. A quick burst of fire caused one of the Japanese to explode in a ball of flames, but the other hid behind a coral rock. McAnally directed a steady stream of bullets at the rock until they chipped through and killed the second soldier. He and his unit had just encountered the first flamethrowers of the Pacific War.

  The combatants struggled at the airfield for ninety minutes. Horie’s men inched close to McAnally’s line to throw hand grenades, but the Americans cut down the soldiers before they inflicted any harm. As happened elsewhere, Japanese superiority in numbers gave them the advantage. With the enemy moving in, McAnally pleaded for assistance from Devereux. When the major replied that he had no one left to send, McAnally said, “Well, sir, I reckon we can make out a little longer.”14

  Shortly after this exchange, Devereux lost communications with McAnally. He sent a two-man patrol from his command pos
t to reconnoiter the airfield, but when that patrol failed to return, Devereux concluded they had been killed and that the airfield was most likely lost. For the first time, he considered the likelihood that the Japanese had overrun many spots on Wake and that he might soon have to establish a last-ditch line along the road near his bunker.

  To the airfield’s east at Peacock Point, Lieutenant Barninger’s forty men remained at the 5-inch guns, as ordered, in case enemy ships attempted to move in closer. Every explosion and every machine gun burst made them want to rush to the aid of their fellow Marines, but orders were orders, and they sat with their guns.

  They drew fire from the airfield a quarter mile away, but surprisingly the bullets came from McAnally’s squad shooting eastward toward the Japanese. “We were scared,” said Cpl. Franklin Gross. “McAnally was firing from the airport right into us. I could lie on my back and watch the tracers go right over us. If we stood up, he’d a killed us.”15

  Lieutenant Barninger later wondered if he made the correct choice in keeping his men around the guns, but he felt that with the information available at the time, he could take no other course. As a result, the men at Battery A played little part in the December 23 struggle for the atoll.

  The final scene of fighting occurred at the airfield’s western end, where Lieutenant Kliewer and the Marines posted to detonate the mines battled the Japanese. Throughout the night the men, armed with two submachine guns, three .45s, and two boxes of hand grenades, rejected repeated enemy bayonet charges.

  Around 9:00 A.M., Kliewer noticed the presence of Japanese flags along the beach and throughout the island. He decided to set off the mines before the enemy overran his position, but the motor designed to detonate the charges failed to work because of damage caused by a recent rainstorm. Kliewer’s group fought for another hour before falling back toward other American forces.

  “We Might as Well Die on the Attack”

  To the west, Lieutenant Poindexter’s line faced serious threats from enemy units. The officer returned from his grenade attack about one hour before daylight and directed the defense while Japanese soldiers infiltrated the brush to his left. He could tell from the large amount of shouting among Japanese and from the frequent use of flares that the Japanese were massing for a final assault on his line.

  At dawn, the Japanese added grenade launchers to their arsenal and quickly knocked out one of Poindexter’s machine guns, inflicting several casualties on his men. One civilian, John Valov, heard someone shout to look out, but before he could react, a hard object smacked into the back of his head. A grenade had exploded nearby and propelled shrapnel in his direction. Valov felt a trickle on the back of his neck, which he at first thought was sweat running down, until another man yelled that his head and back were drenched in blood. Valov still felt fine, so he shrugged off the wound and continued.

  When G.Sgt. Q. T. Wade muttered to Poindexter that, “They’re all over, on all sides,”16 the officer had no choice but to extricate his men from an increasingly hopeless situation. He ordered a withdrawal to Camp 1 in two groups. While half the men pulled back, the other half laid down cover fire. In this fashion, the Marines leapfrogged back to Camp 1, where by 7:00 Poindexter established another line across the island with ten machine guns and interlocking fields of fire.

  Poindexter expected a strong attack at any moment, but he waited with his men for two hours, receiving nothing more than occasional fire. At that point, the aggressive Poindexter decided that if the Japanese were not going to attack him, he may as well attack them. After all, he commanded one of the most powerful units of Americans on the island, with ten machine guns and Marine riflemen. Though he had lost contact with Major Devereux, that was even more reason to assume the initiative. Years later he explained his decision to charge the Japanese. “To hell with that old saw about ‘a gallant last stand’ like George Armstrong Custer at the Little Big Horn. The Marine Corps had taught me that the only way to accomplish anything is to take the offensive. If we were to fight ‘to the very last man,’ we might as well die on the attack.”17

  Poindexter sent a messenger back to Camp 1 to round up additional Marines for a counterattack. The man located a group of Marine clerks and truck drivers dug in near a supply dump and told the assembled Marines that the lieutenant wanted everyone with a rifle to move up to the line on the other side of the water tower, but his pleas at first had no effect.

  The youngest man present, eighteen-year-old clerk Cpl. Cyrus D. Fish, led the way. Rising from the floor, Fish, whom Poindexter later praised for his “inspiring initiative and courage,” picked up his gear and shouted, “What are we sitting on our asses here for?”18 With that display of courage by the teenager, the other men grabbed their rifles and started toward Poindexter’s line.

  A few Navy personnel joined them as they moved forward, including two who had been trapped on a water tower since the battle’s opening moments, F1c. William O. Plate and S2c. James M. Mullen Jr. The men had been standing watch atop the tower near Camp 1 since shortly before midnight. When they climbed the sixty-foot ladder to relieve the men who had been on duty, Plate ignored the fact that he manned his post with neither rifle nor handgun. Weapons remained a precious commodity on Wake, and as naval personnel, he had no access to any, but he relaxed in the knowledge that all the previous nights had passed without incident.

  Kajioka’s sudden arrival jarred Plate back to reality, for here he was, in the midst of an enemy invasion, without a means of fighting back. Since he had orders to remain on the tower, he intended to watch the Japanese through his night glasses and relay the information to Mullen, who would then communicate enemy movements through his telephone to Lieutenant Poindexter’s machine gun positions below.

  Plate’s discomfort magnified geometrically through the course of the battle, as firing from both the Americans and the Japanese streamed toward and near them. Marine 3-inch shells swooshed by the tower on their path toward the landing craft, while enemy bullets sped up from more than one direction. Puncture holes in the tower caused by the shooting produced rivulets of water that made standing on the platform perilous.

  “We felt like a sore thumb sticking up there,” recalled Plate years later. “Anyone on the island could take a shot at us. If we moved from one side of the tower to another, we would get fired on from that side, too. There were a lot of Japs out there. We felt pretty naked up there without a rifle. It was not a good feeling.”

  Instinct saved Plate’s life at one opportune moment. As he observed the beach through his night glasses, Plate suddenly had a funny feeling. “I swung my glasses down to a bulldozer not far below and there was a Jap who had his rifle aimed directly at me. I could see his finger tightening on the trigger through the night glasses. I dropped right where I was on the platform, and he hit the tower right where I had been standing. If I hadn’t glanced down, I would have been drilled dead center.”

  Plate and Mullen remained on the tower for almost five hours while the battle swirled around them. Finally, around 7:00, they contacted Lieutenant Poindexter, who gave them permission to leave their post and join other Marines fighting on the ground. Quitting the tower would be much more difficult than imagined.

  “We wondered how we were going to do this,” explained Plate. “It was quite a ways to the ground, and then we had to go all the way across open land to reach Poindexter’s line, all in plain view of the Japanese.” Plate started down first, achieving what he considered record speed for descending the twenty yards to the surface. He and Mullen made a mad dash across the open area while bullets kicked up dirt on all sides.

  “It looked like a plowed field when rainstorms start and those big drops of rain hit the ground. The bullets kicked up that much dirt and dust. I’ve always wondered how I made it across,”19 said Plate.

  Corporal Fish and the reinforcements moved away from Camp 1 toward Poindexter and the sounds of battle, but Poindexter, eager to begin his offensive, thought the men moved too slowly. He sho
uted for them to quicken their pace, and when one man still lagged behind, Poindexter sprinted out and kicked the man in the rear.

  Reinforced with the additional twenty Marines from Camp 1, Poindexter divided his fifty-five men into three squads of about ten men each, two attacking on either side of the road paralleling the beach and a third following to protect the left flank. The other men stayed behind with the machine guns, ready to lunge forward in support at Poindexter’s command. Poindexter assumed that all the Marines, including Lieutenant Hanna and Corporal Holewinski, had been killed at the airfield or driven back, so he did not count on receiving any help from that sector. He hoped, however, that the Marines on Peacock Point would rush westward along the beach. If they did, the two forces might trap the Japanese in between.

  Poindexter kicked off his assault at 9:00, but quickly experienced difficulty when the men on the left moved more slowly because of the thick undergrowth. Whenever he encountered any Japanese, Poindexter halted his advance and ordered some of the Marines to lay down covering fire, while others rushed closer to the Japanese and dispatched them with a shower of grenades.

  Poindexter moved eastward in this fashion until reaching a fork in the road near the airfield’s western end, where enemy resistance stiffened considerably. Rather than expend his men, around 11:15 Poindexter halted his counterattack and sent word back for the machine-gun crews to rush forward with their guns.

  At that moment, a rifleman shouted that a large cluster of Japanese approached down the road with a white flag. Poindexter scanned the group for signs of any American soldier among them, but he failed to perceive any. Could his counterattack have succeeded? Could the Japanese be surrendering to him? Telling his men to shoot only if the Japanese opened fire on him, Poindexter stepped onto the road, tightly clutching his weapon, and walked forward to meet the opposition.

  “In My War We Were Losing”