While Poindexter enjoyed success at the eastern edge of the airfield, one mile to the west, Lieutenant Hanna and his small band of defenders held off endless attacks by hundreds of enemy soldiers, most roused to vengeance by Hanna’s accurate shooting. His 3-inch gun had severely damaged Patrol Boat 32, killing many men, and even now he cut down more with his smaller weapons as they attempted to close in. Determined to destroy this pesky group of Americans, Japanese soldiers crawled forward until they lay twenty yards in front of Hanna, jumped up, shouted “Charge!” and ran straight at the lieutenant. American hand grenades, rifle fire, and 3-inch shells from Battery E halted the Japanese before they advanced half the distance.
One of those soldiers facing Hanna, Sub-Lieutenant Ozeki, hugged the ground near Captain Uchida when a hand grenade bounced by. He shoved his face deeper into the coral sand, every limb and muscle trembling, and waited for the explosion and for what he thought must be his death, but the American grenade failed to detonate. He raised his head to witness a gruesome sight—instead of Japanese soldiers charging to a glorious victory, the bodies of comrades cloaked the ground leading to Hanna. Men near Ozeki cursed when they dropped bullets as they tried to chamber the rounds in the darkness. The Japanese may have outnumbered the Americans at this gun, but as far as Sub-Lieutenant Ozeki was concerned, the battle had not gone as expected. “They say that in war each man knows only what he sees in front of him. In my war we were losing.”20
Finally, a group of soldiers stood and yelled, “Totsugeki!” the Japanese word for “charge.” Ozeki, now wearing the boots of a dead comrade, tried to rise, but at first his legs would not move. He made a few more attempts before he lifted from the sand and stepped forward, but he trembled so badly that he stumbled with every move he took. Ozeki squeezed off two shots with his pistol, but his hands shook so hard that the bullets smacked into the sand only a few yards ahead of him. Around him, the fallen bodies of other men who had tried to charge Hanna’s gun reminded him of rag dolls tossed in a heap.
Despite the deadly return fire, enough Japanese pressed ahead that they threatened to surround Hanna’s gun. When Devereux ordered Lewis’s 3-inch guns to cease firing at the enemy in front of Hanna, the Japanese closed in even more. The commander, unable to obtain a clear picture of the fight from his command post because so many communications had been cut, later admitted that this move might have been premature, for it left Hanna’s and Putnam’s line on its own and gave the Japanese an opportunity to close in.
As enemy bullets clanked off the 3-inch gun and its platform, Lieutenant Hanna decided he could no longer fire the weapon. The Japanese had drawn so near that the weapon could not be lowered enough to have an impact, and since the gun offered little protection behind which to fight, he and the others would be dead within moments anyway. He ordered everyone to jump off the gun’s circular platform, scoot as far underneath as possible, and lie behind the four eight-foot-long gun legs. The one-and-one-half-foot-thick metallic protrusions provided sparse cover, but it was better than being in the open on the platform. “We’ll make our stand here. This is as far as we go,” Hanna told Holewinski, Gay, Bryan, and Eric Lehtola, a third civilian. The officer admitted later that his order “was almost like telling the men this is where we are going to die, but I didn’t quite put it that way.”21
As Japanese bullets ricocheted off the platform and enemy soldiers shouted encouragement to one another, Hanna, Holewinski, and their civilian volunteers scampered underneath the 3-inch gun and lay down beside its legs. The sharp crack of Japanese rifles and the bullets pinging against the platform drowned out most noise around Hanna, who had so much adrenaline coursing through his body that he failed to notice the sparks caused by enemy bullets striking metal directly above him. The officer continued to fire his .45, but he realized the end could not be far off.
Twenty yards toward the beach, Sub-Lieutenant Ozeki saw Captain Uchida raise his sword, shout a command, and rush forward. He drew his own sword and ran after him, screaming at the top of his lungs as American tracers laced the nighttime sky. He drew inspiration from his leader, Uchida, and comfort knowing that hundreds of his fellow soldiers followed closely behind him, but when the pair fell to the sand after a short sprint, they realized they had been the only two to advance. Ozeki tried to shout something to Uchida about the predicament they faced, but the officer’s head suddenly slumped forward. When Ozeki turned Uchida’s head toward him, a huge hole existed where the captain’s forehead used to be. A bullet had hit the commander directly below the brim of his helmet and sliced away an entire section of his face.
Alone on the beach, Ozeki pressed into the sand and waited for the other soldiers to join him. To his surprise, at such a perilous moment Ozeki remembered a friendly conversation he had with other soldiers who joked that in combat a man’s testicles shrank because of fear. There on the beach, with bullets nipping the ground and men yelling and dying, Ozeki slipped his hand inside his trousers to see if the theory was true. To his delight, he found that fear had not seemed to affect him in any manner.
“I Assumed I Wasn’t Going to Make It”
Back near the 3-inch gun, Corporal Holewinski fired as fast as his old Springfield rifle allowed, but because the weapon did not function properly, he could shoot only one round at a time. As he lay in the prone position and pushed off his chest, Holewinski inserted a bullet into the rifle, took aim, fired, and then repeated the process. Holewinski had clear shots at numerous targets, for explosions lit the battlefield and fires in the brush nearby outlined the advancing enemy, but the sight proved to be a mixed blessing. The illumination only reinforced how hopeless was their situation. For a split second Holewinski wished he had signed on for additional life insurance for his family; then he maintained a steady fire while bullets smacked into the platform above and hand grenades bounced close by and exploded.
The enemy, bayonets gleaming in the night, repeatedly rushed Hanna’s and Putnam’s line, then fell back in the face of heavy fire from the Americans. On a few occasions the Japanese raced completely through the American lines, for at times Lieutenant Hanna shot to his front and then to his rear as the Japanese ran right past. Hand-to-hand fighting again broke out in some spots.
With his band of men from the airfield, Putnam set up a skirmish line immediately to Lieutenant Hanna’s right, determined to prevent Uchida’s men from rushing by and controlling the land directly south of the airfield. In the midst of the fighting, a Japanese sniper wounded Putnam in the left jaw, causing so much blood loss that blood drenched the photographs of the officer’s daughter he always carried in his breast pocket.
With Putnam slipping in and out of consciousness, Elrod, Sorenson, and the rest fought like cornered beasts. Sorenson, the bulky civilian, stood his ground and lobbed grenades at the onrushing Japanese until his supply ran out. With no other weapons at hand, Sorenson picked up large rocks and threw them at the enemy until a volley of bullets cut him down. Captain Elrod jumped up, shouted, “Kill the sons of bitches!”22 and fired his submachine gun as the other Americans rallied around him. When a Marine nearby ran out of ammunition, Elrod handed him his weapon, grabbed a similar gun from a dead Japanese soldier, and continued to fight. Elrod’s courage, combined with the actions of Sorenson and the other men along Putnam’s line, momentarily halted the Japanese momentum.
Captain Elrod’s heroics formed the stuff from which legends are made. He rarely sought cover, even as the battle raged about him. A Japanese officer, most likely referring to Elrod, mentioned that, “One large figure appeared before us to blaze away with a machine gun from his hip as they do in American gangster films.”23 When Elrod ran out of ammunition, he grabbed a handful of grenades to continue the fight, but the odds of his surviving so many bold actions finally caught up when a burst of Japanese fire killed him. For his actions, both on this day and earlier in the battle for Wake, Captain Elrod was later awarded the Medal of Honor.
As the fight stretched into the second and third hours, H
anna and Putnam faced a critical situation. Every officer was wounded or killed except Captain Tharin, and three enlisted men had fallen. Ten Morrison-Knudsen men, including Sorenson, died and another three suffered wounds in the fierce fighting. Only three civilians emerged unharmed, one of whom was Fred Gibbons, who battled side by side with his son until the younger Gibbons slumped dead.
Nearly surrounded and down to just a few men, Putnam, still weak from blood loss and fending off enemy soldiers with his .45, fought his way over to Hanna’s gun, where the lieutenant and his men had already taken shelter under the platform. Hanna glanced over from his position in time to spot three Japanese, neatly silhouetted against the nighttime sky, stalking Putnam from less than ten feet away. Hanna took aim with his .45 and shot each man in the forehead from such a close range that he saw the bullets enter their heads and exit through the back, creating holes large enough for him to sink a fist into.
The fighting now collapsed on Hanna’s 3-inch gun, a temporary haven for the cluster of Marines and civilians who huddled underneath. The Japanese took such large casualties in attacking that they at first retreated to the brush, from where they kept Hanna and Putnam pinned down with rifle fire and lobbed hand grenades toward the Americans. Holewinski learned to ignore the grenades that smoked, since those weapons always failed to explode. When a grenade tumbled in that did not smoke, he squeezed as close to the metal leg as he could and hoped for the best.
Sub-Lieutenant Ozeki had another reason besides the heavy losses for not being so aggressive in grappling with the Americans. He had been taught in training never to let the Americans move within an arm’s reach, since every American soldier was a trained boxer who could snap their necks with one punch. He did not know if it was true, but Ozeki was not about to give one of his opponents a chance to prove it one way or the other.
The battle dissolved into a series of repetitive actions. When the Japanese thought they had the advantage, they scrambled out from the brush and raced toward the gun, shouting words of exhortation to each other. Hanna, Putnam, and the few men underneath or near the gun answered with their rifles and .45s, while Bryan hurled hand grenades. The Americans repelled attack after attack, always preventing the Japanese from closing the circle around them and bringing fire from all sides.
For more than two and one-half hours the beleaguered men at Hanna’s gun kept the enemy at bay. Hanna and Putnam fought side by side, lying on the ground underneath the platform while they fired their .45s. No one expected to survive—too many Japanese soldiers and too few Americans occupied a small radius of action.
“That was a foregone conclusion,” Lieutenant Hanna said after the war. “I assumed I wasn’t going to make it. We weren’t going anywhere. You’re feeling that you don’t have any choice, so you might as well make as much of it as you can.”24
Corporal Holewinski harbored similar thoughts, but he pushed them out of his mind as quickly as he could. If he was a dead man, at least he intended to behave honorably during his final moments and take as many Japanese with him as he could. Holewinski watched one Japanese soldier lift his head to look around; then he fired his rifle. “We were close enough that when my shot hit him he spun around and the blood spurted out, just like in the movies. When he went down, his buddy jumped up, and I got him before he got his rifle out. I shot him, he spun around and went down.”25
At least thirty dead Japanese littered the ground around Hanna’s gun. Bryan became so absorbed in throwing his grenades at the enemy that he refused to share any with Holewinski, who instead kept using his rifle. At the same time, Holewinski heard Bryan yell to Gay that he should save two bullets in the gun he was using. In case the Japanese were about to overrun their position, Bryan wanted a bullet left for each civilian rather than allow them remain alive and face possible torture.
Putnam continued to briefly lose consciousness from the wounds to his neck and chin. He grabbed Hanna’s first-aid kit, hastily bandaged his neck, and then returned to the fighting, but he could not shake his drowsiness. That became the least of his worries when two Japanese soldiers suddenly appeared above him. He fired two quick rounds at the Japanese, who slumped dead to the ground beside Putnam.
Dozens of hand grenades bounded near the platform, but fortunately either they failed to detonate or the platform’s legs absorbed most of the impact. One grenade tore a chunk of flesh the size of a baseball out of Holewinski’s back, but in the heat of the action he did not realize he had been hit until after the battle, when he finally felt the blood trickling down his back and legs.
“Where’s the Cavalry Now?”
Daylight, normally an ally in that it enabled one to see better, worsened the situation for Hanna, as carrier aircraft started bombing and strafing the position around 7:00 A.M. Aircraft swooped down on the gun and peppered the entire area with bullets, killing Gay and Bryan, the two civilians who had battled so valiantly through the night. Holewinski, who was hit in the left leg by the same aircraft, saw Bryan’s body lift up off the ground from the bullets’ impacts, then slump back onto the sand. The enemy planes returned for more runs as the few survivors shrank closer to the steel legs for protection.
“The second attack the Japanese got me in the right leg,” explained Holewinski. “Those bullets were like hot knives going through you. I was lying on my back, looking straight up at the airplane, and I could see the rear gunner’s glasses, the plane came so low. He started making a third run, and I’m scooting under the gun some more.”26
Holewinski, with wounds to his back, both legs, and to his buttocks, lay still, hoping the pilot would think he was dead. His gamble worked, as the enemy bullets splattered into the sand beyond his body.
Hanna praises Gay, Bryan, and Lehtola for sacrificing their lives to assist the Marines, but he blames himself for their deaths because he could not train them properly. Marines are taught to stay low to the ground at all times, but the three construction workers died when they raised their heads to take a look at the battle area. “They didn’t hug the ground like they should,” said Hanna. “They’d stick their head up at the wrong time, but they had no training. You have to know that somebody is looking for you at the same time you are looking for them. That bothers me. I didn’t take the time to explain that to them. It was my fault. I didn’t have much time to show them much of anything.”27
The trio perished, not because of Hanna’s fault, but because they did what they thought they should do, fight alongside their military brethren, and no amount of training by Hanna or any other officer in the limited time available before the landing assault would have likely altered the outcome. The civilian and military worlds united at Hanna’s gun to produce a roster of heroes who willingly risked death to do their duty.
For five and one-half hours, from 2:30 until 8:00, Hanna and Putnam orchestrated the defense around Hanna’s gun, holding off repeated attacks until they began to run out of ammunition. They could never take a breather, for they never stopped fighting during that time, and Hanna does not even recall taking a drink of water. In a report after the war, Major Devereux tried to describe the intense situation facing Hanna, and to make it easier for the reader he simply compared it to that of Custer’s Last Stand, the renowned frontier battle in which American soldiers fought to the death battling larger numbers of Sioux warriors.
They had held out for most of the night, but the aerial attacks at daylight and Japanese numerical superiority proved more than the group could handle. The Japanese gradually drew closer, and as they did, one by one the Americans ran out of ammunition. Finally, weak from blood loss and the constant fighting, both Hanna and Holewinski came down to their final three bullets. The seemingly hopeless situation caused Holewinski to think of those Hollywood films in which surrounded soldiers heroically battle hostile Indians, then are rescued at the final moment by the cavalry. As the Japanese neared the gun, Holewinski thought, “Where’s the cavalry now?”28
“I Guess We’d Better Give It to Them”
As the long night wound on, Cunningham and Devereux tried to obtain a clear picture of events from inside their command posts, but because communications had been severed, they had to rely on the word of runners sent from battery commanders. Cunningham realized he faced a critical situation when he attempted to order a submarine he thought to be in the waters off Wake to join the fighting, but received instead a transmission from Pearl Harbor explaining that no friendly vessels, surface or otherwise, stood near Wake and none were to be expected. After reading the message, Cunningham concluded his chances of survival were slim. “We were on our own,”29 he later wrote.
Around 5:00, Cunningham sent another dispatch informing Pearl Harbor of the battle’s progress. Without clear communications to Wilkes, Peale, or to Hanna, Cunningham could not accurately assess matters, but he knew the enemy had landed in many places with overwhelming numbers. He transmitted a phrase from a book he had read, Anatole France’s Revolt of the Angels, which stated, ENEMY ON ISLAND. ISSUE IN DOUBT.30
With the situation deteriorating, Devereux shifted Marines from other locations around the atoll to his command post, where he organized a final defense. He placed his executive officer, Major Potter, in charge, then ordered Captain Godbold to rush troops down from Peale and Corporal McAnally to fall back from the airfield. By 7:00, about eighty men supported by four machine guns, the largest American force on Wake, manned Potter’s line. Interspersed with the Marines were the civilians from Sergeant Bowsher’s crew on Peale, armed with hunting rifles and shotguns they removed on the way down from the demolished Pan American Hotel.
Gunner Hamas left Devereux’s command post to join the line, which extended from the edge of the airfield across to the beaches. Already, Japanese fire burst into the Marines, who wanted to prevent the Japanese from breaking through and heading north toward Peale.
The group of Americans could do little to change the dramatic situation. At 7:30 Devereux contacted Cunningham to inform him that, as far as he could determine, the battle fared poorly at every point. He mentioned that “the Japs had secured Wilkes Island, Camp One, the channel, the airstrip and probably Barninger’s position [Peacock Point] as well, and that now the enemy was eating his way into the island with Potter’s line as the next bite.”31 Devereux had no contact with the Hanna-Putnam line, and he assumed Poindexter fared poorly, as well. He added that he did not think Potter could long hold out against overwhelming numbers.
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