Pacific Alamo

by John Wukovits

  The thoughts so bothered Cunningham that he had once asked a group of men in prison camp how they could be playing cards and laughing after surrendering. The men replied that while they did not like losing the battle on Wake, they could not be fighting the war all the time.

  Even the Japanese noticed Cunningham’s quandary. One of the guards tried to reassure him by reminding him that Japan had never lost a war in its twenty-six centuries of existence.

  “Acting Like a Damn Fool in General”

  Cunningham would quickly have his answer, for relief operations started as soon as the war ended. Twenty-eight teams of four men each spread inside Japan to check on prison camps and to prepare the men for their journeys home. By September 2, less than one month after atomic bombs had destroyed Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9) and only one day after Japanese representatives signed the document of surrender to officially end the war, the Army established a hospital ship and set up processing facilities in Yokohama.

  Teams of Americans parachuted into camps farther inside Japan or in China. They told the men to remain in camp until they received further orders, and explained that aircraft would soon be dropping food, clothing, medical supplies, and other necessities.

  People back home followed the proceedings with great interest, for the men of Wake had been heroes since the war’s initial days. Headlines in the Washington Daily News for September 13, 1945, proclaimed DEVEREUX, WAKE HERO, IS FOUND and stated that “the gallant commander of the heroic U.S. Marine garrison on Wake Island, has been found safe and well in a prisoner of war camp on Hokkaido, northernmost of the Jap home islands, and is awaiting evacuation by plane.”

  According to the article, Devereux wanted to set one thing straight. “The first thing I’d like to get on the record is that we did not send that radio message saying, ‘Send us more Japs.’ We had all and more than we could handle right then and there.”38

  After American fighters buzzed their camp, the men with Forrest Read spelled out the word FOOD with bedsheets. The fighters departed, but shortly after returned with provisions and a note saying B-29 bombers would drop more material. Other men painted large PW [prisoner of war] on rooftops.

  Bombers dropped fifty-gallon drums of canned goods and other items into most camps, which were eagerly snatched up by the famished prisoners. J. O. Young joined the others in cheering, crying, waving his hat, and “acting like a damn fool in general.”39 Since the men had been without decent food in so long, some became ill immediately after eating, but they did not let that stop them.

  That natural craving for nourishment proved to be fatal for a handful of Wake Islanders. After huddling in dugouts on Wake that rattled from Japanese shells and bombs, after seeing men die and bleed, after stomaching the humiliating defeat and surrender, after enduring three and one-half years of prison camp and all its terrors, some men lived to witness war’s end, only to die in an operation intended to bring them home when faulty parachutes failed to stop the plunges of the heavy drums. A food canister killed one civilian in Lieutenant Hanna’s camp. The man standing next to Private First Class Sanders died in similar fashion, and a bag of food dropped by a fighter pilot appeared to be heading directly toward Forrest Read, who broke his foot jumping off a fence to avoid the missile. In Murray Kidd’s camp, a case of food hit one civilian in the neck and killed him instantly, but since the man had cooperated with the Japanese by informing on fellow Americans, few shed any tears. When two men in Corporal Johnson’s camp died the same way, the men cut up some of the parachutes and spelled out on a nearby hill, NO MORE DROPS.

  The first group of ex-prisoners arrived on the hospital ship on September 4, followed by additional units throughout the remainder of September. By the end of the month, most men had been evacuated from their camps and flown to the Twenty-ninth Replacement Depot near Manila in the Philippines for medical examinations, back pay, uniforms, and a chance to send a message home. While in the Philippines, they had to complete a questionnaire about their time in camp that investigators hoped to use in war crimes trials against abusive Japanese officers and soldiers.

  Touching scenes greeted the newly liberated Americans. When the men with Hans Whitney stepped into a naval craft for the ride to the hospital ship, the sailors manning the boat removed their shirts and carefully wrapped them around the shivering ex-prisoners, preferring to let them ride in relative comfort while they braved the trip without shirts. Nurses in fresh white uniforms welcomed Whitney as he boarded the hospital ship. The females, a welcome sight to every man, stepped forward to lend a hand, but broke down in tears when they realized how weak and thin the men were. Sailors helped Whitney to a room where he showered and donned a pair of pajamas, his first clean clothes since December 1941. After devouring two fried eggs, toast, bacon, and the item most demanded by the former prisoners—ice cream—Whitney climbed into a soft bed and fell into a sleep that was interrupted several times by nightmares.

  While being evacuated from Japan, a few of the men encountered a sight they have never forgotten—the devastation at Nagasaki caused by the atom bomb. Along the route transporting Private First Class Gatewood and others from camp, the troop train traveled directly through what had once been a city. “It was about a month after they dropped the atom bomb,” recalled Gatewood. “I just couldn’t believe it. The only thing standing was a wall here or part of a wall there. This Japanese welder had told us about the bomb at Hiroshima, that one bomb did this, and then he showed us a picture. I thought, ‘That’s impossible!’ I thought he meant one plane dropping all kinds of bombs, but he kept saying, ‘No, one bomb!’”40

  Civilian Rodney Kephart passed through Nagasaki on September 15 and stared, mouth open, at the hellish terrain. “I gasped, I swallowed hard, I tried to believe my own eyes,” he wrote after the war. “I looked, rubbed my eyes and looked again—yes, it was true—the landscape was scorched of everything consumable by fire; to the ridge of the hills the vegetation was brown from the heat. All things were gone. Where dwellings, orchards, and gardens had been there were but bare terraces scorched with terrific heat. Where there had been factories there was but twisted steel.”41

  Any man who witnessed the rubble of Hiroshima or Nagasaki could not help being moved for the women, children, and elderly citizens who perished in the conflagration or would shortly expire from the bomb’s effects. After all, many had been innocent victims who had little to do with causing the war and the hatred endemic to it. To a man, however, they believed then, and still contend today, that the atom bomb saved their lives. They would either have died in camp, overworked and undernourished, or the Japanese would have executed them before the American military could assault the Home Islands and free them. The weapon terminated a war that had only one of two alternatives for the prisoners—they would either die in prison camp, or they would live and return to the United States. While feeling compassion for the Japanese victims lost at the two cities, they have never doubted the propriety of their nation using the bomb.

  “It Was Here the Marines Showed Us How”

  Two thousand miles across the Pacific, on September 4, a Marine unit aboard the destroyer escort USS Levy strained to catch a glimpse of their destination—Wake. They had certainly heard of the location, and one passenger—Col. Walter L. Bayler, who became the famous “last man off Wake Island” when he left the atoll on the final flight out—had once fought there, so they were anxious to land and retake the atoll for the United States. No one expected resistance from the large garrison of Japanese, but every Marine maintained extra vigilance just in case.

  Rear Adm. Shigemitsu Sakaibara, Wake’s commander, and five aides led the Japanese surrender party out to the ship in a small whaleboat. The United States military representative designated to receive their surrender, Marine Brig. Gen. Lawton H. Sanderson, curtly refused to acknowledge a Japanese offer to shake hands. This was Wake, the place where the country commenced its four-year-long march to victory, and he was not about to be fri
endly with the men responsible for the deaths of Wake military and civilian personnel.

  When Sanderson cautioned Sakaibara about Japanese sabotage, the admiral assured him he need not worry. Almost 1,900 of his men had already died from bombings or disease, and the survivors were too weak from malnutrition to mount any effective resistance. Sakaibara then affixed his signature to the surrender document and to eleven copies.

  A landing party of about twenty-five Marines, including Colonel Bayler, headed to Wake Island. Fittingly, Colonel Bayler stepped off the craft first, then took the Americans on a quick tour of the place. When they asked a Japanese officer for the location of graves of Wake military or civilian personnel, he pointed to two large mounds. The Americans had yet to learn about the mass execution ordered by Sakaibara, so they headed on their way.

  The American contingent then gathered for the flag-raising ceremony. Everyone, including a color guard, stood at attention as a Marine sounded colors, then watched the Stars and Stripes once again fly over Wake. “The flag raising was a very emotional event,” said Marine combat correspondent Sgt. Ernie Harwell, later the longtime voice of the Detroit Tigers baseball team. “Getting this outpost was the culmination of the war because of what Wake meant to everyone.”42

  General Sanderson ended the brief ceremony by officially handing over control of Wake to Navy Comdr. William Masek. Masek summed up the emotions of everyone, both those on the atoll and the American population back home, when he said, “I accept this island proudly. Because this is Wake Island. Not just any island. It was here the Marines showed us how.”43

  “I Was Doing What I Was Trained to Do”

  Now that the war had ended, thousands of American prisoners of war, including Lieutenant Hanna and Joe Goicoechea, waited impatiently for orders to head back to the United States and their families. Most had to remain in Japan until their records could be checked and transportation could be arranged, or until their health improved sufficiently for them to make the transpacific voyage. As a result, instead of the Wake Island defenders steaming triumphantly into San Francisco harbor as a group, they filtered home at varying times. No matter when they returned, though, the men experienced one of the most powerful moments of their still-young lives.

  “A Very Warm Greeting”

  Major Devereux arrived home before most of his men. On September 15, he flew to the escort carrier Hoggatt Bay, where he rejoined fellow Wake officers for their first American cooked meal. After a brief layover in Hawaii, Devereux landed in Washington, D.C., on September 26, where he was reunited with his son, Paddy, who hoped to ride horses and attend baseball and football games with the father he had not seen in so long and whom the nation had adopted as its own.

  Devereux’s hometown of Chevy Chase, Maryland, honored him with an enthusiastic parade. Twenty thousand people lined the streets to welcome their hero, a man the Washington Times-Herald called “the smiling little guy who bought time for America when time was the most precious commodity on earth.” The Marine Corps Band played patriotic tunes for the throng, which fought back tears when the band started the notes of the Marine Hymn. Gen. Alexander Vandegrift, the Marine commandant, addressed the crowd about the significance of what the Marines accomplished on Wake. “Throughout the war the slogan of the marine corps [sic] always was remember Pearl Harbor and remember Wake.”1

  The reaction for Commander Cunningham stood in stark contrast to that of Devereux. He arrived in New York City on September 7, then immediately headed to Washington, D.C., for a reunion with his wife and daughter. His wife, though delighted to hold her husband in her arms once again, choked back tears at the sight of the gaunt Cunningham.

  Along his route home, Cunningham, still concerned about being considered a failure, realized that few in the public recognized his name. Since most bulletins issued by the Navy Department during the battle emphasized the Marine role in the fighting, Devereux’s name, not Cunningham’s, gained all the publicity. Few people knew that Cunningham had even served on the atoll, let alone acted as its commanding officer. Contrary to the emotional parade held to honor Devereux, Cunningham returned to empty streets. “My reputation, where it existed at all, was that of a commander who did not command,” he wrote in his memoirs. “To a fighting man, there can be no worse dishonor short of treason itself.” Adding insult to injury, when people who met Cunningham learned that he had been on Wake, they invariably asked the officer, “You were on Wake? Then you were with Devereux?”2

  After being freed from prison camp, Lieutenant Hanna boarded a ship in Tokyo Bay, where he enjoyed his first clean uniform and decent food. Like most Wake Islanders, he asked for ice cream when given the option of any food he could have. Hanna settled in on the ship and then sent a message to Vera in Louisiana that he was all right.

  Hanna had to remain in Hawaii for two days of official business before flying to San Francisco. He called Vera once he landed in California and arranged a meeting in Wichita, Kansas, the destination of Hanna’s next set of hospital tests, then hopped an airplane for the trip eastward.

  Hanna arrived in Wichita around 2:00 A.M., three hours before Vera and Erlyne pulled in by car. Lieutenant Hanna, whose once-haggard appearance had been improved by a better diet and extra rest, enjoyed what he described as a “very warm greeting”3 with his wife at the entrance to the terminal. Though he guessed that Erlyne would not remember him, his daughter’s affectionate welcome seemed to wash away the previous three years. After more than two weeks of fighting on Wake, a month of captivity on the atoll, a few grueling weeks on the hell that was the Nitta Maru, and the years in confinement, the hero of Hanna’s guns was once again where he belonged—in the arms of loved ones.

  Other military personnel, many still younger than most college graduates, gradually headed home to their families. In other conditions, other times, a twenty- or twenty-one-year-old might have been called a young adult or novice worker, yet even the youngest of Wake’s defenders—one Marine, having lied about his age to enlist, was still only a teenager—had seen more, experienced more, and endured more than 99 percent of the nation they defended.

  “There Wasn’t No Fanfare”

  Just emerging from three and one-half years in prison camp, each man inevitably passed through a period of adjustments to peacetime living. When some former prisoners first slipped into comfortable hospital beds, they waited for the nurses to leave the room, then slid out from the covers and slept on the hard floor because the softer mattresses bothered them. On the ship that transported them to Guam, Pfc. Jacob Sanders and other Marines complained that the ship’s doctor would not allow the men to eat anything they wanted. The physician correctly predicted that the richer food would seriously affect their digestive systems, but his words meant nothing to men possessing an enormous craving for the very thing of which they had been deprived.

  When the ship docked at Guam, the Marines took their grievance to another doctor on the island, who readily gave permission for them to consume to their hearts’ desire, an assent that signaled a feeding frenzy. Some of Sanders’s buddies grabbed entire loaves of fresh bread, smeared them with butter, and stuffed them down their throats as quickly as they could. Not surprisingly, they became ill as the first doctor had predicted.

  “We ate everything. We’d eat and then go to the end of the chow line and eat again, until we left Guam,” said Corporal Marvin. “Then they gave us tiddlywinks so we could only eat one meal. You had to show that color tiddlywink for each meal and without it you couldn’t even get through the line. They didn’t want us to overdo it because some of the fellows ate so much they got sick. Some of the guys were gaining one pound a day.”4 Marvin, who had dropped to 115 pounds from his prewar weight of 180, regained most of the weight loss before reaching the United States.

  When Private First Class Gatewood arrived in the United States and telephoned his sister, he spent thirty minutes trying to convince her who he was. “They had heard nothing of me since the first part of 1945, when
they received a card. They thought I was dead. My sister kept telling me, ‘I don’t know what you are trying to pull, but you’re not my brother.’ I said, ‘If I’m not, you haven’t got another brother named George.’ She said, ‘I don’t know who you’re trying to kid, but you’re not Martin.’ She didn’t recognize my voice. I had just turned eighteen when I went into the service, and here I was five years later calling and talking to her.”5

  The first returnees from Wake enjoyed festive celebrations. When Private First Class Sanders’s ship, for instance, steamed under the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, boats filled the harbor and cars lined the bay, all with horns tooting a welcome for the ship bearing prisoners of war. Huge signs reading WELL DONE, BOYS and GRATEFUL NATION WELCOMES YOU greeted others.

  Conditions changed for those who followed the first wave. Delayed in a hospital along the route or held up by a slow-moving troop transport, the men pulled into quiet harbors and empty docks. By then the nation, weary of war and reminders of all things military, had turned its attention from parades to the more civilian pastimes of rebuilding careers and raising families. Private Laporte steamed under the same bridge as Sanders, yet found no one waiting. “The great expectations kind of mellowed by the time we got home. The country wasn’t throwing out any ceremonies at the time. There wasn’t no fanfare. We just went to military hospitals. There was no crowd waiting at the docks yelling and cheering.”6 Sadly, many of the men who played such prominent roles in raising the country’s morale in the war’s bleak early days, when the country most needed a lift, received a lukewarm welcome from that same nation upon returning.

  “The Most Wonderful Day of My Life”

  A gangrenous leg and other maladies kept Joe Goicoechea from returning to Boise immediately. Physicians in Okinawa briefly considered amputating the leg, but heavy doses of penicillin over several weeks cleared the problem. As soon as his leg permitted, the Idahoan roamed the hospital halls, visiting other men and exploring the building. Finally, after receiving an avalanche of complaints from nurses that their patient refused to follow orders, doctors told Goicoechea that if he were healthy enough to be that much of a problem, he was well enough to go home.