The Saga of Wake

It was hot, and in the tangled thickets of ten-foot bush the love birds courted. Out toward Wilkes islet where the contractor’s men were blasting a small boat channel through the jagged coral heads of the lagoon, the dull boom of blasting—a louder roar against the eternal threnody of the sea—roused, with a great fluttering beat of wings, a covey of nesting goonies. From the five thousand foot runway down by Peacock Point, came the thunder of the engines of the dawn patrol as the single-seater Grummans skipped in over the line of surf to a landing. And from “Pan-Am’s” Peale Island there was another sudden man-made cacophony as the Philippine Clipper, in from Midway the night before, took off in a long furrow of white across the still waters of the lagoon.

Commander Winfield Scott Cunningham, U. S. N., Commanding Officer, Naval Air Station, Wake Island, and Major James Patrick Sinnott Devereux, quiet, wiry little “gyrene”—commander of the Second Defense Battalion, U.

S. Marine Corps, stretched, looked at the Pacific sky, and watched the great clipper recede into the distance. It was about seven A. M. Monday, Dec. 8, 1941 (1955 Greenwich Civil Time, Dec. 7). They stood in the middle of the canvas and lumber “city” of Camp 2, on Heel Point, northwestern strip of Wake Island—and around and about them stretched the sand and coral of the tiny atoll that until 1935 was a bird sanctuary, but that was now fast becoming a strategic prize of the Pacific.

Dreary, treeless, sand wastes fringed with coral out-croppings, lined with a thick frieze of hardy scrub, stunted, twisted, tangled by generations of exposure to the winds of the Pacific—this is Wake Island. The most pretentious structures in the atoll known as Wake were Pan-American’s buildings on Peale Island, where the built-up sand dunes, anchored by the scrub, lift to the magnificent height of twenty-one feet above the sea. Peale is separated from the wish-bone shaped spit of sand which is Wake proper by a small opening in the coral barrier reef, and across the shallow lagoon from Peale lies Wilkes Island, third of the triumvirate which is Wake Atoll. To the northwest across the open end of the lagoon stretches a massive coral barrier constantly bright with creaming surf, while to the southeast Peacock Point terminates in a narrow, reef-protected sand spit.

The two men scanned the endless horizons in the narrow manner sailors have. They knew they were isolated in an immensity of distance. To the west, where the Clipper had vanished, lay Guam, 1,334 miles away; to the east, across 2,004 miles of ocean, was Honolulu; Midway, to the northeast, was 1,034 miles distant. But to the south, only 352 miles distant, was Japanese-owned Taongi Atoll and an equal mileage further was strewn a milky way of islets, sand spits, rocks and atolls, known as the Marshall Archipelago-flying the Rising Sun flag of Japan.

The officers had scarcely finished their morning coffee when the startling news came. Pearl Harbor had been attacked. From “Comfourteen” (Commandant Fourteenth Naval District at Pearl Harbor) by radio came the signal so long expected but incredible still:

“Pearl Harbor attacked by Japanese Stop Carry out prearranged plans.”

Major Devereux had the bugler sound “General Quarters,” and as the Marines ran to their guns he took stock. He knew things weren’t as they should be. “Naval Air Station, Wake Island” wasn’t finished. There were some 1,200 civilian laborers on the island—the contractor’s men—supervised by Lieut-Commander E. B. Greey, a Reserve Officer of the Civil Engineer Corps of the Navy, who had gone out to Wake from his home in Princeton, N. J., just a short time before. There was a mass of dredging machinery, machine shops, temporary construction, laborers’ camps and other unmilitary paraphernalia, all of it good bombing targets. The island couldn’t be used by any large defensive force: the small-boat channel being dredged in the lagoon had not been finished; anchorage off Wake’s coral reefs was dangerous and unprotected; only one runway out of three projected was ready.

Indeed, the squadron of twelve barrel-fuselaged Grumman F4F8 single-seater fighters had landed on Wake from an aircraft carrier only a few days before. “Marfitron 211” (Marine Fighter Squadron 211), a part of Marine Air Group Twenty-one, under command of Major Paul Albert Putnam with ten officers and two enlisted pilots and two officers and forty-seven men in the ground crew, added a considerable punch to Wake’s defenses. The roar of the great Pratt and Whitney motors as four of the planes kept endless patrol of the skies above Wake was comforting. But there were no bombers, and if one excepted the giant Clipper winging now toward Guam, there were no reconnaissance or patrol planes.

Major Devereux paused in his mental stock-taking and sent a message to Pan-Am’s radio by orderly, recalling the Clipper.

Devereux commanded the Second Defense Battalion, U. S. Marine Corps, but it wasn’t all on Wake. It was—like so much American effort in those days—a “token force.” The Marines were to suffer for it. Devereux had 365 enlisted men and thirteen officers (including himself) in addition to those in “Marfitron 211” to defend some dozen miles of beach, and he was short of weapons. There were six five-inch .51 calibre naval guns for use against surface targets, which Devereux had carefully emplaced probably at the island’s extremities at Kuku and Toki Points, Heel Point, near Camp 2, and at Peacock Point, by the runway. He had a dozen three-inch anti-aircraft guns, but only two directors, or enough to control the fire of two batteries of eight guns. There were eighteen .50 calibre machine guns—heavy water-cooled Brownings, with the thumb trigger—and thirty .30 calibre machine guns to guard the beaches. There were half a dozen searchlights. Each man had his Springfield, and in the ammunition dumps dug out of the sand there were hand grenades, bombs, depth charges.

But those 1,200 civilian laborers—supernumeraries in battle—worried Devereux. More mouths to feed. . . . And there were others. There was a naval doctor, Lt. (j. g.) Kahn; there were perhaps fifty to a hundred navy men-radio men, machinists, etc.—and there were a handful of Army personnel, radio operators, ground crews, etc., who were at Wake to service the Army bombers that had been using the island as a staging stop to the Philippines. . . .

A louder roar from the skies interrupted Devereux’s stock-taking. It was the Clipper returning. She had not gone far, thank God; at Guam she would have been washed out for sure. J. H. Hamilton, the Clipper’s captain, brought the great flying boat down to a smooth landing on the surface of the lagoon, noted in his log:

“2014, GCT, arrived back at Wake.” There were hurried consultations and plans as the morning wore on.

Commander Cunningham and Major Devereux ordered the Clipper pressed into service as a flying ship-of-war; she was to make a reconnaissance patrol at one o’clock that afternoon with two Grumman fighters (with a cruising radius of about 500 miles) as escorts. The flight was never made. At two minutes before noon, Dec. 8, 1941, the Japs hit the island, and the long trial of blood and agony started. . . .

They came in from the south—high in the blue Pacific heavens. They came in tight formation, a squadron of twelve, and then twelve more some distance back, losing altitude in their approach, until they made their run about three thousand feet above the twisted scrub and hot sands of Wake. . . . You could see the Rising Sun insignia of Japan on their wings, and they appeared to be, according to Hamilton, a cross between the DC-8 and the Lockheed 14—twin-engined land bombers, undoubtedly based on Taongi to the south.

They hit hard—and accurately. Eight of Marfitron 211 ‘s fighters were on or near the runway being serviced after hours in the air. Wake had no radio detectors—and thus little warning of the enemy’s approach; Major Putnam had sent four of his planes on a wide swing to seaward to scout for the enemy.

The first bombs fell near the land runway near Peacock Point. They were 100 pounders that whooshed into the sand and went off on contact with a great roar and mushrooming burst of flame and smoke. They were meant to get the Marine planes and as many of the ground personnel as possible—and they did their job well. There were soon bodies and torn, bleeding wounded, sprawled about the bush in the grotesque attitudes of the stricken. . . .

There were few veterans on Wake. Devereux, of course, had seen action in Nicaragua and elsewhere; he knew what war meant. So did some of his sergeants. But most were green. The seven minutes of that first raid were hell. No man knows what he will do under fire until he has been tried. The Marines didn’t have time to be afraid; there was a job to be done, and—as they saw their fellows die—slow, welling, choking anger came. The “sky guns” lifted toward the dark wings above them and barked into the heavens in staccato bursts. Above and around the raiders, the grey-white puffs of H. E. blossomed like cotton bolls. The guns fired, recoiled, fired, recoiled, fired, recoiled. . . . An ordered chaos, with the roar of sound overcoming the ceaseless symphony of the sea. The goonies wheeled in sudden terror, dark clouds of them, on stiffened wings.

The raiders passed over Wake and hit at Pan-Am’s installations on Peale Island. Hamilton and his chief mechanic Earle flung themselves into the sand; behind them the hotel known to so many trans-Pacific travellers dissolved in flame and debris; ahead of them bullets spattered the water around the hull of the moored clipper, tore into her side.

The enemy wheeled and attacked again. In all, the raiders probably loosed 200 to 300 bombs and spewed out a hail of machine gun fire. Many were misses; the quiet lagoon and the foaming sea were roiled with bomb geysers; but plenty were hits.

As the noise of the motors died away and the guns ceased firing, Commander Cunningham, Major Devereux and Major Putnam took stock. It took but a glance to tell them that the Japanese had known Wake’s lay-out perfectly. Seven of the Grumman fighters lay a twisted mass of charred wreckage near the runway. An eighth was damaged. There were twenty-five dead and seven wounded from the aviation group alone. “Marfitron 211” had been badly hit. The canvas city of Camp 2 had been riddled with machine gun fire. On Peale Island four Chamorro employees of Pan-American and a couple of contractor’s men had been killed, others wounded. Lt. Kahn was already busy with the surgeon’s scalpel in his improvised operating room. The “PanAm” hotel was gone, and there was a greater loss; the airline’s radio transmitter had been destroyed. Machine shop, office building and employees’ quarters were burned; gas tanks and fuel drums were burning fiercely; pumps and gas line were demolished. Peale Island was a holocaust.

But Wake was by no means knocked out. The Clipper had been hit by several dozen bullets, but the incendiaries had missed her gas tanks; she could fly. There were still the four Grummans in the air, though one of them coming into a landing at the d6bris-riddled field bent its propeller. There was another that could be repaired on the ground. Most of the fuel drums which had been a specific objective of the Japanese attack had been empty; there were still 140,000 gallons in surface and sub-surface tanks in “Pan-Am’s” storage alone. The contractor’s men, hidden in the bush, had mostly escaped injury; and their machinery was largely intact, though what good it would be now was not apparent. But the personnel of the Marine Defense Battalion, their guns, and equipment had escaped; they had ample supplies of ammunition. And they were dangerous, for they were angry—fighting mad.

Hamilton and his Pan-Am men were mad, too. They were ready to take the Clipper anywhere with anybody. But Cunningham and Putnam decided she was too valuable and too vulnerable to be risked. They put her passengers back aboard and loaded her chock-a-block with Pan-Am’s civilian ground personnel and in the early afternoon the Marine garrison watched her furrow the waters of the lagoon and head eastward toward Midway and Hawaii. She was one of the last links to civilization they were to know, and when she had gone they were lonely.

Dec, 9, They had buried their dead and the wounded had been bandaged and morphined—groaning in the fitful way the semi-conscious have—when the enemy came over again. It was almost noon and the calm beauty of the day green. The seven minutes of that first raid were hell. No man knows what he will do under fire until he has been tried. The Marines didn’t have time to be afraid; there was a job to be done, and—as they saw their fellows die—slow, welling, choking anger came. The “sky guns” lifted toward the dark wings above them and barked into the heavens in staccato bursts. Above and around the raiders, the grey-white puffs of H. E. blossomed like cotton bolls. The guns fired, recoiled, fired, recoiled, fired, recoiled. . . . An ordered chaos, with the roar of sound overcoming the ceaseless symphony of the sea. The goonies wheeled in sudden terror, dark clouds of them, on stiffened wings.

The raiders passed over Wake and hit at Pan-Am’s installations on Peale Island. Hamilton and his chief mechanic Earle flung themselves into the sand; behind them the hotel known to so many trans-Pacific travellers dissolved in flame and debris; ahead of them bullets spattered the water around the hull of the moored clipper, tore into her side.

The enemy wheeled and attacked again. In all, the raiders probably loosed 200 to 300 bombs and spewed out a hail of machine gun fire. Many were misses; the quiet lagoon and the foaming sea were roiled with bomb geysers; but plenty were hits.

As the noise of the motors died away and the guns ceased firing, Commander Cunningham, Major Devereux and Major Putnam took stock. It took but a glance to tell them that the Japanese had known Wake’s lay-out perfectly. Seven of the Grumman fighters lay a twisted mass of charred wreckage near the runway. An eighth was damaged. There were twenty-five dead and seven wounded from the aviation group alone. “Marfitron 211” had been badly hit. The canvas city of Camp 2 had been riddled with machine gun fire. On Peale Island four Chamorro employees of Pan-American and a couple of contractor’s men had been killed, others wounded. Lt. Kahn was already busy with the surgeon’s scalpel in his improvised operating room. The “PanAm” hotel was gone, and there was a greater loss; the airline’s radio transmitter had been destroyed. Machine shop, office building and employees’ quarters were burned; gas tanks and fuel drums were burning fiercely; pumps and gas line were demolished. Peale Island was a holocaust.

But Wake was by no means knocked out. The Clipper had been hit by several dozen bullets, but the incendiaries had missed her gas tanks; she could fly. There were still the four Grummans in the air, though one of them coming into a landing at the debris-riddled field bent its propeller. There was another that could be repaired on the ground. Most of the fuel drums which had been a specific objective of the Japanese attack had been empty; there were still 140,000 gallons in surface and sub-surface tanks in “Pan-Am’s” storage alone. The contractor’s men, hidden in the bush, had mostly escaped injury; and their machinery was largely intact, though what good it would be now was not apparent. But the personnel of the Marine Defense Battalion, their guns, and equipment had escaped; they had ample supplies of ammunition. And they were dangerous, for they were angry—fighting mad.

Hamilton and his Pan-Am men were mad, too. They were ready to take the Clipper anywhere with anybody. But Cunningham and Putnam decided she was too valuable and too vulnerable to be risked. They put her passengers back aboard and loaded her chock-a-block with Pan-Am’s civilian ground personnel and in the early afternoon the Marine garrison watched her furrow the waters of the lagoon and head eastward toward Midway and Hawaii. She was one of the last links to civilization they were to know, and when she had gone they were lonely.

Dec. 9. They had buried their dead and the wounded had been bandaged and morphined—groaning in the fitful way the semi-conscious have—when the enemy came over again. It was almost noon and the calm beauty of the day provided a sardonic setting. There were twenty-seven of the land bombers, flying as before from the south. The fighters that were left took off and at odds of almost seven to one challenged the enemy in the skies. They shot a Jap bomber out of formation, and she came curling, twisting down into the serried line of surf; but the enemy got home his attack. It was not so low this time; out of respect for the hot AA fire they had met the day before, the Japs stayed at eight thousand feet. They concentrated on Camp 2, and they got the hospital, killed three of the wounded, and destroyed or damaged barracks, aerological building, storehouses and contractors’ equipment. And three more Marfitron 211 ‘s personnel were killed by bomb fragments or bullets.

That evening there were more burials in the dunes with the age-old services read for the dead; and the bodies were covered with the flag.

Lieutenant Kahn moved his hospital to the bomb-proof ammunition cellars that had been constructed, so that no more of those who had already paid in blood would need to offer the “last full measure of devotion.” A communications centre was also set up underground. Two of the little shelters with blast-proof walls that had been built near Peacock Point to protect the planes were roofed over and made light-proof so that the mechanics could work on the Grummans at night. There was no ready way of making them bomb-proof.

The chattering radio sent out the news:

“Terrific bombing Living quarters afire.”

Dec. 10. They came again in the heat of the morning—at 10:50—high, high in the blue skies, twenty-seven of them at twenty thousand feet, really beyond the effective reach of the quick-firing three-inchers. The five fighters, still going strong, made great swinging charges at 350 miles an hour on the enemy’s tail, and knocked two bombers out of the sky. There was little damage and no casualties; the enemy had a growing respect for Wake. The contractors’ men camped in the bush; the “leathernecks” slept by their guns.

Through bad enemy jamming, the Army radio on Oahu, Hawaii, received a message from Wake:

“Can civilian employees be removed Stop Seventy five casualties already.”

There was to be no evacuation.

Dec. 11. The top hamper of many ships broke the endless circle of the horizon at dawn on the eleventh. Friend or enemy? Their doubts were soon resolved. There were two enemy transports, convoyed by escort vessels, light cruisers and destroyers coming out of the southern sea. Radio Tokyo announced proudly but prematurely that a landing had been made on Wake. It seemed logical. The place had been bombed to hell.

Major Devereux waited until he saw the “whites of their eyes.” The enemy fleet moved in. On the runway, the Grummans, engines turning over, idled; then took off in a screeching song of power, took off greatly overloaded with 100 pound bombs slung beneath their bellies and .50 calibre ammunition ready. The range-finder operator, concealed in the scrub of hardwood trees, sang out the ranges as the Japs moved in, and the Grummans climbed.

“Six oh double oh (6,000 yards).” “Five five double oh.” “Five oh double oh.”

The five-inchers, silent until now—their crews envious of the “sky guns” which had done all the “talking,”—opened at forty-seven hundred yards. The “gyrenes,” some stripped to the waist, some in the blue denim of fatigue clothes, worked the pieces with a will.

“Here’s one for Hirohito.” “Take that, you bastard!”

The guns were well aimed. The Marines saw their shots go home in bursts of flame on two destroyers and a gunboat. At the same time the fighters screamed down from the skies. The AA guns on the enemy surface ships opened up in a blaze of fire. The Japs came on. But not for long. They were within range of the three-inchers now and, depressing the sky guns, the “gyrenes” used them too. One destroyer was hit and holed again and again. She was a tower of smoke and flame; slowly she filled and sank, well off the reef that rings the island. Another destroyer and an escort vessel were sunk. There was savage satisfaction in the Marines’ cheers.

Up aloft the Grummans had been at it. Two of them, piloted by Major Henry T. Elrod and Captain Frank Cunningham Tharin, dived at a cruiser. They roared down through the bursting “ack-ack” again and again. The four planes dropped a total of twenty 100-pound bombs, and strafed the decks of the enemy with twenty thousand rounds of .50 calibre. Eight of the bombs hit the cruiser. Smashed, broken, burning, she sank. The fleet, that according to Radio Tokyo had landed troops on Wake, retreated rapidly, one of its remaining vessels damaged and trailing smoke.

But the enemy came again. At noon and from the air. And in force. The AA guns kept them high, and Elrod and Tharin and their mates went up again. Two more bombers were shot down, but Captains Freuler and Elrod got some “AP” bullets in the engines of their planes. Elrod crash-landed on the beach, and his plane was a total washout. Now there were four Grummans.

Dec. 12. At home, the United States was in the first frenzy of war. There were hurried blackouts on the coast, and false alarms and fear. On Wake, the Marines, stubbled with four days’ growth of beard, red-eyed from lack of sleep, but fighting veterans now, joked and asked each other to bring on some more Japs. The enemy obliged. An enemy flying boat was shot down at dawn, but later twenty-seven bombers came over at twenty-two thousand feet and plastered the sand dunes and the scrub. Second Lieutenant David Donald Kliewer, on evening patrol, saw a submarine about ten miles south of the island on the surface. He dived with machine guns chattering, raked her decks and let go two bombs which got her squarely. Back on the field as Kliewer taxied in, the jubilant mechanics chalked up another victory.

Dec. 13. Nothing happened. . . . Nothing except unending vigil and ceaseless lookout; nothing except work and preparation. The “mechs” toiled ceaselessly at the planes; the mechanical ingenuity of First Lieutenant John Franklin Kinney, Technical Sergeant W. J. Hamilton and their men “kept ‘em flying.” They tended the wounded and replenished ammunition; some of them slept in the dugouts, or in the shade of the bush and hardwood trees; a few fed the rest from the contractor’s kitchens. There was nothing doing—nothing except work and waiting. There were to be no more intermissions. . . .

Dec. 14. Three four-engined seaplanes came over in the bright moonlight and dropped their eggs near the runway. Much lost sleep but no damage. They came over again and in force at eleven—their favorite hour of attack—forty-one “B-18 type.” They plastered the runway again, and they got a “Marfighter” and killed two enlisted men. Three Grummans left. But the Marines pulled two of the enemy out of the sky and damaged others with AA fire. Wake still had a sting.

Dec. 16. A sub was sighted southwest of the island—but it got away. A couple of four-engined flying boats came over at dawn; at the routine hour of eleven, twenty-seven land bombers made a run over Peacock Point. “Marfitron 211”—what was left of it—shot down two of the enemy. That afternoon a Grumman crashed on take-off. Two left.

Dec. 16. Forty-one of the enemy—the big, swift-flying land planes-—came up out of the southern sea and dropped a ladder pattern all over the island. A dynamite cache on Wilkes Island went up with a roar; the pocked sand dunes shook to the crash of new explosions as the cotton bolls puffed into smoking blossoms in the windshipped sky. The indomitable Captain Tharin shot down in flaming death a four-engined flying boat in the late afternoon, after it had dropped four bombs, all of which splashed harmlessly in the lagoon.

Dec. 17. Another great attack by thirty-two bombers; objectives—the diesel oil dump, tent encampments, gun emplacements. One enemy shot down; all guns still in commission.

Dec. 18, No bombs—but worse. A twin-engined photographic plane flew over at noon, very high. The Japs would be back.

Dec. 19. It was working on toward Christmas, but there was no reckoning of time on Wake. For time was running out; Wake was doomed. Maybe the Marines didn’t know it; back in Hawaii, still stunned by the disaster of Pearl Harbor, there was too much to be done to spend much thought on that tiny little pinprick in the Pacific. After the island and its in-domitables had taken another pasting on the nineteenth— twenty-seven bombers tried to get the two remaining fighters of “Marfitron 211”—a naval patrol plane from Midway settled down on the quiet waters of the lagoon during the darkness. It came to get Major Walter L. J. Bayler, who had built Wake’s airfield and set up its communications and who was ordered out for similar work elsewhere and to render a first-hand report of the situation.

Dec. 20. There was bad weather on the twentieth and no attacks, so the patrol plane could get away unscathed with Devereux’s last reports and the last messages and letters until that day when the prisoners come home from the wars. Bayler took with him a report from “C. 0., Naval Air Station, Wake” (Commander Cunningham), which detailed in rough outline the existing situation, and stated: “Our escape from more serious damage may be attributed to the effectiveness of anti-aircraft fire and the heroic action of fighter patrols, which have never failed to push home attacks against heavy fire. The performance of these pilots is deserving of all praise. They have attacked air and surface targets with equal abandon. The planes are full of bullet holes. The anti-aircraft battery is fighting with about 50 per cent of the necessary fire control equipment. Four guns are useless against aircraft. One four gun unit is actually being controlled by data received from another unit several miles distance. Only one and a quarter units of AA (three-inch ammunition) remain.”

Major Putnam, commanding Marine Aircraft Group Two (which included Maritron 211), also made a report. It was grim.

“On Dec. 20, of the original total of forty-one enlisted and twelve officers, nineteen enlisted and eight officers are on duty, four enlisted and two officers being slightly wounded but active; one officer and six enlisted in hospital doing nicely. . . .” (Where were the rest—the chattering radio had been their obituary, the sand dunes of Wake their

graves—”Following killed today,. . .. . .. . .

. . . .”)—”Never had more than four active planes,” (the report of Major Putnam continued), “for the most part only two, frequently one. There have been a total of twelve air raids on the island to Dec. 20 with formations varying from three heavy seaplanes to forty-one, twin-engined land planes. . . . Parts and assemblies have been traded back and forth until no airplane can be identified. Engines have been switched, planes have been junked, stripped, rebuilt, all but created. . . . All hands have behaved splendidly. . . .”

There was a report, too, from Lieut.-Commander Greey, the civil engineer:

“Practically every building and structure on the island has been damaged by either bombs or machine gun fire . . . 90 per cent of the contractor’s material has been damaged or destroyed. There are no facilities for repairing same. . . . Since the outbreak of war it has been impossible to do any construction work . . . all of the contractor’s facilities have been concentrated on the construction of dugouts and to assist the military forces. . . . The RO in C. requests instructions as to how to proceed with the contract work. . . .”

(Some of the reports didn’t say it, but long before Dec. 20„ there had been a series of radio messages to “Com 14” itemizing urgently needed supplies—spare parts for the guns, a fresh supply of recoil fluid, a range finder, another director,

more ammunition, more of many things. . …The

patrol plane brought a few of the lighter items but so, so few. Time was running out.)

The 20th was a bad day. The patrol plane left, and many of them guessed their last link with the country they had served so well had been broken.

Dec, 21. Seventeen heavy bombers came over after the gun positions. They laid an accurate ladder of bombs across the island, they smashed some more of the gutted wreckage that had been Wake’s buildings, and they got one of the gun batteries, destroying its director and killing a naval electrician’s mate. Only one three-inch battery of four guns was still effective.

Dec. 22. The rest is little known. Only the slim link of the radio let the world know that the flag was still flying. Later the Navy communique said: “Wake Island sustained another strong air attack on the 22nd.”

The Marines reported: “Attacked middle of night by land planes with carrier bombers and fighters. Period. Our two remaining fighters aloft.”—(two patched and battered Grummans riddled with bullets, wheezing valiantly off the bomb-pocked runway, climbing so futilely, like Icarus into the sun, climbing—climbing toward battle and toward death —two against sixty)—”Several enemy accounted for Davidson killed Freuler wounded.” Later: “Apparent naval action in progress offshore.”

And a disheartening message to Wake from “CinCPac” (Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet): “There are no friendly ships in waters near Wake.”

Dec. 28. Two days before Christmas, and in the States the trees would be trimmed, people would be singing:

“Silent night! Holy night!

All is calm, all is bright. . . .”

The radio sent its last messages as Devereux and his Marines fought the good fight. The enemy was coming in, coming in through the white surf of the broken reef, crawling out of the landing boats on to the white beaches, charging in the thin moonlight toward the machine gun nests in the scrub and the hardwood, coming on over the bodies of their slain.

“Urgent,” Radio Wake proclaimed. “Enemy on island; the issue is in doubt. . . .”

On Dec. 23rd Tokyo claimed that Wake Island was completely occupied by Japanese forces, and the Navy Department admitted that all communication with Wake had ceased.