Before dawn on 23 December 1941 Japanese naval landing troops came ashore on Wake, the small American atoll in the central Pacific that had already beaten off one landing twelve days earlier. After hours of fighting in the dark, with his telephone lines cut and no relief coming, the island commander, Commander Winfield Scott Cunningham, decided to surrender, and at 8 a.m. Major James Devereux of the Marines walked down the shore road under a white flag. The dates are Wake time, west of the International Date Line, which ran a day ahead of Hawaii.
Sixteen days
Wake was attacked from the air on 8 December, the same day as Pearl Harbor on the other side of the date line. Its defenders, a detachment of the 1st Defense Battalion and the fighter squadron VMF-211, with naval personnel and civilian construction workers, repulsed the first Japanese landing on 11 December and sank two destroyers. The Japanese came back with a much stronger force, including the carriers Soryu and Hiryu, whose aircraft shot down Wake's last two fighters on 22 December.1
The last night
The landing began in rain squalls in the early hours. The Marine Corps monograph on the defense records that the first shots were fired at about 2.45 a.m., and Gregory Urwin writes that about 900 men of the Special Naval Landing Force went ashore in the first wave on the south shore. Two destroyers converted to transports were run onto the reef near the airstrip to put their troops ashore.2
The Marines, sailors and contractors fought as infantry. On Wilkes islet they wiped out a beachhead of nearly a hundred men. But the Japanese cut the field telephone lines, and Devereux, isolated in his command post, believed that most of his positions had been overrun. Cunningham had learned that the relief expedition from Pearl Harbor had been recalled. At 7 a.m. he told Devereux that no friendly forces were near, and he decided to surrender. Devereux then went from position to position with a Japanese escort to pass on the order, and Wilkes, the last strongpoint, gave up about 11 hours after the fighting began.3
The cost
The Marine monograph says the garrison had lost almost 20 percent of its men and that Japanese losses, never known exactly, must have exceeded 1,000. Urwin puts the Japanese toll for the whole campaign at 900 to 1,000 lives, two destroyers, a submarine and 21 aircraft, and the American dead at fewer than 100, including 46 Marines and three sailors. Other Navy and Marine Corps counts give 49 Marines, as our article notes. The survivors, military and civilian, went into Japanese captivity.4
Our full account, The Battle of Wake Island, 1941, tells the whole siege, from the first air raid to the fate of the prisoners.
Also on this day
- 1793: Battle of Savenay. A Republican army of about 18,000 caught some 6,000 men of the Catholic and Royal Army at Savenay, west of Nantes, during the first war in the Vendée.
- 1938: Catalonia Offensive. Nationalist forces launched an offensive on Republican-held Catalonia in the Spanish Civil War, backed by clear superiority in the air.
