World War II Day by Day

Wake Island, Western Pacific Ocean • December 23, 1941

On this date in 1941 Wake Island defenders surrendered after 2 attack waves of 1,000 Japa­nese marines each stormed the beaches. Two days earlier, in their largest attack yet on Wake Island, the Japa­nese had sent 49 aircraft, dive bombers and fighters both, to knock out the last of the island’s 8 air­craft—this after launching their first air assault (36 bombers) on Decem­ber 8, 5 hours after their fiery ambush of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. (Wake was on the oppo­site side of the Inter­national Date Line.) Three days later, on Decem­ber 11, 450 Japa­nese marines attempted their first landing. They were repulsed by U.S. Marine Corps shore bat­teries con­sisting of a half-dozen 5‑in/­127‑mm guns from a World War I-era battle­ship as well as aggre­ssive pilots flying Grum­man F4F Wild­cats, who shot down 24 enemy air­craft. Two Japa­nese destroyers were sunk—the first Japa­nese war­ships lost in World War II—and many more vessels damaged.

Wake Island, an American Paci­fic out­post between Hawaii and Guam, had been iden­ti­fied as a “priority defense require­ment” 4 months before August 1941, the month building the island’s defenses began. By Decem­ber the 3 coral islets had become the most heavily defended U.S. atoll in the Western Paci­fic but with a signif­i­cant weak­ness: no radar to alert its defenders to approaching enemy aircraft.

A week after the deadly Japanese assaults on Pearl Harbor and Wake Island, 2 U.S. task forces (TF 11 and TF 14) steamed toward Wake from Hawaii. Among the war­ships were the fleet carrier Sara­toga with 66 air­craft of her air group and a dozen largely obso­lete Brewster F2A Buffalo fighters for the Marine Wake squad­ron, 3 heavy cruisers, 10 destroyers, and ele­ments of the 4th Marine Defense Bat­tal­ion. The relief expe­di­tion was still 425 miles/­684 km away when Japa­nese marines suc­cess­fully assaulted the island on a gusty, rainy Decem­ber 23. After 11 hours of fierce resis­tance, the enemy, which out­num­bered Wake’s defenders 3 or 4 to 1, captured roughly 500 Marines, Navy person­nel, and sol­diers and 1,150 civil­ian-con­trac­tor volun­teers, the major­ity begin­ning 3½ years of captiv­ity as slave laborers in China and Japan. Only about two‑thirds of the men sur­vived their captivity. Bedeviled by heavy seas Adm. Frank Fletcher’s relief force, striving to arrive on Decem­ber 24 in the vicinity of now-fallen Wake, was instead recalled to Pearl Harbor. The size and com­po­si­tion of the relief force was later recog­nized as incap­able of lifting the enemy siege or evacuating the island in the 2 weeks prior to Wake’s capture or dislodging the invaders in the days afterward.

The POWs who remained on the island were employed by the Japa­nese in building island defenses: con­crete and coral block houses and pill­boxes with inter­locking fire, tank traps, land mines, and barbed-wire entangle­ments along the shore­line, air­craft revet­ments at the air­field, and the like. In Septem­ber 1942 a second batch of POWs was trans­ported to pri­son camps in China. The 98 heavy equip­ment opera­tors who remained on Wake were exe­cuted in early October 1943 when the Japa­nese gar­ri­son feared an im­mi­nent inva­sion from a U.S. armada that included the carrier USS York­town and many cruisers and destroyers.

The enemy garrison, numbering 4,400 army and navy per­son­nel at its height, remained en­trenched on Wake Island through Septem­ber 4, 1945, sur­ren­dering to a detach­ment of U.S. Marines 2 days after their nation’s formal surrender in Tokyo Bay. Japa­nese Rear Admiral Shige­matsu Sakai­bara, who ordered the exe­cu­tion of the 98 cap­tive civilian workers, was hanged on June 18, 1947, as a war criminal.

Battle of Wake Island, December 8–23, 1941

Above: Map of the Western Pacific Ocean, circa early 1943. Japa­nese-occupied Wake Island atoll (Wake Island, Wilkes Island, and Peale Island) is located in the center of the map above the black circle enclosing a “1.” Prior to its capture, the U.S. Navy-Marine garri­son on Wake had been an impor­tant intel­li­gence gathering center and warning out­post. Wake had also been a stop­over for Pam Am’s big China Clipper flying boats. To the east of Wake Island the Pacific out­posts are in Amer­i­can hands. Japa­nese island strong­holds lie to the west of Wake and much of the south; e.g., the Marianas, Guam, and the Marshall and Gil­bert islands, which the Amer­i­cans took during cam­paigns that lasted from November 1943 through August 1944.

Left: Columns of smoke rise from on either side of Wake Island’s air­strip after a Japa­nese air attack in December 1941. The Japa­nese lost 7 air­craft, 2 destroyers, 2 trans­ports, 2 patrol boats, and over 1,100 men, with many more wounded, in the Battle of Wake Island. U.S. dead were 122 (including civil­ian contrac­tors), with 49 wounded and 2 missing. Interned were 1,104 civil­ians, of whom 180 died in cap­tivity. Wake’s heroic defense and sacri­fice were the chief bright spots in the grim first months of the Pacific War.

Right: Just hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, 36 Japa­nese medium bombers flown from bases on the nearby Marshall Islands attacked Wake Island, destroying 8 of the 12 F4F‑3 Wild­cat fighter air­craft belonging to Marine Corps fighter squadron VMF‑211 on the ground. This photo, taken after the Japa­nese had cap­tured the island, shows the wreck­age of Wild­cat 211‑F‑11, flown by executive officer Capt. Henry T. Elrod on the morning of Decem­ber 11, 1941, in the attack that sank the destroyer Kisaragi with the loss of all 167 hands. Elrod was post­humously awarded the Con­gres­sional Medal of Honor—the first avi­ator to receive the medal in World War II—for his actions on Wake during the second Japa­nese landing attempt on December 23. At the end of that day, how­ever, the island’s defenders were left with no serviceable aircraft to turn back the invaders.

Above: Japanese Patrol Boat No. 32 and Patrol Boat No. 33 were 2 ex-destroyers recon­figured in 1941 to launch a landing craft carrying 250 naval infantry­men over a stern ramp. In the photo on the left the 2 patrol boats (Patrol Boat No. 32 on the left) have been run aground on the south coral shore of Wake Island near the air­strip before dawn on Decem­ber 23, 1941. Island defenders, with a 3‑in/­76.2‑mm gun, managed to draw a bead on beached Patrol Boat No. 33, less than 500 yards/­457 meter from their posi­tion. Some of their 15 pro­jec­tiles touched off the ship’s maga­zine, and the war­ship began to burn. (Her remains are shown in the right photo.) The illumi­na­tion pro­vided by the burning ship revealed her sis­ter ship, Patrol Boat No. 32, which was hit with 5‑in, 50 lb/­22.6 kg shells from coastal artil­lery guns. Twenty-five minutes later that boat too was completely demolished. The Japanese marines, how­ever, were able to slip over the patrol boats’ sides in the darkness and sprint across the coral reef for cover.

Radio Broadcast Announcing Fall of Wake Island to Japanese