Civilian volunteer John M. Valov, who had been trained on a .30-caliber machine gun by Lieutenant Poindexter before the war started, also assumed the planes were American aircraft on maneuvers. Valov had so much confidence in the U.S. military that he had difficulty believing that any nation had the audacity to attack the powerful United States. When bullets scattered all around him, however, a surprised Valov dived for the nearest shelter.
What they had all witnessed was the opening moments of the first Japanese assault against Wake. Twenty-seven Mitsubishi Attack Bombers, nicknamed Nells, had come roaring in from their island base at Roi in the Marshalls, 620 miles due south. Shortly before reaching Wake, nine bombers veered off to bomb Wilkes Island, Camp 1, Camp 2, and Peale Island while the remaining eighteen focused on the airstrip. Two minutes before noon, war came to Wake.
Wilkes Island and Camp 1 escaped with minimal damage. The nine enemy aircraft strafed both positions, but they were appetizers for the more tempting airfield and military installations on Peale and Wake. Corp. John S. Johnson, on duty at his machine gun off Kuku Point on Wilkes, fired at the enemy bombers as they flew over Wilkes, then spun around to witness the attack on the airfield. Already he could feel the whump of the concussions from bombs smacking near the runway more than one mile away.
The nine Japanese bombers sped over the lagoon at such a low altitiude that Corporal Marvin and the other Marines at Battery D, along Peak’s north shore, could not fire back. They began dropping their bombs while still over the lagoon, then ran them straight toward their intended targets at the Pan Am installations or the civilian barracks and buildings of Camp 2. Workers followed the progress of the bomb explosions, which sounded like an enormous flat hand swatting the water, until they came too near their own positions.
Benjamin Comstock Sr. and his son, Ben Jr., stood on a two-story building on the east shore of Peale when the bombs and bullets approached. Acting with the instinct that would mark the entire war—sons protecting their fathers and families—Ben Jr. tackled his father, shoved him behind a stairway, and then shielded him with his own body. Bombs tossed dirt and coral dust over the two men, but other than rattling their nerves, left both unharmed.
Not far away, Hans Whitney, whose friend had only moments before dared the Japanese to attack, watched the bombers head directly toward him on their way to strike the hotel. He and twenty men leapt for cover in the unfinished structure. “Bullets sounded like a terrific hailstorm, rattling on the steel,” Whitney recalled. “We scampered down the framework and reached the ground where we were huddled together.”12
Other civilians, caught in the open, ran for their lives. Earl Wilkerson jumped out of his seat at a card game in the barracks and rushed to hide in the brush. A group of aircraft swooped down on James Allen near the mess hall. He tried to reach the safety offered by a small bush, but a piece of shrapnel burned into his back before he got there. When those planes departed, he again rose—but hesitated as a second group of aircraft flew in. He suddenly recalled a 1940 conversation in California with a member of the Flying Tiger volunteers who helped the Chinese in their fight against the Japanese. The man told him he had been a tail gunner in China and laughed when he explained how the Japanese on the ground had turned into such easy targets by running and drawing attention to themselves. He added that the best thing to do in an air attack was to hug the ground and wait it out. Allen dropped to the surface, buried his face in the coral, and lay still, hoping that the man had been correct. In a few moments that seemed much longer, the planes sped overhead without noticing him.
Cunningham was working in his office along with his secretary, YN3c. Glenn E. Tripp, when the bombers approached. Tripp lay flat on the floor, while Cunningham dived under his plywood desk. Bullets splintered into the office from one end to the other, and when the attack ended, Tripp rested unharmed between two uniform lines of bullet holes.
Pfc. James O. King stood watch on a tower near Camp 1 when Sgt. Donald R. Malleck climbed up to routinely check on him. As they talked, aircraft suddenly dropped out of some clouds and adopted a course directly toward them. “Let’s get the hell down from here!” shouted Sergeant Malleck to King, who replied, “You don’t have to say that again!”13 The pair safely reached the ground and ran for a nearby dugout.
Private Laporte, who at first had a hard time believing Pearl Harbor had truly been hit, now realized that what he had considered impossible had actually occurred. “Another guy and I left our gun [at Toki Point] to fill our mess kits and grab some coffee when we heard a roar,” said Laporte. “I looked and about one and a half miles away the planes were dropping bombs on the airport. We threw the coffee and stew away—I’d regret that later—and got our butts in a hole and watched ’em come over. They hit the Pan Am Hotel. They flew right over us, but they weren’t after our positions.”14
They wanted Pan Am’s facilities, and accurate bombing reduced much of the spot to smoke and flames. Twenty-three bullet holes riddled the Philippine Clipper at her mooring, and ten Chamorro employees lay dead. As gruesome a toll as this was on the commercial airline, it was dwarfed by the agony at the airstrip.
“The Destruction That Greeted Me Was More Than I Was Prepared For”
Less than two miles across the lagoon, Lieutenant Hanna chatted with Cpl. Franklin Gross at Gross’s dugout south of the airstrip. As Hanna talked, Gross suddenly spotted a group of bombers drop out of a hole in the clouds. “What’s this coming in?”15 he asked Hanna. They guessed the aircraft must be more B-17s coming in for fuel, but bombs, bullets, and explosions awakened them to what was actually happening. Both men hastened to their posts as a fury of sound erupted all about them.
Major Putnam, the commander of VMF-211, saw the bombers at the same time and yelled, “Take cover—bombers.”16 He looked for a safe place on the airfield in which to hide, but when he found nothing, he sped toward a latrine one hundred yards away. Employing every ounce of athletic talent, the former high school track star dodged bullets and bombs and slid headfirst into the latrine moments before an explosion hurled deadly debris and shrapnel in all directions. There, stinking but safe, Putnam climbed out of the latrine to organize his defenses.
All around Hanna and Putnam, men strove first to stay alive, and then to fight back. S.Sgt. Robert O. Arthur had just squeezed into the belly of a Marine fighter to install a homing device when he heard shouting from outside. He peered through an opening, expecting to watch Army bombers land, but swore when he saw Japanese aircraft heading straight toward the airstrip. Knowing what a tempting target each fighter posed, Arthur edged out of the cramped quarters and hustled over to shelter.
Pfc. Jacob R. Sanders was standing on the back of a truck, laying telephone wire on the beach near the airfield, when the bombers struck. He had his back to the approaching aircraft, but turned around when the driver of the truck jumped out and hit the ground. Sanders dropped the telephone wire, retrieved his rifle, and scampered underneath the truck for cover.
He was one of the lucky ones, for during these opening moments on the airfield, to hesitate meant to die. A man either dived for any covering, no matter how slim, or stood exposed to enemy bullets and bombs on an open airstrip. Capt. Herbert C. Freuler used a narrow dip near the squadron’s ammunition tent as shelter, while bullets ripped into ground personnel and airmen mere yards away and explosions eviscerated his mates.
In an attempt to eliminate Wake’s major threat to their operations—the Marine fighters—the Japanese executed a meticulously crafted air strike. They seemed to know exactly what to hit and where to hit it, for in the first seconds of the strike, Japanese bombs destroyed two 25,000-gallon tanks of fuel and more than six hundred 55-gallon drums of aviation gasoline, stacked neatly together along the airstrip. Black clouds billowed skyward while flames, fueled by gasoline gushing out of damaged containers, threatened to engulf most portions of the airstrip.
Eight of VMF-211’s twelve fighters stood unmanned and motionless in one section of
the airstrip, causing surprised Japanese airmen to smile in anticipation of easy kills. The Japanese had expected to meet fighter resistance as they approached Wake, but they avoided the four Wildcats that had earlier taken off to search the skies. Now, instead of dodging American bullets, they raced straight toward silent targets to enact the massacre of VMF-211, Wake’s tiny air force.
“We strafed the soldiers, as we determined to let not even one escape,”17 mentioned Japanese correspondent Norio Tsuji, who accompanied the task force. Unlike Allen on Peale Island, who hugged the coral surface and remained motionless, Marine aviators and ground personnel raced about the airstrip, compelled by duty and courage to risk their lives.
As Lieutenant Hanna watched from not far away, the slaughter of VMF-211, a crucial portion of Wake’s defenses, unfolded. Four Marine aviators rushed toward their Wildcats to take off before Japanese bullets destroyed their planes, but none made it. Machine-gun bullets tore into Lt. Frank J. Holden as he sprinted onto the runway. He slumped to the ground and died yards from his aircraft. Lt. Henry G. Webb raced toward his fighter, but bullets shredded his stomach, face, and legs and severely wounded the young airman.
Lieutenant Conderman and Lt. George Graves sat in the ready tent, preparing to escort the Philippine Clipper, when the alarm sounded. They rushed outside to the airstrip, where Graves actually reached his Wildcat. He climbed into the cockpit and prepared for takeoff, but a direct hit demolished the aircraft and instantly killed Graves. “I saw some of the men running to their aircraft and getting hit,” said Hanna. “I saw Graves get in the plane just at the same time as the bomb got there.”18 Conderman, the boyish-looking aviator with a Tom Sawyer look, evaded bullets all the way to his plane. Just as he prepared to climb in, bomb fragments shredded his airplane and slammed him to the surface.
In other places, groups of ground personnel huddled beneath aircraft wings for protection, but perished when Japanese bombs demolished the planes. Men ran across the airstrip only to die before reaching their destinations. The impact of a bomb lifted Navy Machinist’s Mate 3c. William O. Plate off the ground and slammed him into the brush near the taxiway. A stunned Plate lay in pain from shrapnel wounds and the rough handling, but he emerged in better shape than the men around him, who moaned in agony and bled profusely from gaping holes to their bodies.
The enemy arrived with such suddenness and departed so quickly that the Marines had little time to shoot back. Some Marines fired with the only weapons they had on hand—their rifles—which, against racing aircraft, is about as effective as trying to knock down a rocket with a pebble due to the excessive speed of the plane and the small size of the bullet. Other Marines along Wake’s southern shore, including Holewinski, turned their .50-caliber and .30-caliber machine guns skyward and started shooting, but the Japanese were either too low, too fast, or too far away by then for them to do any good.
The airstrip resembled a scene from Dante’s Inferno. Body parts lay scattered about the coral surface. Wounded and dying men moaned for help and begged to be dragged from the fires. The blackened hulks of the Wildcat fighters littered the airstrip, which became more dangerous by the seconds as a strong forty-mile-an-hour wind spread the fires toward fuel and ammunition supplies. Gasoline drums exploded, and machine gun bullets loaded onto the Wildcats screamed through the air after being ignited by the fires. Even spent Japanese bullets caused injury. When they struck the runway, the bullets flattened into hot metallic ovals that burned anyone who stepped on them.
Heroes sprinkle the pages of Wake, and the first appeared at the airfield. As flames approached a group of wounded Marines lying helplessly on the coral surface, Cpl. Robert E. Page jumped out of his shelter and began dragging each man to safety. For fifteen minutes, Page—who had to hug the ground as he ran to take in the meager supply of oxygen left by the fires—retrieved one man after another in the searing heat, including a sergeant whose nearly severed leg dangled on the few uncut tendons remaining.
The courageous youth battled fires and smoke to save fellow Marines. He stopped rescuing men only to beat out flames that ignited his clothes, but maintained a stream of reassurances to comfort the badly burned or the panicky. “I was scorched,” Page later recalled, “my eyebrows burnt off, tips of my ears and my nose bloody, and I got all that dirt and had all that oil and gasoline and all that smoke had settled on me. And bloody as a hog all over, dragging those wounded men.”19
Page rushed up to Lieutanant Conderman to help him, but the dying aviator pointed to other wounded men lying about the airstrip. “Let me go,” he said. “Take care of them.”20 Page ignored Conderman’s heroic words and dragged him to safety.
With the flames spreading, Page spotted one more Marine who needed help. He started out for him, but an officer, Maj. Walter L. J. Bayler, cautioned against it because some nearby gasoline tanks were about to explode. Without stopping, Page raced into the flames, saved the final man, sprinted away from the tanks, and slumped exhausted to the ground.
While Americans fought and died on the ground, four Marine aviators on air patrol continued their scouting. Capt. Henry T. Elrod, Lt. Carl R. Davidson, Lt. John F. Kinney, and T.Sgt. William J. Hamilton had taken off shortly after learning of the Pearl Harbor attack, but they had failed to detect anything approaching Wake. Unfortunately, the Japanese came in at a lower altitude and beneath a cloud cover. Oblivious of the horrors their VMF-211 mates faced on the atoll, the four flew at twelve thousand feet.
When they spotted columns of smoke gushing upward from the atoll as they neared Wake, the aviators knew something bad had happened. Looks of consternation and anger spread across their faces as the vague images took on the distinct look of burning buildings and smashed equipment. Kinney could not believe that so much damage could have been inflicted in their absence, and the four wondered which of their buddies would be alive when they landed.
“The destruction that greeted me when I landed was more than I was prepared for,”21 wrote Kinney after the war, for the Japanese had virtually wiped out VMF-211 as an effective fighting force. Seven of the eight Wildcats left on Wake, sitting ducks for the Japanese aviators, had been reduced from sleek fighter aircraft to blackened shells, valuable now only for a few spare parts they might provide. The precious supply of spare parts already on hand, minimal from the start, had been destroyed. Much of the gasoline stock wafted in immense black clouds toward the sky. Even worse, of the fifty-five aviation personnel on the airstrip when the attack started, nineteen had been either killed or mortally wounded and thirteen injured, including over half of Putnam’s aviators and every experienced mechanic.
Three of the four aircraft landed without mishap, but Elrod damaged a propeller as he taxied his fighter along the airstrip. Putnam, already staggering under the losses on the ground, saw his air strength pared to three serviceable aircraft and two others that, with repairs, might soon be ready. Kinney inspected the sole remaining fighter of the eight caught on the ground and thought it “might be able to fly again, although it had received hits in both wings, the tail fin, stabilizer, fuselage, elevators, hood, fuse box, radio cables, left flap, and auxiliary gas tank.”22
Putnam turned to Kinney, who had previous experience as a mechanic for Pan Am, and told him he had to take Lieutenant Graves’s place as engineer officer, the man in charge of keeping Wake’s remaining fighters running. “If you can keep them flying,” Putnam promised Kinney, “I’ll see that you get a medal as big as a pie.” Kinney answered, “Okay, sir, if it is delivered in San Francisco.”23 From then on, Kinney spent most of his waking moments scavenging through the seven ruined fighters in an effort to locate parts that could keep the other five in the air.
After removing every usable part that remained on the seven destroyed Wildcats, Putnam spread the hulks out over the airstrip to serve as decoys for the inevitable air attacks to come. He established a command post in the brush near the airstrip, ordered his men to dig foxholes, then split his squadron into two groups of def
enders, and posted them at either end of the airfield, one end commanded by Captain Freuler and the other by Capt. Frank C. Tharin. Men grabbed gas masks, machine guns, and helmets, then hurried to their designated areas to dig foxholes. Putnam buried dynamite every 150 feet along the airstrip and issued orders to Captain Freuler to detonate the explosives should the Japanese attempt a landing through the air.
“Broken Bodies and Bits of What Had Once Been Men”
The battle ended as suddenly as it began. In fifteen nightmarish minutes, the planes had swooped down, smashed their targets, and departed. The Japanese laughed at Wake’s feeble answer—a few rifles and antiaircraft guns retorted, but that was about all. As if to add insult to injury, as they flew away, the Japanese pilots dipped their wings to signify complete victory. “The pilots in every one of the planes was grinning wildly,”24 added a Marine. They had reason to be jubilant—not one aircraft was lost, and only one Japanese had been killed, Seaman Second Class Iwai.
For the first time in fifteen minutes, silence returned to Wake. Calm replaced the sounds of exploding bombs and rattling bullets; only the crashing surf interrupted the tranquillity. Terns and frigate birds staggered about the atoll from the bombs’ concussions, reminding Cunningham of “confused drunks trying to find their way home.”25 Dead fish floated in the lagoon’s normally peaceful waters.
War had come stunningly, quickly, and lethally to Wake. Gruesome reminders lay all over Wake’s airstrip and at the Pan Am facilities. Commander Cunningham raced over to the airstrip, where a dazed Putnam walked toward him “through broken bodies and bits of what had once been men.” As he watched Putnam draw closer, bleeding from wounds and lugging an old Springfield rifle that had been shattered in the attack, Cunningham could not help thinking of “The futility of a situation where a man would try to protect himself from bombers with a rifle…”26
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