Pacific Alamo

by John Wukovits

  The bold plan carried frightening risks, for it meant allowing the Japanese to fire at will while the ships inched inward. The plan required that his men endure a pounding naval bombardment in the interval, something most military men point to as one of the worst experiences of warfare. Each man, especially the inexperienced civilians and untested servicemen, would face a test of nerves the likes of which they had never before encountered. Devereux had to accept those risks, however, to retain any slim chance of repelling the stronger Japanese assault force.

  At the airfield, Major Putnam prodded his men to ready the four fighters and get them into the air before the Japanese opened fire. Wake’s defense heavily depended on the existence of these aircraft, not only for scouting and attacking, but also for the psychological advantage they gave to the men fighting on the atoll. As long as Wake sported an air arm, the Japanese had to approach the atoll with extreme caution; as long as Putnam, Elrod, Kinney, and the others climbed into the Wildcats, Wake’s offensive bite extended hundreds of miles to sea. That provided a comfort zone for the men cringing in foxholes or huddling in dugouts and provided a security, however illusory it might be, that made life more bearable.

  Shortly after 5:00 A.M., Putnam, Tharin, Elrod, and Freuler hopped into their fighters and started the engines. Three Wildcats surreptitiously lifted off at 5:15, with the final aircraft following forty-five minutes later because of a mechanical problem. The aviators flew to their assigned altitude and waited for daylight to give them the opportunity to strike.

  Admiral Kajioka gained more confidence when he pulled to within eight thousand yards of Wake, point-blank range for naval guns, without receiving American fire. He ordered the Yubari and the other cruisers and destroyers to veer left and steam parallel to Wake’s southern shore while the troop transports headed to the right and the invasion beaches.

  At 5:30, Yubari’s guns boomed an unwelcome notice that Wake, ignored for centuries by Pacific travelers, was about to become the stage for one of the war’s most enduring epics. A series of bright flashes from offshore illuminated the darkness as Japanese guns fired. The first shells crashed into oil tanks in the southwest portion of Wake, close to where Devereux watched the drama unfold. That seemed to be the sign for every Japanese vessel to join in, and soon a furious volley of shells cascaded onto the atoll, destroying installations and hurling coral rocks in all directions.

  The deafening noise stunned the Americans as the shells neared their targets. Shrieking, whistling projectiles rumbled above, sounding much like railroad cars as they raced by to explode in an earth-shattering eruption. Dugouts rattled and shook from the blasts; coral dust fell on the men; thick columns of black smoke rose from the atoll.

  Japanese gunfire continued as the ships steamed to the western end of Wilkes, where Kajioka reversed course to repeat the bombardment, this time from only six thousand yards. Three destroyers broke off to swing around the atoll’s northern side and open fire from a second direction. Japanese optimism about easily seizing Wake soared, for in spite of the bombardment, they had still received no American response.

  Not that the Americans did not want to react. From their outposts spread throughout the atoll, Marine officers called Devereux’s command post, begging for permission to open fire, but each plea received the same reply. Devereux, who calmly observed the Japanese from the roof of his dugout, told his radioman, Corp. Robert Brown, to tell them they were to remain out of sight, keep their heads down, and wait for his command. He had to draw the enemy in closer.

  In the brush near the civilian camp, Ben Comstock and his father hastily dug a hole in the brush, then pulled a mattress on top as cover. It was not much, but anything, even something as thin as a mattress, lent a sense of security to the two men, isolated in their own little frightening world—a minuscule hole on Wake that the Japanese wanted to destroy. When a shell fragment sliced clean through their mattress, neither Comstock felt good about their chances of survival.

  Each shell that rocked Wake seemed to produce more men who besieged Devereux to open fire. Battery A’s Lieutenant Barninger at Peacock Point on Wake and Battery L’s Lieutenant McAlister at Kuku Point on Wilkes—standing at the opposite ends of the Japanese bombardment line—implored Devereux to let them respond. Lieutenants Kinney and Hamilton of VMF-211 crowded together in a dugout near the airfield and wondered why none of Wake’s guns answered. Kinney, frightened by the horrifying destructiveness and deafened by the sounds, felt that he would rather be plunging straight through enemy antiaircraft fire than enduring this bombardment. In the air, at least he could see Japanese tracers approaching his fighter. Down on the ground, hugging the dirt, all he could do was wait and hope an unseen shell did not tear him to pieces.

  Japanese guns continued to belch fire and smoke, but still Devereux waited. The ships drew in even more, and Devereux kept silent. One officer, sporting a mixture of anger and fear, mentioned to the man next to him that in practice at Pearl Harbor, his men had regularly hit targets at twelve thousand yards, yet here the enemy was within six thousand yards and still he could not fire. Another shouted to Corporal Brown, “What does that little bastard want us to do? Let ’em run over us without even spitting back?”8 Devereux ignored the remarks and coolly waited, while Lieutenant McAlister called in the ranges.

  Along Kajioka’s intended landing zone on Wake’s beaches south of the airfield, Corporal Holewinski listened to the terrifying whistle as the shells neared. He kept his head down, but that only made it worse, for a Japanese shell could strike at any moment. Men held their breaths as shells churned the ground and defoliated the brush. A frightened civilian on Wilkes asked Corporal Johnson if he were scared. “You’re damn right I’m scared!” replied the veteran. “But that’s healthy because you’ll scamper to stay alive.”9

  In the bombardment, no one thought of home, they thought only of survival, and not survival until next week or the next day, but to the next second. They had become human bull’s-eyes, targets for missiles that could obliterate all traces of their existence. Since it seemed that every inch of Wake rattled from explosions, it was not far-fetched to the men that sooner or later one of those shells would find their dugout or foxhole. They could do nothing but wait until the end came one way or another.

  “The shells were shaking the ground and rattling,” said Pfc. Martin Gatewood. “It feels like hell when you can’t do anything or try to stop it. All you could do was stay low and hope they didn’t hit you. It was a helpless feeling.”10

  Corporal Holewinski described the bombardment as demoralizing. He could hear the shells whistle and shriek, but could not see them or fight back. “A naval bombardment is some of the most fierce action you can be under,” he explained. “It’s frightening. It scares you.”11 For forty-five mind-numbing minutes, American Marines, Army, and Navy personnel, plus a handful of civilian volunteers, huddled near their positions while one thousand other civilians placed their faith in the makeshift holes in the brush.

  Lieutenant Poindexter later compared Devereux’s ploy to the celebrated action taken at Bunker Hill in the American Revolution when the American officer ordered his men to hold fire until they could see the whites of the enemy’s eyes. At Wake, guns replaced eyes; shells substituted for bayonets. The Japanese drew so close that Lieutenant McAlister angrily raved about not being allowed to shoot back.

  Around 6:10, when the Yubari reached the eastern end of Wake off Peacock Point, Admiral Kajioka pulled the ship to within a mere 4,500 yards and ordered a third run. Five minutes later, with the Japanese seemingly within spitting range, the Marines finally heard the command for which they had been waiting—open up with every 5-inch gun on Wake, Wilkes, and Peale. Devereux told switchboard operator Pfc. James O. King to relay the message, “Open fire. Fire at will.”12

  At Lieutenant Barninger’s Battery A on Wake, the gun closest to the Yubari, Sergeant Polousky rushed out of his hole to gather his civilian volunteers. “All right, you civilians, break out those s
hells,” he barked. As he heard the sound of men running across the coral to their stations and the heavy cadence of labored breathing, John Burroughs scampered with the others toward the powder magazine, where Burroughs grabbed a shell and handed it to Johnny Clelan. Sergeant Polousky, irritated by their sluggishness, ran over and yelled, “Come on, you God-damned civilians, hurry up with those shells.”13

  Almost in unison, the six 5-inch guns at all three locations commenced firing in a round of shooting that Lieutenant Kinney claimed was music to his ears. Reminiscent of an old-fashioned Wild West duel between gun-slingers, Wake’s 5-inch batteries blasted away from short range against Kajioka’s naval guns in a battle to see who remained standing when the smoke cleared.

  Men around the atoll shook their temporary paralysis and started acting the way they were trained, as military personnel doing their duty under fire. Finally, their side had responded.

  “You’re In, Johnny Mac!”

  Kajioka, unaware of the surprise that lay only moments away, continued his bombardment. The ferociousness of the Japanese shelling so awed Sub-Lieutenant Ozeki that he wondered not only how anyone could survive such brutality, but who would be left to surrender the atoll.

  A frightening noise interrupted Ozeki’s musings: “My thoughts were shattered by a sudden whooom-clang sound as American shore batteries hit our flagship. The vessel lurched amid ringing sirens and clanging bells. The thought of sinking in a ship, battened down trapped like rats, was an unpleasant one.”14

  A stunned Kajioka could hardly believe the Americans had fired at him, but he recovered in seconds to order the cruiser to turn about and speed away from the shore batteries. Devereux had outfoxed him, and if Kajioka failed to make the proper adjustments, he could end up in the water. As the Yubari executed a zigzag course, Kajioka ordered his guns to focus on the battery at Peacock Point that had opened fire.

  The first two shots from Lieutenant Barninger’s Battery A missed the Yubari, but from observing the shell splashes, Barninger corrected the fire until a salvo scored a direct hit. At a range of about 5,500 yards, two shells smacked into the Yubari’s midsection barely above the waterline. Smoke and steam gushed out of the stricken vessel, which limped slowly in the water. The ship strained to pull out of Wake’s range, but when the Yubari was seven thousand yards away, Battery A poured two more shells into the damaged cruiser, close to where the first two hit. With one entire side of the ship engulfed in flames, Kajioka swerved the Yubari to starboard in an effort to put smoke between Wake and his ship. A destroyer rushed in between the flagship and the Americans to lay its own smoke screen, but another salvo from Battery A crashed into the destroyer, killing two and wounding fifteen Japanese sailors.

  Battery A’s lopsided gun duel with Kajioka took only minutes, but in that brief time, the Marine battery registered an impressive triumph. Their mates on Wilkes and Peale were about to deliver more punishment.

  An abundance of targets steamed within easy range of Lieutenant McAlister’s Battery L on Wilkes Island. McAlister selected the first of seven warships, the destroyer Hayate, but had to estimate the range because an earlier air raid had damaged his gun’s range finder, the device that accurately measured distances.

  Captain Platt called out the results as McAlister fired. The first salvo fluttered beyond the destroyer and the second splashed short, but the 150-pound officer found his mark with the third. “You’re in, Johnny Mac!” cried Platt. “You’re in, Johnny Ma— Oh, hell, he’s gone, get another one!”15 The shell punctured belowdecks and detonated the Hayate’s magazine, producing a ferocious explosion that lifted the destroyer fifty feet in the air. The doomed Hayate split in half and disappeared in less than two minutes, taking the entire crew of 168 sailors to their deaths. Those who were not killed outright by the blast either drowned or were devoured by the swarms of sharks that always ringed Wake. With this feat, McAlister and his men became the first Americans to sink a Japanese ship in the war.

  “Whee! We got the son of a bitch!”16 shouted McAlister to Pfc. King back in Devereux’s command post. Devereux asked King what McAlister had said, and when informed of the accomplishment complimented McAlister for his excellent shooting.

  “That ship stood on end and sank within a minute and a half,” mentioned Lieutenant Hanna, who watched from his post along Wake’s beach. “We really cheered. I don’t think there was a man on the island who wasn’t happy.”17

  Sgt. Henry A. Bedell might have been one, for work remained to be done. The veteran Bedell brought the celebrating men of Battery L back to reality with a few well-chosen words. “Knock it off, you bastards, and get back on the guns. What do you think this is, a ballgame?”18

  The men halted their rejoicing and resumed their superb marksmanship. Before Kajioka pulled out of sight, Battery L landed other hits on a second destroyer, one transport, and one cruiser.

  Across the lagoon on Peale Island, Lieutenant Kessler’s men of Battery B delivered the final blow of the three-punch assault by the 5-inch guns. Heavy fire from the Japanese kept Kessler’s crew partially pinned down, including one shell that screamed between two rows of ammunition handlers. Had the shell veered one way or the other, it would have killed half of Kessler’s crew. Had it landed short, it would have knocked out the gun. His men kept up the firing, though, and landed hits on two of three Japanese destroyers that tried to race around Wilkes’s northern coast. The destroyers altered course and, like the rest of Kajioka’s task force, steamed away from Wake as quickly as possible.

  Kessler, beaming like a proud father, could not have been more delighted with his mostly teenage gun crew. “There was no fear evident as the enemy shells fell about them,” he wrote after the battle, “it was as though here at last they had been given an opportunity to fight back and they were determined to do so. There was no cheering but I sensed a feeling of great pride and satisfaction in the relaxed look in their faces. They had been tested and found themselves not wanting.”19

  By 7:10, approximately one hour after Devereux’s command to open fire, quiet returned to the atoll. Instead of a landing on Wake and a quick victory over the Americans, Kajioka beat a hasty retreat to the Marshalls to lick his wounds and explain his defeat. As Kajioka limped away, Lieutenant Barninger gazed seaward toward the Yubari, from which steam and thick black smoke billowed, then watched the ship slowly gain speed and disappear over the horizon. His job, and the work of every man standing on Wake, was finished, but more lay in store for Kajioka. The smoke had hardly cleared from Wake’s guns when the four aviators of VMF-211, Wake’s tentacles reaching out to sea, plunged down to add the finishing touches to a remarkable morning.

  “Hounded Out to Sea by Fanatical American Fighters”

  While Kajioka and Devereux battled from point-blank range below, Major Putnam, joined by Captains Elrod, Tharin, and Freuler, scouted the skies at fifteen thousand feet to intercept Japanese carrier aircraft. Early reports mentioned the possibility of an enemy aircraft carrier in the area, but when none was sighted, the four decided to descend and help their mates fighting on land. Putnam radioed his companions, “Well, it looks as if there are no Nips in the air. Let’s go down and join the party.”20

  Each aviator carried two 100-pound bombs under his wings in addition to the .50-caliber machine guns. As the pilots dipped toward the Japanese ships, antiaircraft bursts punctured the skies around them, but the Americans held fire until they dropped to within 1,500 feet. Putnam’s errant pair of bombs missed one destroyer, but the officer made amends by peppering the bridge of a second destroyer with his machine guns. As he pulled out, Putnam saw pieces of metal and shards of glass—the enemy crew had apparently forgotten to remove the glass shield from the bridge—spray every Japanese officer and crew member nearby. Now out of ammunition, Putnam hurried back to Wake to land, reload, and return for another attack.

  The four aviators, relieved at times by Lieutenant Kinney and Sgt. William J. Hamilton, flew ten different sorties that morning. For one
hour, the Americans harassed the Japanese, much like hornets pursuing an intruder who had disturbed their nest. “We were hounded out to sea by fanatical American fighters who strafed us relentlessly and dropped bombs with impunity,”21 wrote Sub-Lt. Ozeki. Machine gun bullets from one American fighter punctured the Yubari’s bridge and narrowly missed killing Admiral Kajioka. Other aviators damaged a transport and one other vessel.

  Captain Elrod delivered the coup de grâce, however. In a run against the destroyer Kisaragi, Hammering Hank dropped a bomb that punched through the ship’s deck and started a fire belowdecks. By the time Elrod disengaged to reload at Wake, the ship had slowed in the water, but still floated.

  About 7:37 Putnam spotted the damaged Kisaragi thirty miles south of Wake and prepared to attack. Suddenly, an immense ball of flame consumed the destroyer, which disappeared in less than a minute, taking 150 men to their deaths. Putnam later attributed the sinking to Elrod’s bomb, which started the fires that doomed the ship.

  The six aviators dropped twenty bombs and expended twenty thousand rounds of .50-caliber ammunition at the enemy in sixty minutes, but they paid a price. Japanese antiaircraft fire punctured every Wildcat, especially Captain Elrod’s, whose engine froze from a lack of lubrication. Elrod miraculously nursed the fighter back to Wake and alighted only yards from shore, but the hard landing, combined with the damage inflicted by the Japanese, knocked the Wildcat out of the fight. Elrod jumped out unhurt, but he seemed more concerned with the valuable fighter than about himself. He repeated over and over to Major Devereux, who had rushed to the beach to see if Elrod was all right, “I’m sorry as hell about the plane.”22

  Capt. Freuler’s aircraft also suffered extensive damage, but Putnam concluded that by scavenging parts from destroyed fighters, the plane could be repaired. Until that time, however, he could put only two Wildcats into the sky to oppose the enemy.