Hi I'm the History Guy, I have a degree in history,
I love history and if you love history too this is the channel for you.
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor December 7th of 1941, that was just the
start of a larger campaign. Within seven hours Japanese forces were besieging the British in
Malaya, Hong Kong and Singapore, and attacking American forces in the Philippine Islands,
on Guam and on the tiny atoll of Wake Island. Some of these were longer campaigns,
but some were short battles, and those battles were overshadowed by the attack on Pearl Harbor.
And yet they represent the first efforts of American ground forces in the Second World War,
and these small forces largely cut off from aid from the United States deserve to be remembered.
And so today we are going to remember the fierce, nearly forgotten 1941 defense of Wake Island,
by an outnumbered, outgunned force of marines, sailors, soldiers and civilians.
Wake Island is a tiny triangle-shaped coral atoll encompassing less than three square miles of land.
The United States claimed the uninhabited island in 1899, thinking that it could be a good coaling
station for Navy ships between Hawaii and the Philippine Islands. In 1936 Pan American Airways
gained a lease in order to build a weigh station on their trans-pacific flying Clippers route. The
Pan American Airways hotel was the first permanent settlement in the history of Wake Island. Then in
1941, fearing a Japanese buildup in the Pacific, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered that
Wake Island be built into a military installation including the construction of an airfield.
By December of 1941, the island held 450 officers and men of the first marine defense battalion,
a marine squadron of 12 F4F Wildcat fighter aircraft, 68 US Navy personnel, five US Army
personnel and over 1200 civilians, mostly civil engineers working on the construction of the base
in a few Pan American Airlines personnel. On the morning of December 8th, Pan American Airlines had
just sent their Philippine clipper into the air destined for Guam. The base was just waking up,
when at 7:00 a.m. news first arrived of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Knowing that Wake Island would soon be attacked, the base commander, Navy commander Winfield Scott
Cunningham, ordered the rings on the island to battle stations, asked Penn American Airlines to
recall the Philippine clipper and sent four of the F4F Wildcats into the air to look for enemy
aircraft. Unfortunately because of heavy cloud cover the four Wildcats missed the first Japanese
attack of 34 land-based bombers, the Japanese devastated the airfield, it destroyed the eight
Wildcats that were still on the ground and killed much of the ground crew and did a lot of damage
to the Pan American facility. The Marines fired back as best they could with their 12 three-inch
anti-aircraft guns, but because of the altitude of the Japanese planes they were difficult to target,
they didn't shoot any down but they did manage to damage eight of the planes.
Amazingly the Pan AM clipper was undamaged and was able to make it out with its passengers and
many of the Pan American employees. The airfield was devastated and had only 4 operable aircraft
and many of the ground crew were dead. Fortunately many of the civilian engineers were volunteering
to help with the defense and there happened to be a couple of mechanics among them who proved
to be invaluable at keeping the airplanes in the air. The Japanese air attacks continued on the
9th and 10th, doing more damage to facilities, causing some casualties and again the Marines
fired back not shooting down any aircraft but damaging several of the Japanese planes.
The Japanese commander, Rear Admiral Sadamichi Kajioka, assumed that the Wake Island defenders
had been devastated by all the bombing attacks, and so he planned his land invasion to occur
upon December 11th. The force that he brought was substantial, he had three light cruisers,
six destroyers, two patrol boats and two transports. To defend against this attack
the Marines had six 5.5 inch naval guns that had been rescued from a refit of the battleship Texas,
and of course the four operable F4F Wildcats. The Marines held their fire until the Japanese
ships were in close and when they opened up, it was a devastating barrage, the Japanese ships
raked by the 5.5 inch guns that they didn't even know that the Marines had. Two shells struck into
the magazine the Japanese Destroyer Hiyate and it exploded with a loss of all hands. As the
ships were trying to retreat under fire, a bomb from one of the Wildcats landed amongst a bunch
of depth charges on the Destroyer Kisaragii and it too exploded with a loss of all hands.
Stunned by the ferocious attack, Kajioka was forced to withdraw. This was the first Japanese
naval defeat of the Second World War and it was the only amphibious landing of the Second World
War to be repelled by shore guns. Kajioka, who was humbled by the sizable casualties,
was forced to retreat and ask for support from the fleet that had attacked Pearl Harbor.
Japanese air attacks continued and slowly the four wildcat fighters were put out of commission,
damaged beyond repair, but before the little air force was grounded they had shot down at least
twenty-one Japanese aircraft. The defenders of Wake were hoping for a relief force from
the United States, but after Pearl Harbor the Navy was stretched thin in the Pacific.
A relief force was put together but it was still hundreds of miles away when Kajioka returned
for his second attack with a significantly reinforced fleet, that included two of the
carriers that had been at Pearl Harbor, the Hiryu and the Soryu, and four heavy cruisers.
The final Japanese attack came on December 23rd, supported by massive air attacks from the aircraft
of the two aircraft carriers, and still the outnumbered defenders managed to destroy two of
the patrol craft, those were converted Destroyers that were used to land the Japanese troops.
The fight was brief and bitter, the Marines held out through the night and into the next day,
but as the fight went on it was clear that there was nothing else to gain and
finally commander Cunningham ordered his troops to lay down arms and surrender.
By the time the fight was over the Wake Island defenders had taken 171 casualties,
killed and wounded, 70 of the dead were civilians. But on the other side the Japanese had taken more
than 1,100 casualties, including the crews of the two Destroyers, in addition they had
lost two Destroyers, two patrol boats, a transport, more than 20 aircraft and
dozens of other aircraft and eight other ships were severely damaged in the fight.
360 United States Marines, 60 United States Navy personnel, 5 United States Army personnel
and 1,104 American civilians went into Japanese captivity that day. All but a hundred were sent
to the Japanese mainland where they endure the horrors of Japanese prisoner of war camps during
the war, but a hundred of the civilians were kept on Wake Island as slave labor,
and then in 1943 fearing that an American invasion of the island was imminent the Japanese commander
at the time, Admiral Shigematsu Sakaibara had the ninety-eight survivors from that group executed.
It was a war crime for which Sakaibara was eventually tried,
convicted and hanged. The invasion never came, the island was only handed back
to the United States after the end of the war, officially surrendered September 4th
1945. The air force is in charge of the island now they still operate the airstrip as a refueling
site and there's a small missile defense site, there are 94 permanent residents of Wake Island.
The Wake island defenders didn't necessarily change the war, but they did represent to an
American public shocked after the attacks on Pearl Harbor that Americans really could
fight, and to the Japanese who found great success early in the war that well it might not be as easy
as they thought it would be. Certainly though, the Wake Island defenders proved that they deserved to
be remembered because.. because they did their duty, as well as anyone could ask of them.
I'm the History Guy. I hope you enjoyed this edition of my channel, 5 minutes of history,
short snippets of forgotten history 5 to 10 minutes long. If you enjoyed this then please
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