In December 1941, as Japan ripped across the Pacific, most American outposts collapsed in days. Guam fell between Dec. 8 and Dec. 10 to a larger Japanese landing force after only brief resistance by a small, lightly armed garrison of sailors and Marines. Wake Island was supposed to be another speed bump. Instead, a few hundred Marines, sailors, and civilian contractors turned it into a two-week fight that delivered the first American tactical victory of the Pacific War and a badly needed morale boost at home.
The Defense of Wake Island Faces Long Odds From the Start
Wake was an odd prize: a wishbone-shaped coral atoll about 2,000 miles west of Oahu, made up of three low islets named Wake, Wilkes, and Peale. By early December 1941, the U.S. had turned it into an unfinished outpost with roads, a triangular airstrip, and basic naval air facilities built by more than 1,100 civilian contractors. The garrison itself was tiny but well armed. On Dec. 4, 1941, the island held 449 Marines, 69 sailors, and a six-man Army radio detachment— only 524 officers and men in all. Most belonged to the Wake Island detachment of the 1st Defense Battalion, backed by Marine Fighting Squadron 211 with 12 F4F-3 Wildcat fighters.
The Marines were so few in number that they could not fully man the island’s defenses, but what Wake lacked in manpower, it made up for in hardware. The Marines had 12 3-inch antiaircraft guns, 6 5-inch seacoast guns, six searchlights, 18 .50-caliber antiaircraft machine guns, and 30 .30-caliber guns, dug into coral gun pits they’d carved mostly with picks and shovels. That gave them a real ability to hurt ships and aircraft, which is something Guam never had. Official U.S. accounts of the Guam fight explicitly describe its 1941 defenders as a “small, lightly armed garrison” that was “quickly overrun” between Dec. 8 and 10.
The Defense of Wake Island Faces Early Japanese Air Attacks
Wake’s war started hours after Pearl Harbor. On the morning of Dec. 8 (Wake being west of the International Date Line), the island’s Army radio trailer received an emergency message from Hawaii: Oahu was under attack. Just before noon, 27 Japanese medium bombers from the Marshalls burst out of the clouds over Wake at about 2,000 feet. The garrison hesitated briefly, thinking they might be American B-17s, and paid dearly for it. The bombers destroyed seven of VMF-211’s Wildcats on the ground and killed or wounded about half the squadron’s personnel in minutes.
Rather than sit still and wait for the next raid, the Marines adjusted. Anti-aircraft crews moved their 3-inch guns to new positions, improved camouflage, and used wooden dummies at the old sites. Later raids would waste bombs on the decoys while the real guns fired from fresh locations. Civilian contractors volunteered by the hundreds to reinforce defenses, joining gun crews, belting ammunition, repairing aircraft, and hauling sandbags and hot food to the outer positions.
A Small American Garrison Shocks Japan With a Naval Victory
The first decisive test came on Dec. 11. Confident that earlier bombing had neutralized Wake, Rear Adm. Sadamichi Kajioka approached at dawn with a “Wake Invasion Force” built around three light cruisers, six destroyers, two patrol boats, two transports, and submarines carrying about 450 Special Naval Landing Force troops.
Wake’s defenders didn’t panic and open fire the moment the ships appeared, but they did fume as the Japanese ships approached. Orders from Maj. James Devereux, commanding the 1st Defense Battalion detachment, told them to hold their fire until the cruisers drew close. Devereux knew the ship out ranged his six 5-inchers. His only hope was to hold fire and draw the Japanese into point-blank range. As Kajioka’s flagship, the light cruiser Yubari, ran into about 8,000 yards and began its firing run, the rest of the flotilla followed, pounding the island and setting fuel tanks ablaze. The Marines, under strict orders, kept their guns silent.
Only when Yubari turned into a third firing run at roughly 4,500 yards did Devereux finally give the order to open fire. The 5-inch battery on Wilkes Island, “playing possum” until then, found the range on the destroyer Hayate, scored direct hits, and blew the ship apart in view of the defenders. Other batteries hit additional ships, and Kajioka turned away, believing he was escaping the trap. Instead, he ran headlong into the air side of Wake’s defense.
VMF-211 had only four serviceable Wildcats left, but they flew ten attack sorties against the retreating force, strafing decks and dropping 100-pound bombs. A lucky hit on the stern of the destroyer Kisaragi detonated her depth charges and sent her to the bottom as well. Later that day, a Wildcat on patrol sank a Japanese submarine that surfaced too close to the atoll.
At the cost of two fighters damaged and five Marines lightly wounded, Wake’s garrison had repulsed the landing, sunk two destroyers, and damaged other ships. Historians of the battle and Marine Corps official narratives consistently describe the Dec. 11 fight as America’s first tactical victory of the Pacific War and the first unsuccessful amphibious assault mounted by either side in that theater.
The contrast with Guam could not have been sharper. Where Guam’s lightly armed garrison was brushed aside in three days, Wake’s coastal artillery and handful of fighters inflicted disproportionate losses and forced a Japanese admiral to retreat.
The victory reverberated far beyond the atoll. Reports of the “little island that fought back” reached the United States just as Americans were processing Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and the loss of Guam and Hong Kong. President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself held up Wake as evidence that U.S. forces could and would hit back, and the battle quickly became a potent rallying point for a shaken public.
The Defense of Wake Island Ends in Defeat but Not in Failure
Japan was determined not to be embarrassed a second time. In the days after Dec. 11, the Imperial Navy reinforced Kajioka with four heavy cruisers, additional destroyers, a seaplane tender, and two carriers from the Pearl Harbor strike force, Soryu and Hiryu, along with roughly 1,600 more Special Naval Landing Force troops. Carrier aircraft smashed Wake on Dec. 21 and 22, shooting down the last two Wildcats and further degrading the gun defenses.
On Dec. 23, the Japanese returned, this time avoiding a daylight gunnery duel. Around pre-dawn, they beached two high-speed transports and ran in additional landing craft under cover of darkness, putting roughly 900 SNLF troops ashore in the first wave.
At that point, the battle shifted from artillery and air power to close-quarters infantry combat. The Marine Corps had always taught that every Marine is a rifleman first. On Dec. 23, that doctrine became brutally literal. With many of the big guns damaged or without fire-control equipment, Devereux’s Marines left their pits and fought as infantry, joined by grounded VMF-211 pilots, sailors, and several dozen armed contractors.
For more than 11 hours, small groups of Americans counterattacked, moved reserves by truck, and tried to seal off beachheads before the Japanese could consolidate. At one landing point, they virtually wiped out a beachhead of nearly 100 SNLF troops; near the airfield, they drove enemy forces back roughly 900 yards in a local counterattack. The fight on Wake’s south shore was not a quick collapse, but a grinding, island-wide firefight.
Wake finally fell for reasons that had little to do with the defenders’ tactics. Carrier aviation had destroyed its remaining fighters and severely damaged its guns. A relief expedition sent from Pearl Harbor was recalled before it could arrive. Severed communications and fragmentary reports led CDR Winfield Cunningham to believe most of his strong points had been overrun. Facing that picture, and with no hope of reinforcement, he ordered surrender to prevent what he thought would be a massacre.
By then, the price Japan paid was steep. Estimates say the Imperial Japanese Navy lost two destroyers, one submarine, 21 aircraft, and around 900 to 1,000 men to take an atoll defended by fewer than 600 American military personnel. Fewer than 100 Americans died during the 16-day siege.
Strategically, Wake Island’s loss did not halt Japan’s early-war momentum. But the way its defenders fought mattered. They used coastal guns with disciplined fire control, coordinated their tiny air wing with artillery to ambush a superior fleet, and, when the guns were silenced, fought as agile infantry, counterattacking instead of waiting passively to be overrun. In a month mostly filled with disasters, Wake showed that determined defenders with decent tools and smart tactics could still bloody the Japanese Empire’s nose.
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