Defenders of Wake Island, 1941

Painting by artist Albin Henning shows Marines firing a .30-caliber Browning machine gun as Japanese landing force sailors splash ashore. While inaccurate in details (barbed wire, for example, is an artist's invention because no such obstruction existed at Wake Island, since the coral reef surrounding the atoll was bare of any holding ground for the stakes or anchors necessary to keep them in place), it does capture the desperate nature of the Marines' final day's fighting.

by George Shulsky

Four days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Captain Henry T. Elrod, Marine Corps pilot, was standing on the deck of the aircraft carrier Hornet, awaiting orders for take-off, with great anticipation. They were to take off for Wake Island. But it was not until the carrier was out at sea for some days that the Marine Air Group 211 learned of their destination.

This tiny atoll in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean some 2,600 miles from Honolulu, and approximately 2,200 miles to Tokyo, was frantically being turned into "battle stations readiness" as the war clouds loomed ominously in the Western Pacific.

In the early months of 1941, more than 1,200 construction men descended on this island and went to work, with great haste, building a naval air base. A monumental undertaking which took the combined forces of the eight largest U.S. construction companies.

The work proceeded with great speed in spite of the physical hardships the men had to endure under this tropical sun. Installations of every description had to be erected: power plant, machine shops, store houses, living quarters, cold-storage reefers, water distillation plant, mess and sanitation facilities, a whole city had to be constructed from the ground up.

A coral runway, 5,000 feet long and 200 feet wide, with another 1,000-foot parking area was carved out from a tough, waist-high brush.

In October, Major James Devereux arrived on Wake Island to take command of a small detachment of U.S. Marines, some 180 men, and proceeded in constructing defense installations. Their entire arsenal consisted of three 5 inch batteries, of two guns each, and three 5-inch batteries of four guns each, a total of eighteen guns. For ground defense they had twenty-four .50 caliber machine guns for anti-aircraft fire, and thirty .30-caliber for ground defense, plus assorted small arms and plenty of ammunition. This, then, together with slight manpower reinforcement in the last moments, brought the entire fighting force of Wake Island to 378 men.

The work proceeded with great speed under command of Major Devereux, who worked incessantly and inspired his men and even civilian workers, who were not officially recruited to aid the Marines in defense construction. However, they did help the Marines in building revetments and bomb shelters and other vital defense installations.

In the midst of all this activity, Marine Fighting Squadron 211 came down, one by one, on the newly-built runway. They were met by Commander Walter Cunningham, the Naval senior officer on the island, Major Devereux, Mr. Teters, the civilian construction manager, and scores of eager onlookers. The arrival of the Wildcats was nearly upstaged by the landing of twelve huge Navy PBYs a few days earlier, whose mission was to patrol in the vicinity of Wake Island.

The newly arrived squadron settled down to the routine of unpacking and getting the air station into working order. They faced several logistic and technical problems, such as the inability to fit the existing bombs into their bomb racks. With some ingenuity and improvisation, they managed to hook up two 100-pounders to each plane.

In charge of this resourceful Marine squadron was a 38-year-old Iowan, Major Paul A. Putnam, reported to be an excellent pilot but even better organizer. When on 6 December the huge PBYs left as suddenly as they appeared, it was up to the Marine squadron to take up patrolling duties.

As the morning dawned on 8 December on Wake Island, a radio message was picked up of the Pearl Harbor attack. In the usual manner, the Stars and Stripes went up the flag pole during reveille but did not come down until two weeks later when it was taken down by the Japanese invaders.

"Battle stations" was sounded throughout the island sending the Marines to their gun emplacements. The four Wildcats were already in the air on their morning patrol, the remaining eight planes were dispersed on the side of the runway and concealed as much as possible. The civilians went for cover anywhere they could.

At 11:58 a formation of twenty-four twin-engined Japanese bombers appeared low on the horizon, reported lower than 2,000 feet, completely unnoticed by the patrolling Wildcats which circled the island at some 12,000 feet.

Bombs fell on Wake Island's newly-built installations with a devastating result. The Japanese went for all the visible defense and logistic installations first. They apparently knew the location of each installation with great precision. They blasted the fuel dump, hit all the planes on the ground and rained terror throughout the island installations. The raid lasted approximately ten minutes and then it was all over, leaving behind them a scene of total devastation.

When the smoke cleared somewhat, the defenders counted their dead and wounded and their shattered defenses. Of the eight planes on the ground only one was still intact. When the four-plane Wildcat patrol came down after the raid (they did not know of the attack because the ground-air radio was still inoperative), they found the runway cleared of most of the debris but there were many pot holes, and Captain Elrod's plane broke a propeller on landing. As a result of the attack and Elrod's damaged plane, Wake's air force was down to just four serviceable planes.

The Japanese bombers came the next day again, at exactly the same time as the first day. The Wildcat patrol sighted the twenty-seven Japanese bombers south of Wake Island and tore into them with all their ferocity. Flying without a fighter escort, the Japanese bombers relied only on their own guns for defense. The two Wildcats managed to separate one bomber from the formation and sent him flaming into the sea, their first kill. The bombers proceeded to the island objective and delivered their deadly cargo. Again, it was the earth-shattering shock of bombs exploding, clouds of smoke and fires raging throughout the island. After dropping their bombs, the bombers came swooping low and strafed everything in sight. The attack lasted some ten minutes but the devastation was enormous.

The casualties were high. Fifty-five of the civilian workers were either killed or died that day from their wounds. Three of the aviation ground crew had been killed, while in the hospital.

It is due to the excellent record kept by Major Bayler, the Marine Communication Officer, that it is possible to reconstruct in some detail the last days of the Wildcats' valiant stand against great odds.

In his book, Last Man Off Wake Island, Major Bayler tells how in between raids, which seemed like an eternity to the defenders, they busied themselves around assigned tasks and caught moments of rest when they could. "Sometimes," he relates, "if enough of us wanted to, we hitched up a trailer to the reconnaissance car and go careening through the black of the night to Dan Teters' [the civilian construction camp] to see a motion picture show. Sometimes we would have noisy arguments, which we flatteringly termed debates, and in which Hank Elrod always shone. He would toss some provocative statement into the conversation, then defend it tooth-and-nail against criticism and attack. Elrod was a strong, well-built fellow who liked to take his pleasures the hard way. On one occasion, a few days before the first enemy attack, he and a huge, mustachioed gunner, Clarence McKinstry, put on a wrestling match. They went to it, half-naked, on the bare wooden floor, which was plenty rough itself and splintery. Both men emerged with scratches and colorful abrasions from stem to stern."

Elrod and Captain Frank Tharin, another pilot, were very good friends. They always flew the patrol together and developed a highly effective technique of attack based on their teamwork. Tharin called Elrod "Baron," no doubt after the World War I German air ace, and Elrod usually addressed Tharin as "Duke." They were, as Major Bayler called them, the "Damon and Pythias of aviation."

In the early morning of 11 December, under cover of darkness, a Japanese naval task force comprised of some twelve ships approached the island. It was obvious they would attempt to land.

The defenders were ready for anything the Japanese had in store for them. In the dim gray light of dawn, the Wildcats, Elrod and Tharin, dropped low enough to identify a gunboat, several destroyers and a couple of large ships that might have been either troop transports or supply ships. The Japanese task force was closing rapidly on the island. Seeing themselves discovered, the Japanese opened up with anti-aircraft fire. The planes answered with a pair of 100-pound bomb apiece, then turned and headed for the base to re-supply.

Rearmed and refueled, Elrod and Tharin were joined by the two remaining planes flown by Captain Freuler and Major Putnam. The Japanese had no aircraft carrier with their armada, so the Wildcats had only the ship's anti-aircraft to contend with. In his communication tent, Major Bayler could hear fragments of their inter-plane conversation.

"I felt a little like God," he wrote, "listening in remotely to all the languages, and somehow I was possessed by a conviction that God was hearing it, too, with some tolerance and sympathetic understanding …

" 'Hi, Duke! See that big, fat sonofabitch straight ahead?'

" 'I see him. Let's get him.' "

They went after the Japanese convoy with everything they had and managed to hit a cruiser, to their jubilation. Having emptied their guns, and low on fuel, the two pilots came in for a landing. While the planes were being rearmed and refueled, Elrod and Tharin would gulp a cup of coffee and puff on a cigarette.

As the Japanese ships came within the range of Wake Island, the Marines opened up with all their ferocity. While all six shore guns roared in deafening crash, the two Wildcats raced down the pitted runway. Between the guns on land and the two Wildcats in the air, the Japanese were badly crippled, with loss of two destroyers, Kasaragi and Hayate, and three cruisers, Yubari, Tatsuta, and Tenryu, plus a troop transport ship, the Kongo Maru, seriously damaged. Post-war records showed that indeed the troopship Kongo Maru, with some 500 men, never reached the Japanese base in the Marshalls.

If the defenders had anything to cheer about, this was the day indeed. They managed to avert a full-scale enemy invasion, sink enemy ships, and without a single loss of life to themselves.

While the two Wildcats were being refueled and rearmed again, Tharin and Elrod looked fidgety, as if something was on their minds. They finally approached Major Putnam with a request to go after a Japanese cruiser, which they spotted some distance away, and suspected to be the flagship. Attacking a cruiser with two small fighter planes and four 100-pound bombs wasn't exactly according to the manual, but the situation was beyond any tactical books and so Putnam agreed.

"They departed gleefully for the pits, as happy as a pair of office boys going to a ball game," wrote Major Bayler.

The pair roared down the runway and off in pursuit of the Japanese cruiser. The ground crew could hear the two pilots as they exchanged conversation on their intercom. The pair made four separate trips, they dove four times through a hell of anti-aircraft fire and returned untouched. They sprayed the enemy with thousands of rounds of machine gun fire and dropped 16 bombs altogether, of which eight scored direct hits. The Japanese cruiser was ablaze from stem to stern, the flames billowing from her magazine and her crew in confusion and going overboard.

Tharin and Elrod returned to the base unhurt and beaming with joy. They had sunk an enemy cruiser with small bombs and from a land base. They won the second and decisive round against the invading enemy. How-ever, the jubilation did not last as a flotilla of enemy bombers appeared over the island later that day. The exhausted pilots scrambled once again for their planes to meet the enemy in the sky.

The raid was a quick sweep over and back, lasting no more than a few minutes, but to the besieged garrison it seemed like an eternity.

As the ground crew climbed out from their dugouts and shook the dust off themselves, they noticed returning a single Wildcat coming in for a landing, dangerously low, sweeping in from the sea. The plane was in trouble, losing altitude fast with its engines stopped. It could not make it to the airfield, and for a moment it didn't seem as if it would make it to the island at all. The pilot, however, handled the plane beautifully and brought the crippled aircraft onto the beach.

"I recognized Hank Elrod," wrote Major Bayler. "He was quite unhurt, but for a small cut on his right cheek.

"He stood a moment in silence, looking at his plane, then reached out and touched it gently."

Having lost all their aircraft, the pilots and ground crew went up to the unmanned gun position, just behind the flight line facing the southern shore. This was where they were going to make their stand.

Two days before Christmas, a Wake Island lookout reported seeing many flashing lights northeast of the island. Could it be the American task force coming to their rescue, they asked themselves. But as they argued and guessed the lights came closer. The men realized instinctively that it was the Japanese invasion force back for the kill.

With a greatly enlarged force, the Japanese added two aircraft carriers and increased their landing force to 1,500 men. Admiral Kajioka wasn't going to have another embarrassing episode like the one on 11 December; Wake Island had to be captured.

Under the cover of darkness, without even the customary gun battle, the Japanese invasion of some 1,000 men, jam-packed in two converted destroyers, ran on the reef on the south side of the airstrip, just at the precise location where the Marine aviators took up the defense positions. Supported by another gun crew close by, Major Putnam and his crew opened up with everything they had. For a moment this small band of determined and defiant Marines managed to push back several hundred Japanese invaders. For a while it appeared as though the Marines would succeed in turning back this assault and drive the Japanese back to the surf. Unfortunately, the odds were quite against them. They were facing a much greater force than they had imagined; they were outnumbered and out-gunned. The Japanese were already landing at several other points and closing in fast on the defenders.

Dead Japanese soldiers piled up in front of Putnam's little band of defenders but they were still coming out of the darkness of the ocean and charged in a banzai fashion.

Henry Elrod became a fury itself, standing upright and blasting his Tommy gun which broke the charge for a spell. The enemy soldiers fell close enough to touch him. When his Tommy gun failed, he began tossing grenades. At this moment, unseen among the dead, a Japanese soldier crawled in close enough to shoot the big Marine. Captain Henry Elrod fell to the ground still clutching tightly a grenade in his hand.

Appendix

The President of the United States takes pride in presenting the Medal of Honor posthumously to Captain Henry T. Elrod, United States Marine Corps, for service as set forth in the following citation:

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while attached to Marine Fighting Squadron 211, during action against enemy Japanese land, surface and aerial units at Wake Island, from 8 to 23 December 1941. Engaging vastly superior forces of enemy bombers and warships on 9 and 12 December, Captain Elrod shot down two of a flight of twenty-two hostile planes and, executing repeated bombing and strafing runs at extremely low altitude and close range, succeeded in inflicting deadly damage upon a large Japanese vessel, thereby sinking the first major warship to be destroyed by small caliber bombs delivered from a fighter-type aircraft. When his plane was disabled by hostile fire and no other ships were operative, Captain Elrod assumed command of one flank of the line set up in defiance of the enemy landing and, conducting a brilliant defense, enabled his men to hold their positions and repulse determined Japanese attacks, repeatedly proceeding through intense hostile fusillades to provide covering fire for unarmed ammunition carriers. Capturing an automatic weapon during one enemy rush in force, he gave his own firearm to one of his men and fought on vigorously against the Japanese. Responsible in a large measure for the strength of his sector's gallant resistance, on 23 December, Captain Elrod led his men with bold aggressiveness until he fell, mortally wounded. His superb skill as a pilot, daring leadership and unswerving devotion to duty distinguished him among the defenders of Wake Island, and his valiant conduct reflects the highest credit upon himself and the United States Naval Service. He gallantly gave his life for his country.

Major Henry T. Elrod, USMC.

 

Aerial photograph of Wake Island taken from a Consolidated PBY patrol plane on 25 May 1941, looking west along the northern side of Wake, with Peale Island in the center and right middle distance and Wilkes Island in the left distance. The views shows civilian Camp Number Two on Wake, the bridge connecting Wake and Peale islands, the Pan American Airways facility on Peale Boeing "Clipper" is docked at the pier and seven PBYs moored to bouys in the lagoon off Peale. (Naval History & Heritage Command U.S. Navy photo 80-G-411160)

Wake’s artillery batteries fought day and night to keep at bay a flotilla of enemy cruisers, destroyers, and transports. (U.S. Marine Corps)

Imperial Japanese Navy destroyer Hayate on trials, circa 1925. Sunk by U.S. Marine Corps gun batteries during the initial defense of Wake Island.

The Japanese destroyer Kisaragi, destroyed by Marine Wildcats in the successful first defense of Wake Island.

Two Japanese naval patrol boats beached during the attack on the island.

A U.S. Marine Corps plane on Wake Island is examined by the Japanese after their capture of the island. The Japanese naval officer nearest the camera seems to be taking a picture. The defenders of the island surrendered after a 15-day siege.

Civilian contractors are marched off to captivity after the Japanese captured Wake. Some, deemed important by the Japanese to finish construction projects, were retained there. Fearing a fifth column rising, the Japanese executed 98 contractors in October 1943, an atrocity for which atoll commander, Rear Adm. Shigematsu Sakaibara, was hanged after the war.

The memorial on Wake Island dedicated to the Marines, Navy, Army and civilians, who defended the island against the overwhelming Japanese invasion force. In October 1943, 98 captured civilian workers were executed by the Japanese.

Wrecked U.S. Marine Corps Grumman F4F-3 Wildcat fighters of Marine Fighting Squadron 211 (VMF-211), photographed by by the Wake Island airstrip sometime after the Japanese captured the island on Dec. 23, 1941. The plane in the foreground, “211-F-11” was flown by Capt. Henry T. Elrod during the Dec. 11 attacks that sank the Japanese destroyer Kisaragi. Damaged beyond repair at that time, “211-F-11” was subsequently used as a source of parts to keep other planes operational. (National Archives photo)

Smiling for the Japanese propaganda cameras some of the Wake island defenders, now POWs aboard the transport ship Nitta Maru. Commander Winfield Scott Cunningham, seated in the dark uniform would be awarded the Navy Cross for his leadership. (National Archives)

Vice Adm. William S. Pye, whose decision to abandon the relief of Wake Island was never forgiven by the U.S. Marine Corps. (National Archives photo)

Aerial of Wake Island at the height of the attack by U.S. carrier-based planes and ship bombardment on October 5-6, 1943. A fire burns near the airfield while in the foreground are the remains of a Japanese ship that was beached after being hit in December 1941 by Marines defending the base when it fell to the invading Japanese. (Naval History & Heritage Command 80-G-85197)

Col Walter L. J. Bayler, reputedly "the last Marine off Wake" in December 1941, is the first to set foot on the island in 1945. (Department of Defense Photo USMC 133688)

Defense Installations on Wake, 8-23 December 1941. (USMC)