Battle for Wake
Destroyed Marine Corps F4F "Wildcat" on Wake Island
| date | December 8th to December 23rd, 1941 |
|---|---|
| place | Wake , Pacific |
| output | Japanese victory |
| Parties to the conflict | |
|---|---|
| Commander | |
| Troop strength | |
| 449 soldiers and 1,146 civilians | approx. 5000 soldiers |
| losses | |
|
46 marines dead, 70 civilians dead |
approx. 820 dead |
1941
Thailand - Malay Peninsula - Pearl Harbor - Hong Kong - Philippines - Guam - Wake - Force Z - Borneo
1942
Burma - Rabaul - Singapore - Sumatra - Timor - Australia - Java - Salamaua - Lae - Indian Ocean - Port Moresby - Coral Sea - Midway - North America - Buna-Gona - Kokoda-Track
The Battle of Wake was one of the first skirmishes between Japan and the United States in the Pacific War . It began the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 8, 1941 and ended on December 23 with the victory of the Japanese attackers. The defense of the island by a vastly inferior number of soldiers from the US Marine Corps is still considered an admirable gem of its military history in the USA.
Strategic location
The Wake - Atoll was for Japan of strategic interest. The main reason for Wake's conquest was that Japan could not surrender the island to the Americans if it wanted to secure permanent rule over Indochina , Malaya , Borneo , Sumatra, and Java . For both Japan and the USA, Wake was an important aircraft base, which, in American hands, threatened the Japanese possessions on the Marshall Islands .
Leading up to the battle
Wake is a coral island in the middle of the Pacific and lies between the American Hawaii and the then Japanese-occupied Marianas . The lonely atoll consists of three islands with no fresh water sources. At the time of the attack, the Pan Am airline operated a stopover station that consisted of an airfield and a hotel for around 1,000 passengers and flight crew. 449 Marines were stationed on Wake under the command of Major James Devereux . They were equipped with obsolete material, some of which was still from the First World War, some guns that came from wrecked warships, and eight Grumman F4F fighters that lacked spare parts. Preparations for an anticipated Japanese attack had been underway for less than 24 hours when the first Japanese bombs fell on Wake on December 8, 1941. Several hundred civilians (mostly construction workers) were also still on the island at the time of the attack. A Pan Am Boeing Clipper that had recently flown to Hawaii was recalled after news of the attack on Pearl Harbor had arrived , as the situation was deemed too dangerous; the machine landed on wake again.
Preparatory air strikes
At noon on December 8th, 34 Japanese G3M2 bombers emerged from the cloud cover. The Pan Am Hotel, the airfield's fuel tanks and four of the eight fighters were destroyed within minutes. The fully fueled “Clipper” of the Pan Am remained intact and left Wake fully occupied towards Midway on the same day . At the same time the next day another attack followed by 27 bombers launched from the Marshall Islands , which set fire to the hospital , workshops and other fuel supplies. The defenders failed to shoot down. About 100 civilians from the Pan Am Hotel offered to help defend the island at the time. With their help it was possible to move the coastal guns and anti-aircraft positions until the next attack the following day and to replace them with dummies . The attack by 26 bombers on the morning of December 10th actually targeted the old positions and the dummies were subjected to heavy bombardment.
Attack by the Japanese fleet
Towards evening, Japanese warships were finally sighted by an American submarine and the guards on Wake were reinforced accordingly. The Japanese attack fleet under Rear Admiral Kajioka Sadamichi consisted of three light cruisers , six destroyers , two armed freighters and two patrol boats ( destroyers converted into mother ships for landing craft ). Their plan of attack envisaged first firing the island with artillery, then landing 450 men with the landing craft on the main island of Wake and Wilkes Island and finally, depending on the success of the company, removing more soldiers from the ships on the atoll. It was considered certain that the previous bombings had made a defense of the island impossible and that a quick surrender of the marines was to be expected. The Japanese leadership was surprised when they met fierce resistance at dawn on December 11th, when they were already in close proximity to the island's coast. The defenders managed to sink a destroyer and badly damage three other warships. In addition, landing craft capsized in the rough sea. Admiral Kajioka gave the order to retreat to the open sea. In the early morning the four American fighter planes attacked the formation. They rotated their 50kg bombs, returned to the airfield to refuel and load new bombs, and attacked again. In this way they sank another destroyer and severely damaged one of the cruisers and an armed freighter. Two of the machines were damaged but were able to return to the airfield. The remaining two F4F also took part in the defense against 17 Japanese bombers, which had been called in to destroy the coastal artillery for good. The bombs missed their target, and two of them were shot down and others damaged by flak and the two fighter planes.
The defenders had inflicted heavy losses on the Japanese. In fact, this Japanese attack was the only amphibious operation in the entire Pacific War that failed. The American press took up the struggle of the defenders of Wake as a counterexample to the national trauma of Pearl Harbor , and so it was soon claimed by Major Devereux, the troop commander, that when asked what to give his troops, he had " Send us more Japs! (Send us more Japsen!) “Replied . Major Devereux himself denied, however, that he had ever uttered "such a fabulous donkey". The alleged quote, however, did not fail to have a propaganda effect on the American public.
There was no support
The American Admiralty sent several fleet formations around the carriers USS Lexington , USS Enterprise and USS Saratoga from Pearl Harbor on December 14 and 15 to support the defenders of Wake Island, which were quickly becoming a symbol (including the freighter loaded with spare parts and ammunition Tangier , with which the evacuation of the rest of the civilians was supposed to be managed), but it was feared that a Japanese ambush could be caught at any moment. The position of the Japanese attack fleet on Pearl Harbor was completely unclear at this time, it was to be assumed that they were somewhere in the waters around Wake. Rear Admiral Fletcher, whose Task Force 14 around the USS Saratoga was closest to the island (only half a day's drive from Wake on December 23), justified his decision not to intervene in the Battle of Wake with the great threat posed by it combined Japanese naval forces and the bombers stationed on the Mariana Islands, to which he saw his unit exposed, as well as the insufficient equipment of the Saratoga with only 13 F4F fighter planes. One could hardly imagine anything other than a bait attack as the intention behind the Japanese attack, since the island itself seemed to be completely worthless for the Japanese. It was therefore decided to sacrifice Wake and instead protect their own aircraft carriers .
Wake falls
The atoll continued to be attacked daily by Japanese bombers, which took off from the Marshall Islands . Finally, on December 21, dive bombers arrived from the Japanese aircraft carriers Soryū and Hiryū , who had also been involved in the attack on Pearl Harbor. The constant use of the few remaining F4F on Wake made repairs necessary. Still, the defenders continued to score a number of kills. However, the daily operations weakened the defenders noticeably, and after a final attack against a swarm of carrier aircraft on December 22nd, none of the machines was operational. On the night of December 23rd, Japanese troops landed in the southwest of the main island and on Wilkes Island. The defenders, including various civilians who took part in the fighting as ammunition carriers and combatants , were even able to repel the Japanese attack and damage some of the ships involved. However, it soon became apparent after the attack that all available heavy artillery had become unusable due to enemy fire and that the remaining fighters only had their (already outdated) rifles and a few light machine guns to cope with the ongoing attacks by warships and aircraft as well as the Wilkes Island to fend off remaining Japanese landing forces. At 1:30 p.m. on December 23, Major Devereux finally surrendered.
After the surrender
The surviving marines and most of the civilians became prisoners of war and were shipped to prisoner-of-war camps on the mainland. However, around 100 civilians remained (also as prisoners of war) on Wake Island and were killed there on October 7, 1943, for allegedly attempting to contact the American Navy. The Japanese officer in charge on Wake Island, Rear Admiral Shigematsu Sakaibara , was later executed as a war criminal for this act . On September 7, 1945, Wake surrendered under his leadership.
literature
- Gregory JW Urwin Facing Fearful Odds: The Siege of Wake Island , Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997, Paperback 2002
- Gregory JW Urwin: Victory in Defeat: The Wake Island Defenders in Captivity, 1941–1945 , Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2010.
- Gregory JW Urwin Wake Island in World War II: An Annotated Bibliography , US Army Space and Strategic Defense Command 1996.
- Gregory JW Urwin The Defenders of Wake Island and Their Two Wars, 1941-1945, Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives, Winter 1991, pp. 368-381
Movie
- Wake Island , Feature Film, USA 1942, director: John Farrow , actors: Robert Preston , Brian Donlevy , Macdonald Carey u. a.
