11 December: The Landing That Failed

At dawn on 11 December 1941, Marine gunners on Wake Island held their fire until a Japanese invasion force had steamed to within a few thousand yards, then opened up. By 0800 two Japanese destroyers were on the bottom, the flagship had turned for home, and the first amphibious assault of the Pacific war had been beaten back.

Why it mattered

For the United States, the first days of the Pacific war were an unbroken run of losses. The battle line at Pearl Harbor was sunk or burning, described in the Pearl Harbor collection; the Army’s bombers in the Philippines had been caught on the ground; Guam fell on 10 December. In his fireside chat on the evening of 9 December, President Roosevelt warned the country that “the news has been all bad” and that it should be prepared to hear that Guam, Wake and Midway had all been seized (Miller Center, “Fireside Chat 19”).

Two days later the Battle of Wake Island produced the first good news. On the morning of 11 December 1941, Wake time, the Marine defenders of the atoll turned back a Japanese landing force without letting a single enemy soldier reach the beach. The destroyer Hayate was blown apart by a Marine 5-inch battery on Wilkes Island, the first Japanese surface warship sunk by U.S. forces in the war (Heinl, The Defense of Wake; NHHC, H-Gram 002). A second destroyer, Kisaragi, blew up under attack by VMF-211’s Wildcats. The Naval History and Heritage Command calls it the only time in the Second World War that an amphibious assault was beaten back by coastal defense guns (Nasuti, “The Forsaken Defenders of Wake Island,” NHHC).

The repulse did not save Wake. It bought twelve days, it brought two of the carriers that had struck Pearl Harbor back into the Central Pacific to finish the job, and it set up the agonizing question of whether the Navy would or could send help, told in Chapter 5. But it showed what a small, well-sited garrison could do against an overconfident attacker, and it gave a shaken country its first victory. One note on dates: Wake lies west of the International Date Line, so its 11 December was 10 December in Hawaii and Washington. This chapter uses Wake local dates and times throughout, as the Marine records do.

Three days of bombs, one night of waiting

The landing attempt came at the end of three days of air attack. The first raid, on 8 December, caught eight of VMF-211’s twelve new fighters on the ground and wrecked seven of them, as told in Chapter 2. The Japanese plan, as Lt. Col. Robert D. Heinl Jr. reconstructed it in the Marine Corps’ 1947 monograph, was orthodox: the first raid went after the airstrip and the fighters, the second after the naval air station and its supporting facilities, and the later raids after the antiaircraft and seacoast batteries (Heinl, The Defense of Wake, ch. 2).

The raid of 10 December concentrated on Peale and Wilkes. On Peale, Heinl writes, poor bombing and the return fire of Battery D’s 3-inch guns gave the Japanese nothing. On Wilkes, a bomb set off the contractors’ dynamite cache, which the Marine chronology puts at 125 tons of explosives, with “major damage to batteries on that island” (Heinl, Appendix IV). Among the casualties of that blast was the rangefinder of Battery L, the 5-inch battery at Kuku Point. Battery A at Peacock Point had already lost its rangefinder in the raid of 9 December (Heinl, ch. 2). Both 5-inch batteries that would carry the fight on 11 December would have to work without their main fire-control instrument.

The Japanese airmen came away from those raids believing they had done their job. Gregory J. W. Urwin, the leading modern historian of the siege, writes that they reported Wake’s defenses neutralized by 10 December (Urwin, “The Battle of Wake Island: Nation’s Morale Lifted in 1941,” National WWII Museum). Heinl judged the bombing “insufficient to warrant the landing as it would be attempted.” Robert J. Cressman, writing for the Marine Corps’ commemorative series in 1992, says the invasion force stood in toward the south shore “confident that two days of bombings had rendered the islands’ defenses impotent” (Cressman, A Magnificent Fight).

The garrison numbered 449 Marines, 68 or 69 sailors and five or six soldiers of an Army radio detachment, depending on the count, alongside 1,146 civilian construction workers (Heinl, Appendix III; Urwin). Urwin counts more than 400 contractors who volunteered to help the Marines during the siege, 186 of them on gun crews, and calculates that the defense detachment had about a third of the men it needed to man all its weapons. Their background is told in Chapter 1.

Kajioka’s force

The landing was entrusted to Rear Adm. Sadamichi Kajioka, commander of Destroyer Squadron 6 of the Fourth Fleet, flying his flag in the light cruiser Yubari. The force, which had come up from Truk to the Marshalls at the start of December, was a collection of older ships (Heinl, ch. 2). Cressman lists it as Yubari; six destroyers, Mutsuki, Kisaragi, Yayoi, Mochizuki, Oite and Hayate; Patrol Boat No. 32 and No. 33, two former destroyers converted in 1941 to launch a landing craft over a stern ramp; and the armed merchantmen Kongo Maru and Kinryu Maru. The Fourth Fleet added the old light cruisers Tatsuta and Tenryu of Cruiser Division 18 for gunfire support (Cressman, A Magnificent Fight). Two submarines scouted ahead (Heinl, ch. 2), and the Japanese records list the submarine tender Jingei with the force as well (Combined Fleet, “IJN Hayate”).

Yubari was a small, experimental cruiser of 3,587 tons, completed in July 1923 and armed with 5.5-inch (14-centimeter) guns (Cressman, photo caption). Tenryu and Tatsuta were older still, and the destroyers dated from the mid-1920s. Hayate, a Kamikaze-class destroyer of about 1,400 tons built by Ishikawajima in Tokyo, had been completed in December 1925 (Pacific Wrecks, “Hayate”). Kisaragi, of the Mutsuki class, was built at the Maizuru Navy Yard and completed the same month (Combined Fleet, “IJN Kisaragi”). Against a beaten-down island, this was plenty. Against coastal guns, it was thin-skinned.

The troops were 450 men of the Special Naval Landing Force, the Japanese navy’s infantry. Heinl quotes the plan in the words of Kajioka’s chief of staff: “150 men land on Wilkes Island and the balance, 300 men, on the south side of Wake Island to capture the airfield.” If the wind on the south side was bad, the alternative was the north and northeast coasts. “We expected to have a rough time,” the chief of staff said, “and that we would have difficulty with a landing force of only 450 men.” In an emergency the destroyers’ crews were to be put ashore as infantry (Heinl, ch. 2). Heinl thought the assault troops were probably embarked in the two patrol boats, with the follow-up garrison in the transports; the Combined Fleet record for Oite says she carried an advance landing party as well.

The approach was cautious. Heinl describes the two submarines working about 75 miles ahead of the main body and a picket destroyer 10 miles ahead of the convoy to make the landfall. On the evening of 10 December the weather turned against the Japanese, with high winds and heavy seas, but it also hid them. Neither the submarines nor the picket reported anything to worry about (Heinl, ch. 2).

Triton’s torpedoes

One American ship did see them. The submarine Triton was patrolling on the surface south of the atoll, charging her batteries. At 2315 on 10 December her lookouts saw “two flashes” and then the silhouette of what looked like a destroyer. She submerged, tracked the contact and at 0017 on 11 December fired four stern torpedoes, which Cressman calls the first fired by a Pacific Fleet submarine in the war. The crew heard a dull explosion, but no hit was ever confirmed. Cressman believes the target was most likely the picket destroyer running ahead of the convoy (Cressman, A Magnificent Fight). Triton and her sister Tambor took no part in the action that followed.

0300: “Hold fire”

Wake’s lookouts, like Triton’s, saw flickering lights to the south in the small hours. Capt. Wesley McC. Platt, commanding the strongpoint on Wilkes, reported ships offshore to Marine Gunner John Hamas in the defense battalion command post. Hamas told Maj. Devereux, who stepped outside with his executive officer, Maj. George H. Potter, to scan the horizon in the moonlight (Cressman, A Magnificent Fight). Heinl puts Kajioka’s landfall at 0300 and says the Japanese, with Yubari in the van, began their final approach to stations 5 to 6 miles off the south shore. Wake, from the sea, was “dark and silent” (Heinl, ch. 2).

The garrison went to general quarters. Then came the order that decided the morning: hold fire. Heinl, writing from the Marine records, describes “emphatic orders” to hold fire “no matter how tempting the targets appeared to be,” and gives Devereux’s reasoning. The enemy force undoubtedly outgunned Wake in both range and weight of metal, and opening fire early would reveal where the seacoast guns were and how many, and would throw away surprise, “their best ally” (Heinl, ch. 2). Devereux had attended the Army’s Coast Artillery School at Fort Monroe in 1933 and had taught at the Marine Corps’ Base Defense Weapons School (Marine Corps History Division, “Brigadier General James P. S. Devereux”). He knew exactly what his old guns could and could not do.

Who gave the order is one of the oldest arguments about Wake. Cressman has Hamas telephoning Cunningham, “who ordered the guns to hold fire until the ships closed on the island”; Heinl credits Devereux. The “Lawyer’s note” later in this chapter sets out the competing accounts.

Meanwhile Cunningham was acting on other fronts. At 0200 the Army radio unit had sent his message to Pearl Harbor reporting the contractors’ casualties and suggesting the early evacuation of the civilians; operators on Oahu noted that the Japanese tried to jam it. When the ships were sighted he told Cmdr. Keen (as Cressman spells it) and Lt. Cmdr. Elmer B. Greey, the resident officer in charge of construction, that hostile ships were standing in, and drove to the communications center in his pickup truck (Cressman, A Magnificent Fight).

At the airstrip, Maj. Putnam put VMF-211 on alert at 0400. He and Captains Henry T. Elrod, Frank C. Tharin and Herbert C. Freuler, his three most experienced pilots, manned the four flyable Wildcats, each with a 100-pound bomb under each wing. Shortly before 0500 Kajioka’s ships began their final run. At 0515 three Wildcats took off, and the fourth followed five minutes later. They joined up at 12,000 feet over Toki Point (Cressman, A Magnificent Fight; Heinl, ch. 2).

The guns of Wake

The defense rested on six 5-inch seacoast guns in three two-gun batteries, one at each corner of the atoll’s wishbone shape. Battery A, under First Lt. Clarence A. Barninger, stood at Peacock Point, the southeastern tip of Wake Island proper, with what Cressman calls Wake’s “high ground” behind it. Battery L, under Second Lt. John A. McAlister, was at Kuku Point on the western end of Wilkes. Battery B, under First Lt. Woodrow M. Kessler, was at Toki Point at the western tip of Peale. The 5-inch group was commanded by Maj. Potter (Heinl, Appendix VIII). Three 3-inch antiaircraft batteries, D, E and a provisional F, guarded the air. The separate Batteries G, H and I were commanded by Platt, Second Lt. Robert M. Hanna and Second Lt. Arthur A. Poindexter; Barninger’s report identifies Hanna as the .50-caliber machine-gun officer.

The guns were not new. Urwin describes them as castoffs that had once served as secondary batteries on Navy battleships and cruisers. A 5-inch/51 could throw a 50-pound shell at 3,150 feet per second to a maximum range of 17,100 yards, according to Cressman. That was well short of what the Japanese cruisers could reach. And the batteries had been emplaced by Marines working with picks and shovels in Wake’s hard coral; there were no sandbags at Battery A when the shooting started (Cressman; Urwin).

0522: the bombardment begins

By 0500, as dawn broke, Yubari was about 8,000 yards south of Peacock Point. She turned west and began a firing run parallel to the south shore, broadside on, with the other ships following about a thousand yards farther out (Heinl, ch. 2). Cressman times the opening of the Japanese bombardment at 0522. The cruisers laddered their salvos along the shore from Peacock Point toward Camp 1, and the first shells set fire to the diesel oil tanks near Camp 1 on the southwest part of Wake (Heinl; Cressman). Battery A was already tracking Yubari; its camouflage had been pulled away so the guns could train.

The order to hold fire was repeated. Heinl says Barninger and McAlister were “only restrained from returning fire by a repetition of the original hold-fire order.” Urwin, who interviewed many of the survivors, describes a battery commander on the field telephone demanding to know what the commander was waiting for, since his crews had been hitting targets at 12,000 yards in practice and the enemy was now inside 7,000. In Urwin’s account the Marines found the waiting almost unbearable, and obeyed it anyway (Urwin, National WWII Museum).

After her first run, Yubari reversed course and turned toward the atoll, closing the range, apparently with the two patrol boats in company. Cressman has her within 4,500 yards off the western tip of Wake about 20 minutes after the bombardment began, seemingly “scouring the beach” with her guns, and then reversing again at 0600 to close still further. By 0600, Heinl puts her almost due south of Battery A at some 4,500 to 6,000 yards (Heinl, ch. 2; Cressman).

The word went up the chain again. In Cressman’s account, Devereux had Hamas relay the latest reports to Cunningham, who had by then reached his own command post, and Cunningham answered: “What are we waiting for, open fire. Must be Jap ships all right.” Devereux passed the order to his batteries (Cressman, A Magnificent Fight). Urwin’s version puts the moment with Devereux, who, as Yubari began her third run at 4,500 yards, told his gunners in a flat voice, “O.K. Open fire.” Cressman gives the time as 0610; Heinl says the defense detachment commander, standing on the beach beside his command post, gave the order at 0615.

Peacock Point: Battery A and Yubari

Battery A fired first. Barninger’s report, which Heinl printed at length, is the best eyewitness record of the duel. “At a range of forty-five hundred yards and a bearing of about 190º true we received the word to engage,” he wrote. The opening salvo went over, as intended. “At the opening salvo the cruiser turned and raced away from the battery on a zig-zag course, picking up speed rapidly. She now concentrated her fire on the battery position which had been disclosed by the initial firing.”

The Japanese fire was close but never close enough. “She straddled continually, but none of the salvos came into the position,” Barninger reported. The rounds landed 200 to 300 yards over, then 100 to 200 yards short on the reef. Cressman notes that the one shell to land near the battery burst about 150 feet from Barninger’s command post, and that it was fortunate the Japanese shooting was so poor, because the guns sat in the open with no sandbag protection at all (Heinl, ch. 2; Cressman).

Then Battery A began to hit, or believed it did. “The first salvo from our guns which hit her was fired at a range of 5,500–6,000 yards,” Barninger wrote. “Both shells entered her port side about amidships just above the waterline. The ship immediately belched smoke and steam through the side and her speed diminished.” Two more struck at about 7,000 yards. He thought he got two more into her side after that, and a hit on her forward turret, after which that turret did not fire again. “I am sure of the first four,” he wrote. When the firing stopped, he described the cruiser lying broadside to the sea, still pouring smoke and steam, with a definite port list, getting slowly under way and creeping over the horizon (Heinl, ch. 2).

During the duel a destroyer came in at high speed to lay smoke between the battery and the cruiser, and an over aimed at Yubari struck its forecastle. Lt. Hanna saw the hit from his command post. Heinl, working by elimination, thought this ship was probably Patrol Boat No. 33, which postwar Japanese records list as damaged that day. Yubari kept returning fire with her own guns as she withdrew out of 5-inch range, and ceased fire about 18,000 yards offshore. In the whole exchange she slightly wounded one Marine of Battery A (Heinl, ch. 2).

Wilkes: Battery L sinks Hayate

On Wilkes, the battle began a little late. McAlister hesitated to open fire with the rough data he could get without his rangefinder (Heinl, ch. 2). Platt, watching from the Wilkes strongpoint, told Potter by phone that McAlister was having trouble getting the range, and passed back Potter’s order to estimate it and shoot (Cressman, A Magnificent Fight).

Battery L had more targets than it could handle. Heinl lists a division of three destroyers, both transports, and the two old cruisers Tatsuta and Tenryu, which had broken away from Yubari at the western end of her firing run and were steaming north about 9,000 yards southwest of Kuku Point. The destroyers, almost certainly Destroyer Division 29 with Hayate leading, had turned in toward the shore, firing as they came. About 4,000 yards out they turned left, westward, and Hayate was settling into a run close along the Wilkes shore when Battery L opened fire (Heinl, ch. 2). The Combined Fleet record says she had not yet opened fire herself (Combined Fleet, “IJN Hayate”).

Cressman says Battery L hit one of the transports first, which drew the escorting destroyers in toward the guns. Then McAlister’s gunners put three salvos into Hayate. In Heinl’s words she was “swallowed up in a violent explosion” just after the third two-gun salvo, at 0652, and when the smoke and spray cleared the men on Wilkes could see her broken in two and going down. Within two minutes she was gone (Heinl, ch. 2). Japanese records put the sinking at 0452 Tokyo time, the same moment by a different clock, two miles southwest of Wake, and say she was hit by “at least two” 12.7-centimeter (5-inch) shells at a range of about 5,400 meters (NOAA Ocean Exploration, “Hayate”; Combined Fleet, “IJN Hayate”).

What exactly blew up is not known. The naval historian Anthony Tully, writing for NOAA, notes that a Marine eyewitness, Private Jack Skaggs, saw a blast that blew off the back half of the ship, and argues that a 5-inch shell most likely detonated the torpedoes in her No. 2 or No. 3 mounts aft, which better explains the instant breakup (NOAA Ocean Exploration, “Hayate”). Her captain, Lt. Cmdr. Takatsuka Minoru, went down with her. Japanese records count Takatsuka and 167 men lost, and one sailor pulled from the sea. Oite and Mochizuki were close by but could not stop to search, and Tully writes that Oite’s rescue attempt was broken off under strafing by the Wildcats (Combined Fleet; NOAA).

Heinl, writing in 1947, called Hayate “the first Japanese surface craft to be sunk during the war by United States naval forces,” and probably the first consequential loss of the Japanese navy in modern times (Heinl, ch. 2, n. 23). The Combined Fleet record calls her the first Japanese destroyer lost in the Pacific War.

The sight was too much for the gun crews. Heinl records that “firing was involuntarily checked” as the Marines cheered, until a veteran noncommissioned officer broke the spell. The NHHC’s account names him and gives his words.

In their words

Knock it off, you bastards, and get back on the guns. What d’ya think this is, a ball game?

Battery L shifted to Oite, the destroyer that had been following Hayate. She was so close to shore that Devereux had to forbid the .30-caliber machine gunners from opening up on her. One hit was seen before the onshore wind blew smoke across the target; several more salvos went into the smoke unobserved. Some men on Wilkes thought they saw her transfer survivors and sink, but she survived (Heinl, ch. 2). The Japanese record lists her damage as light, from near misses, with 14 men injured (Combined Fleet, “IJN Oite”). Cressman adds that Mochizuki was also hit, with an undetermined number of casualties.

McAlister then trained onto the leading transport, about 10,000 yards south of Wilkes, which was hit once and turned away behind a destroyer smoke screen. Finally he took on a cruiser, either Tenryu or Tatsuta, about 9,000 yards off the west end of Wilkes; after a few salvos she was hit aft and turned away trailing smoke. By about 0710 Battery L had no targets left in range. In an hour it had fired some 60 salvos, 120 rounds, with civilian volunteers from the Wilkes work force serving as ammunition handlers. Two Marines on Wilkes had slight wounds (Heinl, ch. 2).

Peale: Battery B and Yayoi

The other half of the destroyer force, Destroyer Division 30, was working northwest past Kuku Point, probably led by Yayoi. Shortly after 0600 it steamed into the field of fire of Battery B on Peale at about 10,000 yards, the longest range of the morning, and Kessler opened on the leading ship (Heinl, ch. 2). Cressman lists Battery B’s opponents as Yayoi, Mutsuki and Kisaragi, with Tenryu and Tatsuta also in the exchange.

The Japanese replied quickly and accurately. Their return fire raked Peale, scored hits in and around Batteries B and D, and cut the communications between the 5-inch guns and the battery command post. At the worst possible moment Gun 2 suffered a recoil-cylinder casualty and was out of action. Kessler moved Gun 2’s crew to Gun 1 as extra shellmen and powdermen and kept firing with one gun, laying it on local control. The muzzle blast temporarily knocked out his rangefinder as well (Heinl, ch. 2; Cressman).

After about ten rounds the single gun hit Yayoi in the stern and set her afire. Cressman, drawing on Japanese records, gives her casualties as one killed and 17 wounded; the Combined Fleet record agrees and calls the damage minor (Cressman; Combined Fleet, “IJN Yayoi”). Kessler shifted to the second ship in line, which was laying smoke to cover Yayoi, and the three destroyers reversed course and ran south out of range. As the Japanese withdrew, Kessler’s gun threw two parting rounds at a transport that turned out to be beyond its reach (Heinl; Cressman).

0700: Kajioka turns back

By 0700 Kajioka had seen enough. Heinl writes that the admiral’s plans had been thwarted “not only by the inauspicious weather but by the stout and accurate fire from the beach,” and that at 0700 he ordered a general retreat on Kwajalein. Within minutes his ships were out of gun range and Devereux gave the cease-fire (Heinl, ch. 2).

The weather had already made the landing doubtful. Heinl says boating the troops in the heavy seas went slowly, with some landing craft overturned or swamped, and Cressman notes that the heavy seas overturned landing boats almost as soon as they were launched. The Japanese themselves gave the guns the credit. Cressman writes that Yubari’s action record acknowledged that, despite the air raids, the defenders still had enough coastal guns to mount a ferocious defense, which forced Kajioka to retire (Cressman, A Magnificent Fight). The Combined Fleet record for Kisaragi, based on the Japanese official history, says that “due to air attack and the shore batteries” Kajioka suspended the landings and ordered his surface forces to withdraw (Combined Fleet, “IJN Kisaragi”).

Looking back in a 1970 interview quoted by Cressman, Devereux doubted that a task force of that size and composition “could have been very effective.” The Japanese navy learned the lesson. The second attempt, on 23 December, would come with carriers, heavy cruisers, more than 1,500 landing troops and no preliminary bombardment at all, as told in Chapter 6.

The Wildcats strike

The retreat was exactly the moment for an air attack, and VMF-211 was overhead, armed and ready. Cressman says Putnam’s four Wildcats had climbed to 20,000 feet and stayed there until daylight, when Putnam satisfied himself that no Japanese aircraft were airborne. Heinl says they swept at 12,000 feet looking for carrier aircraft or a coordinated strike from the Marshalls. With that possibility disposed of, they went after the ships, catching the Japanese little more than an hour’s steaming southwest of Wake (Cressman; Heinl, ch. 2).

The F4F-3 was a fighter, not a dive bomber. Each carried two 100-pound bombs, which Heinl describes as “island-modified.” Each pilot dropped his two bombs, strafed, flew back to Wake to rearm and refuel, and went out again. Heinl admits that the pilots’ accounts of which ship each man hit are confused (Heinl, ch. 2).

The two old cruisers were bombed and strafed in the face of thick antiaircraft fire. Heinl credits Elrod and Tharin, and says Tenryu’s torpedo battery was put out of action and Tatsuta’s topside radio shack silenced. Cressman, using Japanese records, says Putnam, Tharin and Freuler strafed Tenryu forward near her No. 1 torpedo mount, wounding five men and disabling three torpedoes. The transport Kongo Maru took a 100-pound bomb on the stern from Freuler in Heinl’s version; Cressman has Freuler, Putnam and Technical Sgt. William J. Hamilton strafing her and igniting barrels of gasoline in a hold. Either way she burned fiercely, with three men killed, 19 wounded and two missing (Heinl; Cressman).

Putnam saw at least one of Elrod’s bombs hit Kisaragi. Trailing oil and smoke, she slowed to a stop, got under way again, and limped south with fire burning inside her (Cressman). The Combined Fleet record, drawn from the Japanese official history, says a bomb struck at about 0537 Tokyo time and “blew off most of her bridge” (Combined Fleet, “IJN Kisaragi”).

Then came the end. Second Lt. John F. Kinney and Hamilton had relieved two of the original pilots. Kinney was pushing over at 0731 to attack a destroyer when, in Heinl’s words, he “saw her blow up with a tremendous single explosion” (Heinl, ch. 2). Putnam saw it too. The Japanese record has her upending sharply and sinking at 0542 Tokyo time, 0742 by Wake’s clocks, about 30 miles southwest of the atoll. Her captain, Lt. Cmdr. Ogawa Yoichiro, and all 156 of his men were lost (Combined Fleet, “IJN Kisaragi”). The explosion was so large that some pilots took her for a cruiser, which Heinl thought accounted for the claim, widely published during the war, that a Japanese cruiser had been sunk off Wake (Heinl, ch. 2, n. 24).

Why she blew up is still argued. Heinl and Cressman both say she was carrying a deckload of extra depth charges because of the American submarine threat, and that a bomb or bullets set them off. The Combined Fleet record notes that Japanese eyewitnesses disputed this and said the fatal blast came from amidships; it suggests her crew fought internal fires for some time before something below, perhaps a magazine, exploded (Combined Fleet, “IJN Kisaragi,” n. 2). The NHHC credits the sinking to Elrod, and his Medal of Honor citation credits him with the first major warship destroyed by small-caliber bombs from a fighter.

The Japanese antiaircraft fire exacted a price VMF-211 could not afford. A bullet cut a fuel line in Elrod’s plane (Cressman says it perforated his oil line). He made it back to Wake but had to put down among the boulders on the south beach, and the crash landing demolished the aircraft. The ground crew wrote it off; it was F4F-3 number 4019, squadron code 211-F-11 (Heinl; Cressman; Pacific Wrecks, “F4F-3 Wildcat 211-F-11”). Freuler took a hit that pierced his oil cooler and one cylinder; he reached the field, but the engine was a total loss. Hamilton came back with a perforated tail (Heinl; Cressman).

In all, VMF-211 flew 10 sorties that morning, dropped twenty 100-pound bombs and fired about 20,000 rounds of .50-caliber ammunition (Heinl, ch. 2). The squadron had started the day with four flyable fighters. Cressman describes the three serviceable Wildcats shuttling back and forth after Elrod’s crash; the NHHC and the 2026 Ocean Exploration Trust account both say that only two remained in working condition after the action (Nasuti, NHHC; Ocean Exploration Trust, “Wake Island: Searching for a Battlefield Beneath the Waves”). Kinney, the squadron’s engineering officer, and its mechanics would spend the rest of the siege keeping the survivors flying with parts stripped from wrecks such as 211-F-11 (Cressman), as described in Chapter 4.

Medal of Honor · Posthumous

Capt. Henry T. Elrod, VMF-211

Elrod’s citation covers the whole siege, 8 to 23 December. It records that he “shot down two of a flight of 22 hostile planes” and, executing low-altitude bombing and strafing runs, sank a Japanese ship, “thereby sinking the first major warship to be destroyed by small-caliber bombs delivered from a fighter-type aircraft.” When his plane could no longer fly he fought as an infantry officer, and he was killed leading his men on 23 December. He was 36. The medal was presented to his widow, Capt. Elizabeth J. Elrod of the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve.

Citation →

0915: the bombers come back

The Japanese did not leave Wake alone for long. After seeing Kisaragi go, Kinney strafed another destroyer and went back to the field. Rearmed and refueled, he took off again at 0915 with Second Lt. Carl R. Davidson, shortly before 17 Mitsubishi G3M “Nell” bombers arrived to bomb the batteries on Peale. Davidson took on nine of them, which had split off to the southwest, and Kinney the other eight. Battery D fired 125 rounds. The bombs fell near Battery D but did no damage and caused no casualties. Japanese records show two Nells lost and eleven damaged, with 15 men killed and one slightly wounded; Putnam credited Kinney and Davidson with one bomber each (Cressman, A Magnificent Fight).

That raid was the price of firing. Battery D had shown its position, and Devereux ordered it moved. At 1745 Capt. Bryghte D. Godbold began shifting his 3-inch guns the length of Peale to a new position, and for the next eleven hours his Marines and nearly 250 civilians dug new emplacements. At 0445 on 12 December Godbold reported, “Manned and ready.” (Cressman, A Magnificent Fight).

Timeline

The landing that failed, 10–12 December 1941 (Wake time)

1. 10 Dec, 2315Triton sights “two flashes” and a destroyer silhouette south of the atoll.
2. 11 Dec, 0017Triton fires four stern torpedoes; a dull explosion is heard, but no hit is confirmed.
3. 11 Dec, 0200Cunningham’s message to Pearl Harbor on civilian casualties goes out by Army radio; the Japanese try to jam it.
4. 11 Dec, about 0300Kajioka’s landfall; Wake’s lookouts see lights; general quarters and the order to hold fire.
5. 11 Dec, 0400VMF-211 alerted; Putnam, Elrod, Tharin and Freuler man the four flyable Wildcats.
6. 11 Dec, about 0500Yubari 8,000 yards south of Peacock Point, starting her westward firing run.
7. 11 Dec, 0515–0520The four Wildcats take off and climb over Toki Point.
8. 11 Dec, 0522Japanese bombardment begins; oil tanks near Camp 1 set afire (Cressman).
9. 11 Dec, about 0600Yubari reverses course and closes to 4,500–6,000 yards; Destroyer Division 30 enters Battery B’s field of fire.
10. 11 Dec, 0610–0615Order to open fire (0610 in Cressman, 0615 in Heinl); Battery A engages Yubari.
11. 11 Dec, 0652Battery L’s third salvo; Hayate explodes, breaks in two and sinks within two minutes (0452 Tokyo time).
12. 11 Dec, 0700Kajioka orders a general retreat to Kwajalein.
13. 11 Dec, about 0710Last targets pass out of range; Battery L has fired about 120 rounds.
14. 11 Dec, 0731–0742Kisaragi blows up and sinks with all hands (0731 in Heinl; 0542 Tokyo time, 0742 Wake, in the Japanese record).
15. 11 Dec, about 0915Seventeen Nells bomb Peale; Kinney and Davidson each claim one.
16. 11 Dec, 1745Battery D begins moving to a new position with about 250 civilian helpers.
17. 12 Dec, 0445Godbold reports Battery D “Manned and ready.”

The news reaches America

The Marine Corps made sure the country heard about it. Urwin writes that American newspapers surprised their readers with headlines announcing a victory at Wake, and that the Commandant, Maj. Gen. Thomas Holcomb, promptly told Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox that “a cheery note comes from Wake.” On 12 December, Urwin notes, Roosevelt himself told the country that the Wake garrison was “doing a perfectly magnificent job” (Urwin, National WWII Museum). The Wake story would grow in the retelling, including the famous message that the garrison never actually sent; that legend is untangled in Chapter 4.

At Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel wanted to relieve Wake, though his carriers were scattered on patrol (Cressman). Elements of the 4th Defense Battalion were ordered to prepare for an operation whose destination was closely held, and many of its Marines, Cressman writes, probably concluded, “We’re headed for Wake!” What became of that expedition is the subject of Chapter 5.

Kajioka, meanwhile, was steaming back to the Marshalls, “humbled by sizeable casualties,” having asked for aircraft carrier support (Cressman). Yubari reached Roi on 13 December (Combined Fleet, “IJN Yubari”). Kajioka was not relieved. He was sent back with far more: the carriers Soryu and Hiryu, detached from the force returning from Pearl Harbor and described in the Pearl Harbor collection’s chapter on the Kido Butai, plus heavy cruisers, more destroyers and nearly 1,600 more landing troops (Urwin, National WWII Museum).

The search for Hayate

Neither destroyer has been found. Both lie in deep water off the steep flanks of the atoll, which rises from a seafloor about 5,400 meters (17,700 feet) down (Ocean Exploration Trust). They are war graves: more than 320 Japanese sailors went down in them.

In August 2016 NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer, on the “Deepwater Wonders of Wake” expedition (EX1606), dived on a sonar target from earlier mapping that had been thought to be Hayate. The remotely operated vehicle Deep Discoverer found a ship sitting upright on the bottom, but welded lettering on the bow and stern showed it was not the destroyer. It was the Japanese water carrier Amakasu Maru No. 1, torpedoed by the same submarine, Triton, on 24 December 1942 (NOAA Ocean Exploration, EX1606 dive 9 summary and expedition log). The dive summary records the team’s conclusion that the wreck was “not the Kamikaze-class HAYATE.”

The search resumed in August and September 2026, when the Ocean Exploration Trust’s E/V Nautilus spent four days of its NA181 expedition looking for Hayate. Seven targets of roughly the right size, picked from the NOAA mapping data, all turned out to be natural carbonate blocks, some “deceivingly ship-shaped.” The team then mapped about 5 square kilometers of slope in fine detail with a sonar on the ROV Hercules, with Japanese archaeologists from Tokai University taking part from shore. The trust reported that the expedition “ultimately did not find the destroyer Hayate,” though it did locate other wartime debris near Wake, including ordnance, a sunken barge and fuel drums (Ocean Exploration Trust, “The Search for Wake’s World War II Maritime Heritage” and NA181 expedition summary). Positions of any heritage sites found are withheld under federal regulations.

People

Maj. James P. S. Devereux (1903–1988), born in Cuba to an Army surgeon’s family, enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1923 and was commissioned in 1925. He trained at the Coast Artillery School and taught base defense weapons before taking command of the Wake detachment in October 1941. He spent the war as a prisoner, retired as a brigadier general and served four terms in Congress from Maryland (Marine Corps History Division; Wikipedia).

Cmdr. Winfield Scott Cunningham (1900–1986), a naval aviator who had commanded Fighting Squadron 5, arrived on Wake on 28 November 1941 as officer in charge of all naval activities. He twice tried to escape from prison camp in China, wrote Wake Island Command (1961) and retired as a rear admiral.

Capt. Henry Talmage Elrod (1905–1941), from Turner County, Georgia, attended the University of Georgia and Yale, enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1927 and was commissioned in 1931 (Cressman). VMF-211’s executive officer, he was killed on 23 December and was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously for his actions in the air and on the ground at Wake. The frigate USS Elrod (FFG-55) was named for him.

Maj. Paul A. Putnam (1903–1982), commanding VMF-211, had enlisted in 1923 and flown in Nicaragua. He led the 11 December strike, later received the Navy Cross for a lone search for the Japanese carriers on 21 December, and retired as a brigadier general.

The battery commanders. First Lt. Clarence A. Barninger (Battery A, Peacock Point) wrote the report that remains the best account of the duel with Yubari. Second Lt. John A. McAlister (Battery L, Kuku Point) sank Hayate without a rangefinder, and would fight again on Wilkes on 23 December. First Lt. Woodrow M. Kessler (Battery B, Toki Point) kept firing with one gun after the other broke down (Heinl, Appendix VIII).

Capt. Wesley McC. Platt commanded the Wilkes strongpoint and relayed the orders that put Battery L into action. His counterattack on Wilkes on 23 December is told in Chapter 6.

RAdm. Sadamichi Kajioka (1891–1944), a navigation specialist from the naval academy’s 39th class, led the second, successful assault on Wake and the Port Moresby invasion force at the Coral Sea, and was killed when the destroyer Shikinami was torpedoed by USS Growler in September 1944 (Wikipedia, citing Japanese sources).

Lt. Cmdr. Takatsuka Minoru commanded Hayate and Lt. Cmdr. Ogawa Yoichiro commanded Kisaragi. Both died with their ships on 11 December (Combined Fleet tabular records).

Losses and uncertainty

The American side of the ledger is short and well documented. Heinl, writing from the unit records, sets “total Marine casualties of four men wounded in action” against the Japanese losses: one at Battery A and two on Wilkes, all slight, plus one more elsewhere. Urwin counts five Marines slightly wounded. The NHHC’s 2016 article says one American was killed in “this first battle”; neither Heinl nor Cressman records a death on 11 December, and the one Battery L fatality Cressman reports came in the bombing of 10 December. Materially, the defense lost Elrod’s Wildcat and Freuler’s engine, and Battery B’s Gun 2 was temporarily out with its recoil-cylinder failure.

The Japanese losses are less certain. In 1947 Heinl had no Japanese casualty records. He assumed that each sunken destroyer carried about 250 men, like comparable American ships, and added a guess of 200 for the damaged ships, arriving at “at least 700 casualties, mostly dead” (Heinl, ch. 2). His Appendix III repeated the assumption: 500 killed in the two destroyers and 80 killed and 160 wounded in eight damaged ships. The postwar Japanese records show much smaller crews and allow a ship-by-ship count instead.

By the numbers

Japanese killed, 11 December 1941

Killed or missing by ship or unit, from Japanese records as published

Hayate167–168

Kisaragi157

Nell bomber crews15

Kongo Maru3 + 2 missing

Yayoi1

Added up, the published Japanese figures give roughly 340 to 345 killed and missing, about half of Heinl’s 1947 estimate. The difference matters less than it seems: Heinl was candid that his figure was a reconstruction, and the Japanese counts for the damaged ships, apart from Yayoi, Oite, Tenryu and Kongo Maru, are not available. NHHC’s Nasuti puts the cost at “more than 200 dead and two destroyers,” and the Ocean Exploration Trust’s 2026 account follows the NHHC’s 168 and 157 for the two destroyers.

The Yubari question. Barninger was sure of four hits and less sure of three more. Heinl concluded that she had been “hulled at least four times” and taken a hit on her forward turret. The figure of eleven hits appears in the NHHC’s H-Gram 002 and in Nasuti’s 2016 article, and has been repeated widely since. Against that, the Japanese ship record summarized by Hackett and Kingsepp says Yubari opened the range to about 5,700 yards and was straddled twice more “without being hit,” and records no damage or casualties for the day. Heinl’s footnote says all three cruisers “received injuries from air or surface attacks,” yet all three were back off Wake less than two weeks later. The likeliest reading is that Battery A drove off and perhaps damaged the flagship, and that the eleven-hit figure overstates what the Japanese records support. We have not found a primary Japanese damage report that settles it.

Times. Japanese ships kept Tokyo time, two hours behind the local time used on Wake, so the Japanese 0452 for Hayate’s sinking is the American 0652 (NOAA Ocean Exploration, “Hayate”). Kisaragi’s loss is 0731 in Heinl, when Kinney saw the explosion, and 0542 Tokyo time, or 0742 Wake time, in the Japanese record. The order to open fire is 0610 in Cressman and 0615 in Heinl. The Japanese departure from Kwajalein is 8 December in Cressman and the Japanese records and 9 December in Heinl, who thought his Japanese source ran a day behind. None of these differences changes what happened.

Questions readers ask

Was the Battle of Wake Island the first American victory of World War II?

It is usually described as the first American victory of the Pacific war, and Urwin calls the 11 December repulse “America’s first tactical victory of the Pacific War.” It was a victory in a single engagement, not in the battle as a whole: the Japanese came back on 23 December and took the atoll. But on 11 December the defenders sank two warships, turned back a landing and lost no men killed by the Marine records, at a moment when every other report reaching Washington was a defeat.

What was the first Japanese warship sunk by the United States in World War II?

The destroyer Hayate, sunk by Battery L on Wilkes Island at 0652 on 11 December 1941. Heinl called her the first Japanese surface craft sunk by U.S. forces in the war, and the NHHC calls her the first Japanese surface combatant sunk by the United States. Japanese submarines and aircraft had been lost earlier, at Pearl Harbor and elsewhere; Hayate was the first surface warship.

Why did the Marines on Wake hold their fire?

Because the Japanese cruisers outranged and outgunned Wake’s 5-inch batteries, and two of the three batteries had lost their rangefinders. Firing early would have revealed the guns to an enemy who could shoot back from beyond their reach, and would probably have missed. Waiting brought the ships to 4,000 to 6,000 yards, where the gunners could see their fall of shot and correct it.

How did a fighter plane sink a destroyer?

With help from what the destroyer was carrying. Elrod’s F4F-3 carried two 100-pound bombs, which Heinl calls “island-modified,” far too small to sink a warship by blast alone. At least one hit Kisaragi, and the Japanese record says a bomb wrecked her bridge. Some minutes later she blew up. American accounts attribute the explosion to extra depth charges carried on deck; Japanese eyewitnesses said it came from amidships, which suggests a fire reaching a magazine. Either way, Elrod’s citation credits him with the first major warship sunk by small-caliber bombs from a fighter.

Have the wrecks of Hayate and Kisaragi been found?

No. NOAA’s Okeanos Explorer investigated a target thought to be Hayate in 2016 and found instead the water carrier Amakasu Maru No. 1, sunk by USS Triton in 1942. The Ocean Exploration Trust’s Nautilus searched for Hayate for four days in 2026 and did not find her. Kisaragi sank about 30 miles southwest of Wake, and her wreck has not been located either (Ocean Exploration Trust).

How it connects

The guns that won on 11 December were emplaced by the Marines and contractors described in Chapter 1, and the Wildcats that sank Kisaragi were the four survivors of the raid in Chapter 2. The siege that followed, with daily bombing, moved guns and dwindling aircraft, is Chapter 4. The relief expedition that the 11 December victory helped set in motion, and its recall, are in Chapter 5. Kajioka’s return, Elrod’s death and the surrender are in Chapter 6. For the attack that opened the war on the other side of the date line, see the Pearl Harbor collection, especially Day of Infamy, which covers the week in which the news from Wake arrived. See also the collection’s timeline and the Wake Island FAQ.

What happened afterward

Every ship that survived 11 December came back. Yubari, Tenryu and Tatsuta supported the second assault less than two weeks later (Heinl, ch. 2, n. 24). Patrol Boats No. 32 and No. 33 were run aground on Wake’s south shore on 23 December to put their troops ashore, and both were lost there, as told in Chapter 6. Most of Kajioka’s ships did not see the end of the war. Yayoi was sunk by Allied aircraft off New Guinea in September 1942, Tenryu by a submarine that December, Oite in the carrier raid on Truk in February 1944, Yubari in April 1944 and Tatsuta by a submarine in May 1944 (Combined Fleet; Heinl, n. 24).

For the defenders, the victory changed little. The bombers returned on 12 December and nearly every day after. The garrison received no reinforcements. On 23 December the Japanese landed, Elrod was killed, and Cunningham surrendered the atoll. The Marines and sailors who sank Hayate and Kisaragi spent the rest of the war as prisoners in China and Japan, and many of the civilians who had carried ammunition to the guns never came home; their story is told in Chapter 7 and Chapter 8. The Wake defenders received the Presidential Unit Citation, and Devereux and Cunningham the Navy Cross, in citations worded almost identically. How the 11 December repulse was remembered, in Elrod’s medal, in the 1942 Paramount film Wake Island and in the two commanders’ competing memoirs, is the subject of Chapter 9.

Navy Cross

Maj. James P. S. Devereux, 1st Defense Battalion

Announced in April 1942, while he was a prisoner, the citation honors Devereux “for distinguished and heroic conduct in the line of his profession” as commanding officer of the 1st Defense Battalion at Wake, “responsible for directing defenses of that post during the Japanese siege from 7 through 22 December 1941, against impossible odds.”

Citation →

Walking the ground today

Wake is not open to visitors. The three islands are managed as an active U.S. Air Force installation, and the surrounding reefs and waters form the Wake Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, part of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument; the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service states that the refuge “is not accessible to the general public,” with access only by special use permit (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “Wake Atoll National Wildlife Refuge”). The airfield is controlled by Pacific Air Forces and run by the Pacific Air Forces Regional Support Center, formerly the 611th Air Support Group; as of 2018 a handful of airmen and about 100 contractors lived there, supporting refueling stops and missile-defense testing (Wikipedia, “Wake Island Airfield”).

Wake Atoll was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1985 for its role in the Second World War (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service). The place names of 11 December survive on the map: Peacock Point at the southeastern tip of Wake, Kuku Point at the western end of Wilkes, Toki Point on Peale. A monument to the Marines killed and captured in the battle stands near the airfield terminal, and the “98 Rock” is a memorial to the 98 civilian contractors who were kept on the island and killed by their captors in October 1943 (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service), described in Chapter 8. Those who cannot go can follow the battle on the collection’s atoll atlas, and the site’s other Pacific collections, including Iwo Jima, are gathered on the World War II hub.

Sources and further reading

• Lt. Col. R. D. Heinl Jr., The Defense of Wake (USMC Historical Section, 1947): ch. 2, “The Attempted Landing, 11 December” (HyperWar); Appendix III, casualties; Appendix IV, chronology; Appendix VIII, command and staff; PDF, Marine Corps University.
• Robert J. Cressman, “A Magnificent Fight”: Marines in the Battle for Wake Island (Marines in World War II Commemorative Series, 1992): “Humbled by Sizeable Casualties” (NPS History); full text (Project Gutenberg); PDF (Marines.mil).
• Naval History and Heritage Command: Samuel J. Cox, H-Gram 002, “Wake Island”; Guy Nasuti, “The Forsaken Defenders of Wake Island”; “Narrative of Captain W. S. Cunningham, US Navy, Relative to Events on Wake Island in December 1941”.
• Gregory J. W. Urwin, “The Battle of Wake Island: Nation’s Morale Lifted in 1941,” National WWII Museum, 2020; and his Facing Fearful Odds: The Siege of Wake Island (1997).
• Japanese ship records (Combined Fleet, “Long Lancers” and cruiser pages, Allyn D. Nevitt, Anthony Tully, Bob Hackett and Sander Kingsepp): Hayate, Kisaragi, Yubari, Oite, Yayoi.
• NOAA Ocean Exploration, Deepwater Wonders of Wake (EX1606): Anthony Tully, “Hayate”; Frank Cantelas and Katie Wagner, expedition log, 14 August 2016; Dive 9 summary; expedition summary.
• Ocean Exploration Trust, NA181: “Wake Island: Searching for a Battlefield Beneath the Waves”; “The Search for Wake’s World War II Maritime Heritage”; expedition page and summary.
• Pacific Wrecks: Hayate, Kisaragi, F4F-3 Wildcat 211-F-11.
• Awards and biographies: Congressional Medal of Honor Society, Henry T. Elrod; Military Times Hall of Valor, James P. S. Devereux; Marine Corps History Division, “Brigadier General James P. S. Devereux”; Wikipedia biographies of Winfield S. Cunningham, Paul A. Putnam and Sadamichi Kajioka.
• Franklin D. Roosevelt, Fireside Chat 19, 9 December 1941 (Miller Center).
• Wake today: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Wake Atoll National Wildlife Refuge; Wake Island Airfield (Wikipedia).
• Photographs: Naval Historical Center online library, 80-G-411053 and 80-G-179006 (HyperWar mirror). For the full story see also James P. S. Devereux, The Story of Wake Island (1947); W. Scott Cunningham with Lydel Sims, Wake Island Command (1961); Samuel Eliot Morison, The Rising Sun in the Pacific (vol. III, 1948); and Bill Sloan, Given Up for Dead (2003).

Photographs and maps: official U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps photographs, captured Japanese photographs and U.S. Marine Corps maps, National Archives and Naval History and Heritage Command, public domain.