Memory and Legacy: Medals, Myths, the 1942 Film and Wake Today

Wake Island fell on 23 December 1941, but its story kept growing for decades: a presidential citation, a Hollywood film, a radio legend that nobody on the island ever said, a feud between its two commanders, and a long fight to have its civilian workers counted as veterans. Today the atoll is a restricted Air Force installation and a National Historic Landmark.

Why it mattered

The Battle of Wake Island was a defeat, and Americans in December 1941 knew it would probably end in one. That is part of why it mattered so much to them. In the first weeks of the Pacific war the news was a run of losses: the fleet at Pearl Harbor, Guam, the airfields in the Philippines, the British capital ships off Malaya. Wake Island in 1941 was the one place where the defenders hit back hard and were seen to do it. On 11 December, by Wake time (the atoll lies west of the date line, so Wake’s 8 December was Hawaii’s 7 December), the garrison’s coast guns and four Wildcats drove off an invasion force and sank two destroyers, the story told in Chapter 3. The National Park Service’s landmark study of the atoll calls it “the only time in the Pacific War that coastal guns drove off an amphibious landing” (NRHP/NHL nomination, “Wake Island,” 1984).

The same study notes that “Remember Wake” became almost as popular a slogan as “Remember Pearl Harbor.” Within weeks the garrison had a presidential citation; within nine months it had a feature film, made with the Marine Corps’ cooperation and nominated for four Academy Awards. Most of the men being celebrated knew none of this. By the time the film opened, the survivors of Wake were in prison camps in China and Japan, and 98 of the civilian workers were still on the atoll as forced laborers. Those 98 were killed on Admiral Sakaibara’s order in October 1943 (Chapter 8).

What the country remembered and what had happened were never quite the same thing. The legend said the Marines had radioed “Send us more Japs.” They had not. The film ended with the Marines dying to the last man. They had not; they surrendered, on the orders of a Navy commander whom the citation and the film barely acknowledged. The legend was about Marines. More than twice as many civilians as servicemen had been on the island, and in captivity the civilians died in far greater numbers. This chapter follows the honors and the arguments that came after the battle, and ends on the atoll as it is now: a runway, a small Air Force detachment, a scatter of memorials, and a coral boulder with a date cut into it.

December 1941: “Remember Wake”

The garrison heard about its own fame on the radio. Robert J. Cressman’s history for the Marine Corps quotes a stateside broadcast that praised Wake’s Marines and said it could not reveal the size of the garrison for security reasons, but that “we know the number is very small.” Lt. John F. Kinney, VMF-211’s engineering officer, who was keeping the squadron’s last Wildcats flying out of salvaged parts, wrote in his diary: “Nothing like letting the enemy know our status.” He added: “Still no help.” The bandleader Kay Kyser, Kinney recorded, dedicated a song on the air to the “Wake Marines” (Cressman, A Magnificent Fight).

The broadcasts also carried the line that would outlive almost everything else about the battle. Commentators reported that when Wake’s defenders were asked what they needed, they had answered, “Send us more Japs.” Cressman notes drily that “Wake had little need for ‘more Japs,’ despite media claims” (Cressman, A Magnificent Fight). The Naval History and Heritage Command is blunt: “This is not true; the phrase originated in cryptographic ‘padding’” (NHHC, H-Gram 002). Outgoing Navy messages were routinely buffered at the start and end with nonsense words so that an enemy codebreaker could not use predictable openings and closings. In the official explanation, someone at Pearl Harbor read the padding on one of Cunningham’s dispatches as part of the text, and the phrase reached the press. The siege chapter, Chapter 4, tells that story in detail.

Not everyone accepts the official explanation. Writing in American Heritage in 1987, Peter Andrews called it unconvincing and unproven, and suggested the line was more likely a public-relations invention. He was firm on one point: “The only thing known for certain about the celebrated line is that no one at Wake ever said it” (Andrews, “The Defense of Wake,” American Heritage, July/August 1987). Cunningham’s own postwar narrative, written to correct the record about his command, never mentions the phrase; the one dispatch it quotes from the last morning is “The issue is in doubt” (NHHC, “Narrative of Captain W. S. Cunningham”).

The press coverage had a second effect that would matter for decades. The Marine Corps had an active public-relations office, and the story it told was a Marine story. The historian Bonita Gilbert, who has written about both the contractors and Cunningham, describes how the stand “quickly turned into front-page news” on the strength of that campaign, while little was said about the Navy men on the island or about the civilians (Gilbert, “The Commander”). The pattern set in December 1941 held through the citation, the film and the official history that followed.

The Presidential Unit Citation, 5 January 1942

Thirteen days after the surrender, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a citation for the garrison. The National Archives holds the document and dates it 5 January 1942 (National Archives, “NARA Coast to Coast: Henry T. Elrod”). It named three groups: the Wake detachment of the 1st Defense Battalion, U.S. Marine Corps, “under command of Major James P. S. Devereux”; Marine Fighting Squadron 211 of Marine Aircraft Group 21, under Maj. Paul A. Putnam; and the Army and Navy personnel present. Its opening sentence is the best-known official tribute to the defenders.

In their words

The courageous conduct of the officers and men who defended Wake Island against an overwhelming superiority of enemy air, sea, and land attacks from December 8 to 22, 1941, has been noted with admiration by their fellow countrymen and the civilized world, and will not be forgotten so long as gallantry and heroism are respected and honored.

The citation went on to credit the defenders with sinking or severely damaging five enemy warships, shooting down “many hostile planes” and destroying an unknown number of land troops, and it commended them “for their devotion to duty and splendid conduct at their battle stations” (Heinl, The Defense of Wake, Appendix IX). Its dates, 8 to 22 December, stop the day before the final assault. When it was signed, Washington did not yet know the details of the last day.

The citation came before the award formally existed. On 6 February 1942 Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9050, which authorized the Secretary of the Navy to issue citations in the President’s name to Navy and Marine Corps units for “outstanding performance in action on or after October 16, 1941,” and to let men who served in a cited unit wear an insignia for it (Executive Order 9050, American Presidency Project). The Wake citation had been signed a month before the order existed.

What the citation left out was noticed at the time and has been argued over since. It named Devereux and Putnam. It did not name Cunningham, the officer in overall command, and it did not mention the 1,146 civilians, some of whom had fought beside the Marines. Gilbert points out that “No mention was made of Navy Commander Cunningham” (Gilbert, “The Commander”). For the civilians, any official thanks would wait almost forty years.

The Navy later added a second, quieter mark of the battle to the uniform. Navy and Marine Corps personnel who served in the defense of Wake Island from 7 to 22 December 1941 (the Navy uses Washington dates here) are authorized a bar inscribed “Wake Island” on the suspension ribbon of the Navy Expeditionary Medal or Marine Corps Expeditionary Medal, and a silver “W” on the service ribbon. (NHHC, “Navy Expeditionary Medal; Marine Corps Expeditionary Medal”).

Paramount’s Wake Island (1942)

Hollywood moved almost as fast as the War Department. Paramount shot Wake Island between 17 April and 20 July 1942, with John Farrow directing from a screenplay by W. R. Burnett and Frank Butler and B. G. DeSylva as executive producer. Brian Donlevy played Maj. Geoffrey Caton, the Marine officer who arrives as the new commanding officer; Macdonald Carey played Lt. Cameron, a pilot whose wife is killed at Pearl Harbor; Robert Preston and William Bendix played a pair of brawling enlisted Marines; Albert Dekker played Shad McCloskey, a civilian construction boss who clashes with Caton; and Walter Abel played a Navy officer, Commander Roberts. The characters were fictional (AFI Catalog, “Wake Island (1942)”).

The Marine Corps treated the film as its own project. The American Film Institute’s catalog lists as military advisers the Commandant, Lt. Gen. Thomas Holcomb, and a group of officers led by Brig. Gen. Robert L. Denig, the Corps’ public relations chief, with a technical director, a liaison officer and a special-weapons adviser. The script was approved by the Marine Corps and the Navy Department. Most of the film was shot on the shore of the Salton Sea in California’s Imperial Valley, where the studio built a replica of the Wake encampment and an airstrip that it turned over to the Navy afterward; flying scenes were shot over the Great Salt Lake. Because Japanese Americans were being removed to internment camps in 1942, Filipino and Chinese actors played the Japanese troops (AFI Catalog).

The film was previewed for Marines in August 1942 at Quantico, Virginia, and at Camp Elliott near San Diego. It premiered in New York on 1 September 1942, with the proceeds going to the Marine Corps fund, and in Los Angeles on 23 September. It cost $826,061, about $175,000 over budget (AFI Catalog). It was nominated for four Academy Awards: Outstanding Motion Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor for Bendix and Best Original Screenplay. It won none, but it was voted one of the year’s ten best by Film Daily’s critics’ poll (AFI Catalog).

The film opened with a foreword promising that its events were recorded “as accurately and factually as possible,” and many film historians have treated it as one of the first American films to show the grim realities of battle, in the AFI catalog’s summary of later criticism. Its battle scenes followed the outline of the real siege: the first raid that caught the fighters on the ground, the repulse of the first landing, the dwindling Wildcats and the last assault. Paramount even held back the final sequence while it waited to see whether American forces might retake the island (AFI Catalog).

The ending was where the film parted from the facts. In the AFI synopsis, Caton refuses a Japanese demand to surrender, and on 23 December the Marines fight to their deaths as the Japanese overrun the island (AFI Catalog). On the real Wake, Cunningham authorized surrender that morning and Devereux carried a white flag through the lines; most of the garrison lived, and 1,537 Americans, servicemen and civilians, went into captivity (NHHC, H-Gram 002). In the film the island’s commander is a Marine; Gilbert adds that it showed the Navy commander killed in the first raid, which “further ingrained the Marine narrative in the public consciousness” (Gilbert, “The Commander”). The real island commander, Cunningham, was then a prisoner in a camp near Shanghai, from which in March 1942 he had already made his first escape attempt (Chapter 7).

The film was made in the spring of 1942, when no one in America knew what had become of the garrison, and its ending gave the country a picture of Wake as an American Alamo, a place where everyone died fighting. The image was powerful, and it was wrong. It also left out what happened to the men afterward: forty-four months of captivity (Crapo, 2017), and for the 98, death on the atoll.

Myths and corrections

Most of the popular myths about Wake come from the first months of 1942, when there was little real news from the island and a great appetite for it. Five come up most often.

“Send us more Japs”

As above, the line was never sent. NHHC traces it to message padding (H-Gram 002); Andrews thought it more likely a public-relations invention; neither Cunningham’s narrative nor the Marine Corps’ own histories treat it as anything but legend. Cressman’s point is the practical one. Wake did not need more Japanese; it needed radar, fighters, fire-control gear and men, and none of those came.

“They fought to the last man”

The film’s ending, not the record. The garrison surrendered on the morning of 23 December. Heinl’s official monograph, which is generally sympathetic to Devereux and the Marines, concludes that “the decision to surrender Wake was reasonable,” given the civilians on the island and the absence of any relief, and that by then “the only answer was surrender” (Heinl, The Defense of Wake, Conclusions). Some Marines on Wilkes Island, cut off from the command post, were still winning their own fight when the order reached them; Lt. David Kliewer, ordered to give up at the airstrip, later wrote, “It was a difficult thing to do” (Cressman, A Magnificent Fight). The decision is examined in Chapter 6.

“The Marines defended Wake”

They did, but not alone. Heinl counts 449 Marines, 68 Navy personnel and 5 Army signalmen, alongside 1,146 civilian workers (Heinl, Appendix III). A Navy commander was in overall command. Civilians volunteered for gun crews, carried ammunition and fought on the beach at the end; Cressman records one afternoon on which 18 civilians reported for military duty (Cressman, A Magnificent Fight). Forty-five Chamorro men from Guam, employees of Pan American Airways, were also on the atoll; ten were killed in the battle (Pacific Air Forces, “Restoring Wake Island’s Guam Memorial,” 2017).

“Devereux commanded Wake”

Devereux commanded the Marine defense battalion detachment, the guns and the men on the ground. Cunningham, who had arrived on 28 November 1941 as officer in charge of naval activities on Wake, was senior and in overall command of the atoll (Chapter 1). The citation named only Devereux, and the press called Devereux the commander. The argument that followed is taken up below.

The Japanese losses

Wartime claims inflated them, and even the careful estimates differ by a factor of two. The AFI catalog’s historical note says the Marines killed “over 800” Japanese. Heinl’s 1947 reconstruction, which he warned was “exceedingly approximate,” came to about 820 killed and 333 wounded, more than 500 of the dead in the two destroyers sunk on 11 December. NHHC’s “Forsaken Defenders” essay and Cressman give 381 killed. The ship losses are firmer: NHHC gives Hayate 168 lost with one survivor and Kisaragi 157 lost with no survivors (H-Gram 002). The table under “Losses and uncertainty” sets the figures side by side.

Medals after liberation

Individual decorations for Wake had to wait for the war to end. Most of the witnesses were in prison camps until the autumn of 1945. Several of the major awards were approved in 1946 and 1947, more than four years after the battle.

The garrison’s single Medal of Honor went to Capt. Henry T. Elrod of VMF-211. His citation covers his whole fortnight on Wake: in the air, where he “shot down two of a flight of 22 hostile planes”; in the low-level attack on 11 December that sank the destroyer Kisaragi; and on the ground at the end, when, with no aircraft left, he “assumed command of one flank of the line set up in defiance of the enemy landing” near Hanna’s gun on the south shore (CMOHS, “Henry Talmage Elrod”). He was killed there before dawn on 23 December. The NHHC describes him as “the first Marine in the war awarded the Medal of Honor” (NHHC, “The Forsaken Defenders of Wake Island”); the medal was presented to his widow on 8 November 1946 (USMC History Division, “Capt Henry Talmage Elrod”).

Medal of Honor · Posthumous

Capt. Henry T. Elrod, Marine Fighting Squadron 211

A Georgian who attended the University of Georgia and Yale, Elrod enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1927, was commissioned in 1931 and earned his wings in 1935. On Wake he flew until there was nothing left to fly, then fought on the beach. The citation ends: “He gallantly gave his life for his country.” His widow, Capt. Elizabeth J. Elrod of the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve, received the medal on 8 November 1946; it is now at the National Museum of the Marine Corps. He was promoted posthumously to major.

Citation →

Elrod was buried first on Wake. In October 1947 his remains were brought home and reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery (USMC History Division). In 1985 the Navy commissioned the guided-missile frigate USS Elrod (FFG-55), built by Bath Iron Works; she served until she was decommissioned at Norfolk on 30 January 2015 (NHHC, DANFS, “Elrod”). Cressman notes that Elrod is the only Marine from Wake to have a warship named for him.

The Navy Cross, the Navy’s second-highest award for valor, went to the garrison’s three senior officers and to a handful of others. Cressman and the NHHC record Navy Crosses for Cunningham, Devereux and Putnam; for Capt. Herbert C. Freuler, VMF-211’s gunnery and ordnance officer, who also received a Bronze Star; and, posthumously, for 2nd Lt. Carl R. Davidson, shot down fighting the carrier planes on 22 December (Cressman, A Magnificent Fight; NHHC, “Forsaken Defenders”). 2nd Lt. Robert M. Hanna, whose 3-inch gun fought the beached patrol boats on the last morning, received the Navy Cross under a board action dated 24 January 1946 (Home of Heroes, Navy Cross citation, Robert M. Hanna).

Navy Cross

Cmdr. Winfield Scott Cunningham, USN, island commander

Awarded for directing the defense of Wake Island through the siege. Cunningham, a 1921 Naval Academy graduate and naval aviator, had been on the atoll less than two weeks when the first bombs fell. He tried twice to escape from captivity in China, in March 1942 and again in October 1944, and was recaptured both times. After the war he spent years arguing that his part in the defense had been written out of the record.

Cunningham’s narrative →

Navy Cross

Maj. James P. S. Devereux, USMC, Wake detachment, 1st Defense Battalion

The citation recognizes “distinguished and heroic conduct in the line of his profession in the defense of Wake Island.” Devereux commanded the guns that sank Hayate and drove off the first landing, and on 23 December he carried the surrender order through the lines. He was released from a camp on Hokkaido in September 1945.

Biography →

Navy Cross

Maj. Paul A. Putnam, USMC, commanding VMF-211

Putnam brought twelve Wildcats to Wake on 4 December 1941, lost most of them on the ground four days later, and kept the rest flying until the last two were shot down on 22 December. On the final morning he and his pilots, with no aircraft left, fought as infantry alongside Hanna’s gun crew. He was designated a naval aviator in 1929.

Cressman, A Magnificent Fight →

Navy Cross

2nd Lt. Robert M. Hanna, USMCR, 1st Defense Battalion

On 23 December Hanna manned a 3-inch gun near the airstrip and fired into the beached patrol boat, a converted destroyer, that had landed troops on the south shore, sinking it, according to his citation. He killed three infiltrators with his pistol and, with two men, held the position until Marines of VMF-211 joined him. When the senior officer was wounded, he took command and held against repeated attacks until the surrender.

Citation →

Navy Cross · Posthumous

2nd Lt. Carl R. Davidson, USMC, Marine Fighting Squadron 211

VMF-211’s assistant gunnery officer. On 22 December Davidson and Capt. Herbert Freuler flew the squadron’s last two Wildcats against the strike from the carriers Soryu and Hiryu. Davidson was last seen in a dogfight with six enemy planes and did not return.

“Wake’s Valiant Aviators” →

Some decorations later looked too small to the men who had seen the fighting, or to their families. Capt. Wesley M. Platt, who led the counterattack that destroyed the Japanese landing force on Wilkes Island on 23 December, the most complete American success of the last day, received the Silver Star for “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action” (Clemson University Scroll of Honor, “Wesley McCoy Platt”). 1st Lt. Arthur A. Poindexter, who led the mobile reserve, received the Bronze Star. Cpl. Ralph J. Holewinski, who went with Hanna to the 3-inch gun and was badly wounded in the fight that followed, received the Bronze Star with “V” device only in 1999; in 2006 his family was still asking the Navy to upgrade it to the Navy Cross, and the Navy said it would need new and compelling evidence (Stars and Stripes, 20 July 2006; Cressman).

The civilians received nothing at the time. Marine Gunner John Hamas was so impressed by the contractors’ physician, Dr. Lawton E. Shank, who carried wounded men out of the burning hospital on 9 December, that he later recommended Shank for the Medal of Honor (Cressman, A Magnificent Fight). No military decoration followed. The civilians’ recognition, when it came, came through a different door.

Two commanders, two books

Devereux came home famous. Cunningham came home to find that most of the country had never heard of him. The two men had not liked each other on Wake, and their quarrel over who deserved credit for the defense outlasted the war; American Heritage concluded in 1987 that neither man’s memoir settled it (Andrews, 1987). The NHHC’s summary is restrained: both Cunningham and Devereux held the coastal guns’ fire on 11 December until the enemy ships were close, and “both later claimed credit” (NHHC, H-Gram 002).

Devereux told his story first. Within two years of the war’s end he had published a series in the Saturday Evening Post and the book The Story of Wake Island (1947) (Gilbert, “The Commander”). Cressman, the Marine Corps’ own historian, lists the book among the older general works on Wake but warns that it was, “by the author’s own admission, a ghost-written ‘romance’” (Cressman, A Magnificent Fight, Sources). The same year the Marine Corps Historical Section published Lt. Col. Robert D. Heinl Jr.’s official monograph, The Defense of Wake. It remains the indispensable starting point, with its casualty tables, chronology and command lists, but Andrews judged that it “comes down heavily on Devereux’s side” (Andrews, 1987), and Gilbert writes that it “further built up the USMC dominance of events” (Gilbert, “The Commander”).

Cunningham answered first in private. A typed narrative now in the Navy Department Library, written in the third person and citing documents as late as July 1948, sets out his case paragraph by paragraph. He describes himself as “the Island Commander in every sense of the word” who “delegated none of his powers at any time.” He complains of “a continuing hoax as to who had commanded the defense of Wake” and says his part had been “almost wholly obscured.” He gives his account of the surrender: that Devereux told him, “The decision is yours to make,” and that he then authorized it. He appends statements from other officers and from the civilian superintendent, N. D. Teters, and ends by speaking of rights that had, “unless he is badly mistaken, been wantonly violated” (NHHC, “Narrative of Captain W. S. Cunningham”).

In 1961, by then a retired rear admiral, Cunningham published Wake Island Command, written with Lydel Sims (Little, Brown). Boston University holds his papers, and its finding aid notes that the book disputed the official account and that the collection documents the controversy that followed (Boston University, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Winfield Scott Cunningham Collection). The book won support from some Wake officers and civilians, Gilbert writes, but it was “not enough to turn the long-established tide” (Gilbert, “The Commander”).

Later historians have kept the question open. Gregory J. W. Urwin’s Facing Fearful Odds (1997), the fullest modern study of the siege, gives the dispute its own assessment in an appendix. Gabriel M. Brady’s Wake Island: New Insights into the Past (2022) argues Cunningham’s case; Gilbert summarizes its conclusion as that “the Navy did not have Cunningham’s back,” during or after the war (Gilbert, “The Commander”). Andrews’s 1987 verdict on the whole literature still stands as a warning: the accounts are “scrappy, incomplete, fragmentary, and contradictory.”

Both men went on to public careers. Devereux retired from the Marine Corps on 1 August 1948, advanced to brigadier general on the retired list for having been specially commended in combat (USMC History Division, “Brigadier General James P. S. Devereux”). He was elected to Congress from Maryland as a Republican in 1950 and served four terms, ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1958, and later served as Baltimore County’s director of public safety. Cunningham commanded the seaplane tender Curtiss, then the Naval Technical Training Center at Memphis, and retired in 1950 as a rear admiral. Devereux died in 1988 and is buried at Arlington; Cunningham died in Memphis in 1986.

The contractors: veterans after forty years

The largest group on Wake in December 1941 was also the last to be recognized. The 1,146 civilians worked for Contractors Pacific Naval Air Bases, the consortium led by the Morrison-Knudsen Company of Boise, Idaho, which was building the naval air station described in Chapter 1. Heinl counts 70 of them killed in the siege and 1,104 taken prisoner. The Japanese kept 98 on the atoll and shot them in October 1943; Heinl estimated that about 180 civilians, 16 percent, died in captivity, against 3 to 4 percent of the military prisoners (Heinl, Appendix III).

Many contractors served. Civilian volunteers, many of them veterans of the First World War, helped man the gun batteries, built fortifications, made repairs and cooked for the garrison (Ahler, NHHC, 2016); some went into the line on 23 December beside the Marines (Cressman). Others stayed in the brush and the shelters, which was what civilians without uniforms or training were expected to do. When the Japanese took the island, they made no distinction: Urwin notes that the Japanese “classified all the surviving civilians as prisoners of war” and held them until the end of the war (Urwin, “The Wake Island Militia,” Naval History, December 1997).

For decades after 1945 they had no standing as veterans. Change came through a 1977 statute that allowed civilian groups who had served the armed forces in wartime to apply for recognition. In 1981 the Department of Defense decided to grant veterans’ benefits to former contractors who had helped defend Wake. In Urwin’s account, eligible men received honorable discharges from the U.S. Navy, the World War II Victory Medal, the American Campaign Medal and the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal, with a letter of thanks that called the recognition “a long-overdue thank you for your patriotism” (Urwin, 1997). Senator Mike Crapo of Idaho, writing in 2017, gave the same year: “In 1981, the civilian Morrison Knudsen employees were granted veteran status” (Crapo, “Honoring Those Who Served at Wake Island”).

Memory of the contractors has been kept mostly in the towns they came from. In Boise, a memorial in Veterans Memorial Park honors the Americans who served on Wake; its text includes the line “The workers signed up for a job; they ended up fighting in a war” (Crapo, 2017). The survivors’ organization, Survivors of Wake, Guam and Cavite, held its last Boise reunion in September 2017; Joe Goicoechea of Boise, the last of Idaho’s Wake workers, had died the year before. Crapo co-sponsored a bill, S. 450, the Pacific Defenders of World War II Congressional Gold Medal Act, to honor the defenders of Guam, Wake Island and the Philippines (Crapo, 2017).

State legislatures have taken up the cause since. Oregon’s House Concurrent Resolution 23, adopted in April 2025, honors the 134 Oregon civilians who worked on Wake, 31 of whom died as a result: 11 among the 98 executed in 1943 and 18 in prison camps in China and Japan. It notes that the “nonbattle losses” plaque at the state’s World War II memorial does not describe their combat role, and it thanks the historian Bonita Gilbert for her research (Oregon Legislative Assembly, HCR 23, 2025). Idaho’s House Concurrent Resolution 27, adopted by both chambers in March 2026, honors the 225 Morrison-Knudsen workers with Idaho connections, 32 of whom lost their lives, including 10 of the 98 (Idaho Legislature, HCR 27, 2026). Both resolutions repeat the 1981 date for the Defense Department’s recognition.

Timeline

Remembering Wake, 1941–2026

1. 23 Dec 1941Wake surrenders (Wake time). Radio commentators at home are already repeating the “Send us more Japs” legend.
2. 5 Jan 1942President Roosevelt signs the citation for the Wake garrison (National Archives).
3. 6 Feb 1942Executive Order 9050 formally authorizes Navy and Marine Corps unit citations.
4. 17 Apr–20 Jul 1942Paramount films Wake Island, chiefly at the Salton Sea.
5. 24 Aug 1942Premiere for Marines at Camp Elliott, San Diego; New York premiere 1 September.
6. 7 Oct 1943The 98 civilians kept on Wake are executed on Sakaibara’s order.
7. 4 Sep 1945The Japanese garrison surrenders Wake; the U.S. flag is raised again.
8. Sep 1945Survivors liberated in Japan and China; Devereux freed on Hokkaido.
9. 24 Jan 1946Navy Cross approved for 2nd Lt. Robert M. Hanna.
10. 8 Nov 1946Elrod’s Medal of Honor presented to his widow.
11. 1947Heinl’s official monograph and Devereux’s The Story of Wake Island published; Elrod reinterred at Arlington in October.
12. 15 Oct 1950Truman and MacArthur meet on Wake during the Korean War.
13. 1961Cunningham publishes Wake Island Command.
14. 1972The Air Force takes over Wake from the FAA.
15. 1981Defense Department recognizes the Wake contractors as veterans.
16. 1985Wake designated a National Historic Landmark; USS Elrod commissioned 18 May.
17. 31 Aug 2006Super Typhoon Ioke strikes Wake after all 188 residents are evacuated.
18. 2011Remains found on Wake’s north beach, near the massacre site, are recovered by JPAC.
19. 8 Jun 2017Restored memorial to the Guam men rededicated on Wake.
20. 2025–2026Oregon and Idaho legislatures adopt resolutions honoring the contractors.

The dead and the missing

Bringing Wake’s dead home took longer than awarding its medals. Men killed in the siege were buried on the atoll in December 1941. After the war, Army graves registration teams disinterred the known graves and took the remains to Oahu; most of Wake’s dead now lie in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, the Punchbowl in Honolulu, where Gilbert reports a plaque listing 178 names, 131 civilian and 47 military (Gilbert, “JPAC Mission: Wake 98”). Elrod was reinterred at Arlington. Seventeen of Oregon’s Wake civilians are buried at the Punchbowl, according to the Oregon resolution.

The 98 were the hardest case. Of the 98 killed in October 1943, Gilbert writes, 96 were first buried on the north beach of Wake Island, and the graves registration teams did not find all of them. In 2011 a contractor doing asbestos removal on the island found what appeared to be human remains. A team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC, now the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency) excavated the site, near the generally accepted place of the massacre, and took the remains to its laboratory in Hawaii (Air Force News, “Officials Search for POW/MIAs on Wake Island”; Gilbert). By 2013 the laboratory had determined the remains were those of Caucasian men, but none had been identified, and Gilbert was still searching for families to give DNA samples.

Wake after the war

Wake went back to work almost as soon as the Japanese garrison left. The Navy took control again in September 1945. Pan American Airways and Transocean Airlines set up on the atoll, and military and commercial aircraft crossing the Pacific stopped to refuel (Gilbert, “Postwar Wake Island”). The Civil Aeronautics Administration, later the Federal Aviation Administration, ran the airfield from 1947 to 1972; formal authority passed from the Navy to the Department of the Interior in 1962 (Gilbert). At its height the civilian and military community on the atoll reached roughly 2,000 people, with families and an elementary school (USGS, Biodiversity Surveys of Wake Atoll, 2023).

On 15 October 1950, in the fourth month of the Korean War, President Harry S. Truman flew to Wake to meet Gen. Douglas MacArthur, then commanding United Nations forces in Korea (Truman Library). It was the atoll’s most famous postwar day.

Long-range jets ended Wake’s value as a refueling stop. In 1972 the FAA handed the atoll to the Air Force under an agreement with the Secretary of the Interior. The Army administered it from 1994 for missile-defense work, and the Air Force took it back in 2002, by the U.S. Geological Survey’s account (Gilbert gives 2001). In January 2009 a presidential proclamation included Wake in the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, and the Secretary of the Interior delegated management of the monument’s waters to the Fish and Wildlife Service; the Air Force continues to manage the land under the 1972 agreement (USGS, 2023). The Wake Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, run by the Fish and Wildlife Service, covers 495,515 acres of emergent and submerged lands and waters, and in 2014 the monument’s protection around Wake was extended to 200 nautical miles (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “Wake Atoll National Wildlife Refuge”).

The atoll is only about 7 square kilometers of land, low coral and sand with no high ground (USGS, 2023), and the Pacific has hit it hard. In late August 2006 Super Typhoon Ioke, a Category 5 storm, bore down on Wake. The highest point on the atoll is about 18 feet above sea level, and the Air Force warned of waves up to 18 feet and surges up to 40 feet. On 28 August two C-17 Globemaster IIIs flown by Air Force and Hawaii Air National Guard crews evacuated all 188 people on the island, most of them Thai employees of the support contractor, the first evacuation of Wake in nearly five decades (Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 29 August 2006). Ioke struck on 31 August with winds of about 150 mph. A Coast Guard flyover two days later found “less destruction than expected” and no oil or hazardous-material releases (Pacific Air Forces, “Damage on Wake less than feared, flyover shows,” September 2006). Gilbert writes that some facilities were never rebuilt.

The memorials on the atoll

The atoll’s memorials were put up at different times by different groups, and together they tell the battle from several sides. The 15th Wing at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, whose website carries the page for the Air Force detachment on Wake, lists them (15th Wing, “11th AF Det 1 Wake Island”).

The Marine Corps Memorial stands near the site of Devereux’s command post and is “dedicated to the gallant defenders of Wake, 8 Dec–23 Dec 1941.” In January 2009 about 60 Marines of Marine Attack Squadron 211, the descendant of VMF-211 and still nicknamed the “Wake Island Avengers,” stopped on Wake on the way to a deployment at Iwakuni, Japan, and gathered at the memorial; it was the first time since 1993 that most of the squadron had returned (U.S. Marine Corps photograph caption, 8 January 2009).

The Harry Morrison and Civilian Construction Memorial honors the contractors who “participated in the defense of Wake Island” (15th Wing). Harry Morrison was the co-founder of Morrison-Knudsen.

The 98 Rock is a large coral boulder on the lagoon beach of Wilkes Island. The National Register nomination calls it “the most poignant reminder of the war” and transcribes its carving as “PW,5-10-43”; the Air Force gives the full inscription as “98 US PW 5-10-43,” cut by an unknown prisoner who escaped the massacre (NRHP nomination, 1984; 15th Wing). The nomination places the killing itself on the north shore of Wake Island, possibly near a grove of ironwood trees. The date on the rock, read day-first as 5 October 1943, is two days earlier than the 7 October date used in most histories and in the Oregon and Idaho resolutions. An NHHC essay records that the atoll commander killed the last remaining contractor with his sword (Ahler, NHHC, 2016); the carver’s identity is unknown. The story is told in Chapter 8.

The Guam Memorial honors the 45 Chamorro men from Guam who worked for Pan American Airways on Wake in 1941. Ten were killed in the battle; the other 35 were sent to camps in Japan and China, where two died. Wake Island workers first put up the memorial in 1991. By 2015 heat and salt air had made the names unreadable, and Col. Frank Flores, a Guam native commanding the Pacific Air Forces Regional Support Center, had it restored; it was rededicated on 8 June 2017 (Pacific Air Forces, 2017).

The Japanese Memorial remembers the Japanese dead of the battle and the occupation. Its inscription reads, “May the souls of the war dead repose in peace” (15th Wing). Nearby, historical markers identify a Japanese command post and an aircraft revetment, both “built by American civilian P.O.W.s,” completed in 1942 and 1943; an 8-inch coast-defense gun from the Japanese defenses still stands on Peale; and “Nitro Rock” carries a carving made when a U.S. Navy ship called at Wake in 1939 (15th Wing).

A National Historic Landmark

In 1984 Erwin N. Thompson of the National Park Service prepared the nomination of Wake to the National Register of Historic Places and recommended Wake, Wilkes and Peale Islands for designation as a National Historic Landmark. The atoll was designated in 1985; the NPS record is dated 16 September 1985 (NPS, Maritime Heritage Program, “World War II” landmarks; NPGallery, NRIS 85002726). The NPS database gives the district’s period of significance as 1925 to 1949, with 1941 and 1945 as its significant years; its area of significance is military, and its boundary follows the outer edge of the reef, taking in the three islands and the lagoon, about 2,600 acres in all (NRHP nomination).

The nomination is frank about what is left. It lists as contributing features the Japanese structures, earthworks and fortifications on all three islands; the ruins of the Pan American Airways base and the prewar naval air station on Peale; an American antiaircraft gun emplacement and the Prisoner of War Rock on Wilkes; Japanese command posts, blockhouses, pillboxes, magazines, aircraft revetments and gun positions on Wake; the Marine and Japanese memorials; the bridge to Peale; and the unfinished channel on Wilkes. It excludes the postwar runway, terminal, housing and fuel works. Much of what survives was built by the Japanese, some of it with prisoners’ labor. Of the American defense, the nomination records a hard fact: the 5-inch naval gun batteries that sank Hayate and drove off the first landing have no surviving physical remains (NRHP nomination). Postwar construction erased much of the Japanese occupation on Wake Island itself, while Peale was described as still “covered with the wreckage of war.”

The battle also left remains offshore. Hayate, sunk by Battery L on 11 December 1941 with 168 men and one survivor, broke in two and went down within about two minutes. NOAA Ocean Exploration prepared a background essay on her for the Okeanos Explorer’s 2016 expedition in the region (EX1606), noting that because of the date line it is often overlooked that the Wake garrison sank the first major Japanese warships of the Pacific War, while the submarine I-70, sunk by a Navy dive bomber on 10 December, is generally credited as the first Japanese warship lost (NOAA Ocean Exploration, “Hayate”).

People

Capt. Henry T. Elrod (1905–1941), born in Turner County, Georgia, flew with VMF-211 and died on the south shore of Wake on 23 December. He was the garrison’s only Medal of Honor recipient, presented to his widow in 1946. He lies at Arlington, and the frigate USS Elrod carried his name from 1985 to 2015.

Cmdr. Winfield Scott Cunningham (1900–1986), a Wisconsin-born naval aviator and Naval Academy graduate of 1921, was Wake’s island commander and the officer who authorized its surrender. He twice escaped from captivity in China and was twice recaptured. He retired as a rear admiral in 1950 and spent much of the rest of his life contesting the Marine-centered account of the defense, most fully in Wake Island Command (1961).

Maj. James P. S. Devereux (1903–1988), born in Cabana, Cuba, commanded the Marine detachment and became the public face of the defense. He wrote The Story of Wake Island (1947), retired as a brigadier general in 1948, and represented Maryland in Congress from 1951 to 1959. He is buried at Arlington.

Maj. Paul A. Putnam (1903–1982), born in Michigan, commanded VMF-211 from its arrival on 4 December to the surrender and received the Navy Cross. He stayed in the Marine Corps after the war and retired as a brigadier general.

Capt. Wesley M. Platt (1914–1951), of Summerville, South Carolina, and Clemson, commanded on Wilkes Island and led the counterattack that destroyed the Japanese landing party there on 23 December, for which he received the Silver Star. He survived captivity, and died of wounds in Korea as a colonel on the staff of the 1st Marine Division in September 1951.

Lt. Col. Robert D. Heinl Jr. (1916–1979), a Marine officer and historian, wrote The Defense of Wake (1947), the first official history of the battle. Its tables and chronology are still the base of most accounts, and its sympathy for Devereux is part of the argument this chapter describes.

John Farrow (1904–1963), the Australian-born director of Wake Island, received an Academy Award nomination for the film. Brian Donlevy (1901–1972) played its fictional Marine commander, Major Caton, and repeated the role with Robert Preston in a Lux Radio Theatre broadcast on 26 October 1942 (AFI Catalog).

Bonita Gilbert, a historian of the Wake contractors and author of Building for War, has spent years tracing the families of the 98 for DNA identification. Oregon’s 2025 resolution thanks her by name for the research behind it.

Losses and uncertainty

Wake’s numbers were first counted by men in prison camps and then reconstructed from incomplete records, and they still vary from source to source. NHHC’s H-Gram says so directly: “Sources vary on some of these numbers.” The chart below shows the American dead of the Wake garrison, servicemen and civilians, from the battle through the end of captivity, using Heinl’s official tables. Civilian deaths dominate it.

By the numbers

Americans of the Wake garrison who died, 1941–1945

Killed in the siege, executed on Wake, or died in captivity elsewhere

Civilians executed on Wake, Oct 194398

Other civilian deaths in captivityabout 82

Civilians killed in the siege70

Marines killed in the siege49

Servicemen died in captivity17–20

Navy killed in the siege3

The civilian figures are the least settled. Heinl, Cressman and the NHHC all give 70 civilians killed during the siege; the Oregon and Idaho resolutions of 2025 and 2026 give 34. Heinl and Cressman count 12 civilians wounded; NHHC’s “Forsaken Defenders” gives 20. Heinl’s estimate of about 180 civilian deaths in captivity includes the 98 executed on Wake; H-Gram 002 gives 108 civilian deaths in captivity, and it is not clear whether that figure includes them. The size of the work force is given as 1,146 by Heinl and Cressman and as “over 1,200” in a later NHHC essay (Ahler, NHHC, 2016). Even the Navy contingent is 68 in Heinl and 69 in that essay, and Crapo’s memorial account lists six Army Air Corps men rather than Heinl’s five Army signalmen.

The honors have their own small uncertainties. Accounts of VMF-211’s Lt. David Kliewer disagree about his decorations: Cressman lists a Bronze Star and two Air Medals, while a 2020 Naval History article captions him as a Silver Star recipient. The date of the Japanese surrender ceremony is firm, 4 September 1945, but the dates of transfer of the atoll among federal agencies differ by a year between the USGS and Gilbert. This chapter gives both.

Questions readers ask

Did the Wake Island Marines really radio “Send us more Japs”?

No. The Naval History and Heritage Command says the phrase came from cryptographic padding, the nonsense words added to the start and end of a coded message, which someone read as part of the text. Others think it was a public-relations invention. Either way, no one on Wake sent it, and the garrison’s actual requests were for fighters, radar, fire-control equipment and men.

Who commanded Wake Island, Cunningham or Devereux?

Both, at different levels. Cmdr. Winfield S. Cunningham, USN, was the island commander, senior officer and the man who authorized the surrender. Maj. James P. S. Devereux commanded the Marine defense battalion detachment and directed the fight on the ground. The press, the 1942 presidential citation and the film all made Devereux the hero, and Cunningham spent decades trying to correct the record.

How accurate is the 1942 movie Wake Island?

The broad outline of the siege is right: the first raid, the repulse of the first landing, the losses of aircraft and the final assault. The characters are fictional, the Navy commander is pushed aside, and the ending is invented. In the film the Marines refuse to surrender and die fighting; in fact the garrison surrendered on 23 December 1941 and most of the men spent the rest of the war as prisoners.

What medals were awarded for the defense of Wake Island?

One Medal of Honor, to Capt. Henry T. Elrod of VMF-211, presented to his widow in 1946. Navy Crosses went to Cunningham, Devereux, Putnam, Freuler, Hanna and, posthumously, Davidson, among others. The garrison received a presidential unit citation dated 5 January 1942, and Navy and Marine defenders are authorized a “Wake Island” clasp and silver “W” on the Navy or Marine Corps Expeditionary Medal.

Were the Wake Island civilian contractors recognized as veterans?

Yes, in 1981. Under a 1977 law that allowed civilian groups to be certified as having performed active military service, the Defense Department recognized the employees of Contractors Pacific Naval Air Bases who took part in the defense of Wake. Eligible men received honorable discharges, campaign medals and veterans’ benefits. The group is still listed in the VA regulation at 38 C.F.R. § 3.7(x)(6).

Can you visit Wake Island today?

Not as a tourist. Wake Atoll is an active U.S. Air Force installation with no public access or commercial service, and the surrounding national wildlife refuge “is not open to the public,” with entry only by special use permit (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service). Visits are limited to people with official business, such as Air Force personnel and contractors, scientists, and occasional survivor or memorial groups traveling with official approval.

How it connects

This chapter closes the collection. The base the contractors were building, the arrival of Cunningham and VMF-211, and the gaps in the defenses are in Chapter 1. The first raid that destroyed most of the Wildcats on the ground is Chapter 2; the 11 December victory that made Wake famous is Chapter 3; the siege, the padding message and Davidson and Freuler’s last fight are Chapter 4. Whether Wake could have been saved, and the argument over Task Force 14’s recall, are in Chapter 5. Elrod’s death, Hanna’s gun, Platt’s counterattack and Cunningham’s surrender decision are Chapter 6. The Nitta Maru, the camps and Cunningham’s escapes are Chapter 7, and the occupation, the 98 and Sakaibara’s trial are Chapter 8.

Wake was attacked within hours of Pearl Harbor, by forces that were part of the same Japanese plan; the Hiryu and Soryu aircraft that struck Wake on 21 and 22 December had flown against Pearl Harbor two weeks earlier, as described in the Pearl Harbor collection’s chapter on the Kido Butai. The way the country learned of Wake, through bulletins, rumor and slogans, belongs with the story of the Day of Infamy, and the postwar arguments over credit and blame have a parallel in the Pearl Harbor investigations and memorials. The Marine Corps’ habit of turning battles into lasting public images, which began with Wake, reached its height at Iwo Jima. For the whole war, return to the World War II collection; for quick answers, see the Wake Island FAQ and the collection’s timeline.

What happened afterward

The survivors came home in the autumn of 1945 to find themselves famous for a version of events they had not lived. Cunningham went back to sea, Devereux to the Marine Corps and then to Congress; Platt fought again in Korea and died there. For years the survivors gathered at reunions, most often in Boise, organized through Survivors of Wake, Guam and Cavite; the last Boise reunion was in 2017 (Crapo, 2017). The Oregon resolution of 2025 records that all of that state’s 103 Wake contractors who survived the war have since died.

The arguments did not die with the men. Cunningham’s defenders have kept publishing, and so have the historians of the contractors. The families of the 98 still wait for identifications. The Marine squadron that carries VMF-211’s lineage still calls itself the Wake Island Avengers. And the oldest part of the legend, the Alamo version in which everyone died fighting, has slowly given way to a fuller story: a short and skillful defense, a reasonable surrender, a long captivity, a war crime, and a group of civilians who did a soldier’s work and waited forty years to be thanked for it.

Walking the ground today

Very few people will ever walk Wake. The atoll is a restricted U.S. Air Force installation, operated by a small detachment and a contractor work force; the Air Force maintains it for contingency deployments, as an emergency landing field and for fuel storage (USGS, 2023). There is no public access and no commercial service. The Fish and Wildlife Service states that the refuge “is not open to the public and entry is only allowed through a Special Use Permit” (USFWS, “Visit Us”). Anyone with a real reason to go, a family member of one of the dead, a researcher, a veterans’ group, has to start with the Air Force and the refuge.

For those who do go, the visit is a walk around a ring of low coral islands. On Wake Island itself, beside the runway, are the Marine memorial near the site of Devereux’s command post, the civilian construction memorial, the Guam memorial, the Japanese memorial and the concrete of the Japanese command post that American prisoners built. On Peale, across the channel bridge, are the ruins of the Pan American base and the naval air station and the 8-inch gun. On Wilkes, by the lagoon, is the 98 Rock. Nothing remains of Battery L, whose guns sank Hayate, or of Battery A at Peacock Point. The National Historic Landmark covers all of it, out to the edge of the reef.

For everyone else, the places to visit are at home. Elrod’s grave is at Arlington, Section 12. His Medal of Honor is at the National Museum of the Marine Corps at Quantico. Many of Wake’s dead lie at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, a short drive from the Pearl Harbor National Memorial. In Boise, the Wake memorial in Veterans Memorial Park carries the workers’ story, and the Oregon State Capitol’s World War II memorial lists the state’s war dead. The atlas on the collection hub shows where everything on the atoll stood in 1941.

Sources and further reading

• Lt. Col. R. D. Heinl Jr., The Defense of Wake (USMC Historical Section, 1947): HyperWar text, Appendix III, U.S. and Japanese Casualties, Appendix IX, Presidential Unit Citation, Conclusions; and 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): Project Gutenberg text; HyperWar text; NPS History edition, “A Difficult Thing To Do” and Sources.
• Naval History and Heritage Command: H-Gram 002; “The Forsaken Defenders of Wake Island”; Cmdr. Ryan Ahler, “Wake Island: The Other Story of December 1941” (2016); “Narrative of Captain W. S. Cunningham”; “Navy Expeditionary Medal; Marine Corps Expeditionary Medal” (Wake Island clasp); DANFS, “Elrod”.
• The citation and the medal: National Archives, “NARA Coast to Coast: Henry T. Elrod, U.S. Marine Corps Fighting Squadron 211”; Executive Order 9050, American Presidency Project; Congressional Medal of Honor Society, Henry Talmage Elrod; USMC History Division, “Capt Henry Talmage Elrod” and “Brigadier General James P. S. Devereux”.
• Other awards: Home of Heroes, Navy Cross citation, Robert M. Hanna; Clemson University Scroll of Honor, “Wesley McCoy Platt”; Stars and Stripes, “Kitty Hawk sailor wants uncle’s WWII heroics recognized” (2006); Naval History, “Wake’s Valiant Aviators” (December 2020).
• The film: American Film Institute Catalog, Wake Island (1942).
• The command dispute: Peter Andrews, “The Defense of Wake,” American Heritage, July/August 1987; Bonita Gilbert, “The Commander”; Boston University, Inventory of the Winfield Scott Cunningham Collection. Books: Winfield S. Cunningham with Lydel Sims, Wake Island Command (1961); James P. S. Devereux, The Story of Wake Island (1947); Gregory J. W. Urwin, Facing Fearful Odds: The Siege of Wake Island (1997); Gabriel M. Brady, Wake Island: New Insights into the Past (2022).
• The contractors: Gregory J. W. Urwin, “The Wake Island Militia,” Naval History, December 1997; 38 C.F.R. § 3.7 (groups considered to have performed active military service); Sen. Mike Crapo, “Honoring Those Who Served at Wake Island” (2017); Oregon Legislative Assembly, HCR 23 (2025); Idaho Legislature, HCR 27 (2026) and text; Bonita Gilbert, Building for War.
• The dead: Bonita Gilbert, “JPAC Mission: Wake 98”; Air Force News, “Officials search for POW/MIAs on Wake Island”.
• Wake today: U.S. Geological Survey, Biodiversity Surveys of Wake Atoll (Open-File Report 2023-1066, history and administration); U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Wake Atoll National Wildlife Refuge and “Visit Us”; 15th Wing, “11th AF Det 1 Wake Island” (historic sites); Bonita Gilbert, “Postwar Wake Island”; Pacific Air Forces, “Restoring Wake Island’s Guam Memorial” (2017).
• Typhoon Ioke: Honolulu Star-Bulletin, evacuation report, 29 August 2006; Pacific Air Forces, “Damage on Wake less than feared, flyover shows” (September 2006).
• The landmark: Erwin N. Thompson, National Register of Historic Places/National Historic Landmark nomination, “Wake Island” (1984); NPGallery, NRIS 85002726; NPS Maritime Heritage Program, World War II National Historic Landmarks; NOAA Ocean Exploration, “Hayate”.

Photographs: U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Air Force photographs, public domain; the 1942 premiere photograph is from the Leo D. Hermle Collection, Marine Corps Archives, used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.