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Special Units · Wake Island, 1941
VMF-211 and the civilians of Wake Island
Marine Fighting Squadron 211 reached Wake with twelve new Wildcats four days before the war. It lost seven on the ground in the first raid, kept the rest flying for two weeks with the help of the atoll’s civilian builders, and fought its last battle on foot.
- U.S. Marine Corps · Marine Aircraft Group 21
- Wake Atoll, central Pacific
- 4–23 December 1941
Twelve Wildcats
Wake was meant to become a Navy patrol-plane base, and in 1941 it was a construction site. About 1,146 civilian employees of Contractors Pacific Naval Air Bases, many of them Western dam and road builders hired through Morrison-Knudsen of Boise, were building an airfield, a seaplane base and a submarine channel. They outnumbered the servicemen by more than two to one. The contractors built the base; they did not build its defenses, and they never came under full military control (Chapter 1).
Marine Fighting Squadron 211 of Marine Aircraft Group 21 at Ewa was chosen to give the atoll fighters. Maj. Paul A. Putnam had taken command on 17 November. On 28 November his pilots flew twelve new Grumman F4F-3 Wildcats aboard the carrier Enterprise, and on 4 December they flew them onto the strip near Peacock Point. The pilots were Putnam; Captains Henry T. Elrod, Herbert C. Freuler and Frank C. Tharin; 1st Lt. George A. Graves; 2nd Lts. Robert J. Conderman, Carl R. Davidson, Frank J. Holden, John F. Kinney, David D. Kliewer and Henry G. Webb; and two enlisted pilots, T/Sgt. William J. Hamilton and S/Sgt. Robert O. Arthur (Heinl, The Defense of Wake).
Nothing was ready. The Wildcats had no armor and no self-sealing tanks, and their bomb racks did not fit the bombs on the island. The strip took one plane at a time, there were no revetments, manuals or mechanics experienced with the new engines, and fuel went in by hand pump. When Putnam asked for aircraft bunkers on 5 December, stressing that “speed, rather than neatly finished work, was required,” he found a young engineer setting out stakes with a transit and had to replace him with bulldozers. On the morning of 8 December six bunkers were under way. None was finished.
8 December
Word of Pearl Harbor reached Wake early on 8 December, Wake time. Putnam put four Wildcats on patrol and faced a hard choice about the other eight. Moving them across the rough coral risked damage, and with no spare parts any damage meant losing an airplane; the bunkers would be ready by 1400. He left them dispersed in the parking area about a hundred yards apart.
The Squadron Commander was faced with a choice between two major decisions, and inevitably he chose the wrong one.
Just before noon some three dozen Mitsubishi G3M bombers from Roi came out of a rain squall, 34 by Cressman’s count and 36 by Heinl’s, unseen by the patrol above them. They laid fragmentation bombs and incendiary fire across the squadron area. Graves was killed climbing into his cockpit, Holden was cut down running for cover, and Conderman, pinned under a burning Wildcat, told a corporal to help another man first and died before morning. Seven of the eight grounded fighters burned. Heinl counted 55 aviation men on the ground, of whom 23 were killed or died of wounds and 11 more were wounded: “At one stroke,” he wrote, “VMF-211 had sustained over 60 percent casualties” (Chapter 2). That night aviation Marines and volunteer civilian equipment operators built eight blast-proof revetments, and by morning the surviving fighters were under cover.
11 December: the destroyer Kisaragi
Three days later Rear Adm. Sadamichi Kajioka brought an invasion force to Wake. The Marine 5-inch batteries held their fire until the ships were close, sank the destroyer Hayate and drove the force off. VMF-211 was overhead with four Wildcats, each carrying two 100-pound bombs. Putnam, Elrod, Tharin and Freuler bombed and strafed the retiring ships; the transport Kongo Maru was set afire, and Putnam saw at least one of Elrod’s bombs hit the destroyer Kisaragi. Kinney, who had relieved one of the first pilots, was pushing over to attack her when she blew up and sank with all hands, 157 men by the Japanese record. Why she exploded is still argued; the NHHC credits the sinking to Elrod, and his Medal of Honor citation calls her the first major warship destroyed by small-caliber bombs from a fighter (Chapter 3).
The squadron paid in airplanes. Antiaircraft fire cut a line in Elrod’s fighter, and he wrecked it landing among the boulders on the beach. Freuler’s engine was ruined. In all VMF-211 flew ten sorties that morning, dropped twenty 100-pound bombs and fired about 20,000 rounds; it ended the day with two or three flyable Wildcats.
Rebuilt from wrecks
For eleven days Japanese bombers came back almost daily, and every Wildcat that flew did so because of a few men working in the open between raids. Kinney, who had replaced Graves as engineering officer, worked with T/Sgt. Hamilton and Aviation Machinist’s Mate First Class James F. Hesson, a Navy man from the air station, stripping parts from wrecks and swapping engines between airframes. Freuler found a way to move welder’s oxygen into the fighters’ oxygen bottles so the pilots could reach the bombers’ altitude. Putnam wrote that the three, “with the assistance of volunteers among the civilian workmen, did a truly remarkable and almost magical job” (Heinl, ch. III).
The civilians did far more than help the mechanics. Cunningham reported civilian morale as generally bad, and Heinl wrote that most of the workmen did not join the defense; but hundreds did. The National WWII Museum’s account, drawing on Urwin, counts more than 400 volunteers, 186 of whom joined Marine gun crews. Sixteen of them worked Gun 3 of Battery D on Peale under Sgt. Walter A. Bowsher Jr.; nearly 250 helped move that battery in a single night, and about a hundred more moved Battery E. Dan Teters, the contractors’ superintendent, sent hot meals out to the guns by truck. The contractors’ doctor, Lawton E. Shank, kept working after bombs destroyed his hospital on 9 December and set up a new one in an empty magazine (Chapter 4).
On 21 December carrier aircraft from Hiryu and Soryu joined the raids, and Putnam flew alone in search of the carriers without finding them. On the 22nd the squadron’s last two Wildcats went up against 39 carrier planes. Freuler shot down at least one attack plane before a Zero wounded him and wrecked his fighter; Davidson was last seen going after the bombers with a Zero behind him and was never found. “This left us with no airplanes,” Kinney wrote. That afternoon Putnam reported to Maj. James P. S. Devereux as an infantry officer.
23 December: on foot
About 1,000 Japanese naval infantry landed before dawn on 23 December. Two old destroyers converted to transports were run onto the reef south of the airstrip, and the only gun that could reach them was a single 3-inch piece manned by 2nd Lt. Robert M. Hanna, Cpl. Ralph J. Holewinski and three civilian contractors. Devereux ordered Putnam to take what was left of VMF-211, about 20 men, and form a line between the gun and the landing; civilian volunteers attached to the squadron carried ammunition. Putnam, wounded in the jaw, gave the order “This is as far as we go,” and his men were still there six hours later. Elrod, leading one flank, was killed shortly before daybreak. Tharin retook a lost position, Hesson drove back two rushes with a submachine gun and grenades, and Kliewer held the generator at the west end of the strip. At the surrender, of the ten men left at Hanna’s gun, nine or all ten were wounded (Chapter 6).
Captivity and the 98
The surrender began a separate ordeal. The NHHC counts 70 civilians killed in the defense and 1,104 taken prisoner. On 12 January 1942 the liner Nitta Maru carried the military prisoners and most of the civilians to camps in China and Japan; about 360 contractors, the equipment operators and tradesmen, were kept on Wake to build Japanese defenses. By October 1942 they had been cut to 98, and Dr. Shank had chosen to stay with them. On 7 October 1943, after a two-day American carrier raid, Capt. Shigematsu Sakaibara had the 98 shot on the north beach. One man escaped long enough to carve “98 US PW 5-10-43” on a coral rock before he was caught and beheaded. A U.S. Navy military commission at Kwajalein convicted Sakaibara, and he was hanged on Guam in June 1947. That killing was a war crime, not a battle casualty (Chapter 8). The Defense Department recognized the civilian defenders of Wake as veterans only in 1981.
The insignia, rendered
Illustration Original insignia-style artwork made for the Lake Norman Brief. It is not the unit’s official emblem. The drawings are not based on the squadron’s own emblem.
Timeline
- VMF-211’s pilots fly twelve F4F-3s aboard USS Enterprise at Pearl Harbor.
- The Wildcats land at Peacock Point, Wake.
- Bombers from Roi burn seven of eight grounded Wildcats; 23 of 55 aviation men on the ground die.
- Wildcats bomb the retiring invasion force; Kisaragi blows up and sinks with all hands.
- Kinney, Hamilton and Hesson rebuild fighters from wrecks while civilians move guns by night.
- Carrier aircraft join the raids; Putnam searches alone for the carriers.
- Davidson is lost and Freuler wounded; the squadron has no aircraft and reports as infantry.
- VMF-211 holds a line around Hanna’s gun; Elrod is killed; Wake surrenders.
- Nitta Maru takes most prisoners away; about 360 contractors are kept on Wake.
- Sakaibara has the last 98 American civilians on Wake shot.
People of the unit
Read the full story
- Chapter 1: Before the Storm: Pan Am, the Contractors and the Build-Up on Wake
- Chapter 2: 8 December: The First Raid and the Wildcats Lost on the Ground
- Chapter 3: 11 December: The Landing That Failed
- Chapter 4: Under the Bombs: The Siege, 12–22 December
- Chapter 6: 23 December: The Final Assault and the Surrender
- Chapter 8: Occupied Wake, 1942–1945: Raids, Starvation and the Murder of the 98
- The Wake Island collection and atoll atlas
By the numbers
VMF-211 and the civilians of Wake by the numbers
VMF-211’s fighters, 4–22 December 1941
Wildcats on Wake able to fly; after 8 December the count is the 12 delivered less the 7 burned, and after 11 December Heinl gives “two or three”
Source: Heinl, The Defense of Wake (USMC, 1947); Cressman, “A Magnificent Fight” (1992).
The civilians of Wake
Contract workers of Contractors Pacific Naval Air Bases; volunteer counts from Urwin via the National WWII Museum
Source: Guy Nasuti, “The Forsaken Defenders of Wake Island,” NHHC (2016); Gregory J. W. Urwin, Facing Fearful Odds; Hubbs, “Massacre on Wake Island,” Naval History (2001).
11 December: one morning’s work
VMF-211’s strike on the retiring invasion force
Source: Heinl, The Defense of Wake (USMC, 1947), ch. III; Combined Fleet tabular records for Hayate and Kisaragi.
In pictures
More photographs
In the art of World War II
Insignia, posters and art
Sources
- Lt. Col. Robert D. Heinl Jr., The Defense of Wake (USMC Historical Section, 1947), with Putnam’s report and letters.
- Robert J. Cressman, “A Magnificent Fight”: Marines in the Battle for Wake Island (Marine Corps Historical Center, 1992).
- Frank O. Hough, Verle E. Ludwig and Henry I. Shaw Jr., Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal (1958).
- Guy Nasuti, “The Forsaken Defenders of Wake Island,” Naval History and Heritage Command (2016); NHHC, H-Gram 002.
- Gregory J. W. Urwin, Facing Fearful Odds: The Siege of Wake Island, and his account for the National WWII Museum.
- Bonita Gilbert, Building for War: The Epic Saga of the Civilian Contractors and Marines of Wake Island; Mark E. Hubbs, “Massacre on Wake Island,” Naval History (February 2001).
- Combined Fleet tabular records for Hayate and Kisaragi; Arlington National Cemetery, Henry T. Elrod.