Battle of Wake Island, (December 8–23, 1941), during World War II, battle for Wake Island, an atoll consisting of three coral islets (Wilkes, Peale, and Wake) in the central Pacific Ocean. During the battle a small force of U.S. Marines and civilian defenders fought elements of the Imperial Japanese Navy, which ultimately seized the island but at great cost.
Located about 2,000 miles (3,200 km) west of Hawaii and 600 miles (approximately 1,000 km) north of the Japanese-held Marshall Islands, Wake Island impressed American naval planners as an ideal site for an advance defensive outpost. In January 1941 a consortium of civilian firms called Contractors Pacific Naval Air Bases (CPNAB) began construction of military facilities on the atoll. By December CPNAB had more than 1,100 construction workers toiling on Wake, but they did not complete their work before the outbreak of war between Japan and the United States. A garrison of 449 U.S. Marines, several dozen navy personnel, and a handful of army radio operators also were stationed on Wake. That force had nearly 2,100 fewer troops than American strategists had deemed necessary to properly defend the atoll. The island’s defenders were equipped with six 5-inch (127-mm) coastal artillery pieces, 12 3-inch (76-mm) antiaircraft guns, 12 F4F Wildcat fighter planes, and an assortment of machine guns and small arms. Forty-five Guamanian men, employed by Pan American Airways as part of its transpacific Clipper service, rounded out the atoll’s human population.
The Japanese first struck Wake Island at noon (local time) on December 8, 1941, with a wave of tactical bombers launched from the Marshall Islands. The atoll’s defenders had received word of the Pearl Harbor attack several hours earlier (Wake and Hawaii are separated by the International Date Line), but heavy cloud cover and the absence of radar facilities allowed the attackers to achieve surprise. The Japanese caught the bulk of the island’s fighter squadron on the ground and destroyed eight Wildcats as well as killing or wounding nearly two-thirds of the aviation personnel. Wake was bombed on an almost daily basis for the next two weeks. Once Wake became a battlefield, 186 CPNAB employees volunteered to fight beside the marines, and about another 250 workers found other ways to support the embattled garrison, from building bomb shelters to delivering hot meals to gun positions and other battle stations.
On December 11 a Japanese naval task force—including three light cruisers, six destroyers, and two transports—attempted to land 450 Special Naval Landing Force (SNLF) troops on Wake Island’s south shore. The Japanese suffered a rude repulse from the marines’ light coastal-defense guns and the four remaining fighters. Two Japanese destroyers were sunk, several other ships sustained damage, and the transports were withdrawn. That small engagement, the first tactical defeat experienced by the Japanese navy in World War II, electrified the American people, dispelling much of the gloom caused by Pearl Harbor.
Humiliated by that setback, the Japanese navy continued to bomb Wake Island and eventually sent a much larger task force of approximately 2,000 SNLF troops to take the atoll. Nine hundred Japanese stormed ashore before dawn on December 23. After hours of desperate, close infantry combat, the Japanese finally forced Wake’s defenders to surrender. Although the fight for Wake ended in a U.S. defeat, the American people continued to view the atoll as a rallying point. The garrison’s stand inspired Hollywood’s first combat film of the war, Wake Island, which was released in the late summer of 1942.
The Japanese navy sacrificed two destroyers, two converted destroyers, one submarine, and some 1,000 lives to capture Wake Island, whereas just over 100 Americans and Guamanians were killed in the atoll’s defense. The survivors became prisoners of war, and most were evacuated to China and Japan, although 98 civilian workers were kept on the island to be used as forced labour.
Wake Island spent the rest of World War II in Japanese hands. The Japanese garrisoned Wake with more than 4,000 troops and erected extensive fortifications to protect them from attack. The U.S. military never tried to retake the atoll but cut it off from resupply and subjected it to periodic naval bombardments and air raids. The Japanese garrison commander, Capt. Sakaibara Shigematsu, interpreted one such attack, in October 1943, as an invasion attempt, prompting him to order the execution of the remaining civilians on the island. On September 4, 1945, two days after Japan formally surrendered, the surviving Japanese troops on Wake Island lowered their flag. For his role in ordering the killing of nearly 100 prisoners of war, Sakaibara was executed for war crimes in June 1947.