Book Excerpt
Hell Wouldn't Stop,
An Oral History of the Battle of Wake Island

by Chet Cunningham
©2002Chet Cunningham
All rights reserved

A Note from the Author
REMEMBERING MY OLDER BROTHER,
KENNETH CUNNINGHAM

I was two days from my 13th birthday when the war started. I’d been proud of my big brother Kenneth who had joined the Marines and was now out in the Pacific Ocean somewhere on some little bitty island. Before the war came he told us about the island and the dumb birds and the land crabs and the beautiful lagoon out there on some small spit of sand and coral called Wake Island.

Then December 8, and the attack, and the war, and almost before we knew it Wake Island had fallen to the Japanese. My brother was either dead or a prisoner of war. We didn’t know which for a long time. Seems like it was a year, but we at last received a letter from him from somewhere in China where he was in a prison camp. He was alive! That’s all we needed to know right then. That first letter triggered a lot of memories about my brother. How he taught me to shoot a BB gun, how to make a sling shot, and how to ride my bike.

We’d moved from Dust Bowel Nebraska to green and scenic Oregon when I was eight in 1937 and five of us kids had glorious water fights where we stayed near Buxton with a relative. The little creek was knee deep and six feet wide, and just right for water fights with old bicycle pumps. That summer of 1937 we wandered the wonders of Oregon. Walked the rails over the old logging trestles, pretended a train was coming and ran like crazy. We explored the abandoned lumber mill a mile upstream and marveled at the log pond and the machinery. We picked blackberries off the tangle of bushes that seemed to grow everywhere. We ate blackberries until our tongues turned blue. We stared in wonder at the gloriously green Douglas fir trees and the hemlock and all the green underbrush and grass.

That fall we moved into a small town nearby so we could go to school. We were poor but we didn’t know it. We ate a lot of grapefruit and oatmeal because they were cheap. Ken had only one decent pair of pants and one shirt, so he had to wear them every day to school. Yes, he got teased about it. I was sad when he ran away from home when he was sixteen. He came back from California six months later and soon joined the CCC’s. The Civil Conservation Corps. He learned how to drive bulldozers, graders, and drag lines. Then he and his best friend joined the Marine Corps. He was just past seventeen. His CCC training put him into a construction related Marine Corps outfit. By the time he was eighteen he was shooting at the Japs who were trying to kill him.

After Wake fell to the Japanese, we waited and waited. We didn’t know if Ken was still alive. My mother nearly had a mental breakdown with the worry about Ken. Then the letters came and she felt better and weathered it. When he came home after 44 months in those prisons, it was the greatest day of our lives. Yes, a lot to remember about Kenneth Cunningham.
—Chet Cunningham

Dare K. Kibble, USN
Meridian, Idaho

"Then all hell broke loose! The ass on the guy in front of me disappeared. It was completely blown away. I could hear and see the slugs hitting all around me along with fragmentation bombs. Then the guy behind me yelled and fell. I was scared shitless and knew I would be next. The planes on the strip were exploding and burning as I ran past them. I looked up at the Japanese bombers and knew I could see the gunners sighting in on me. If only those damn machine gun slugs would stop whining and thudding. How in the hell did I ever get into this mess? Here I was on a spit of an island, in a war I knew nothing about, with death breathing down my neck. My only thought was to run, run, run†."

Wake Island
December 23, 1941.
PFC Wiley W. Sloman, USMC
Hondo, Texas

"We had killed all but three of the bastard Japs who tried to sneak up on us there on Wilkes Island in the dark. Bob Stevens and I and another guy went down on their flank and fired away at them with our Springfield 30.06 caliber rifles. Bolt action. We captured the last three and took them back up the slope to the three-inch gun we had been using for what little cover it gave us.

"The gun had been knocked out in the bombing. There was no ammo, no crew and no height finder. Just when we got back to the gun a whole swarm of Japs who came up through the center of the island pinned us down around the gun with deadly machine gun fire.

"Don’t remember how long I lay there in a small depression trading shots with the Jap MG’s. At last I decided to move to my right away from the others. Corporal Bill Raymond was on my left and Gordon Marshall was on the other side of the gun. I wanted to get down closer to the Nip MG’s, within hand grenade range. Sergeant Stowe held down the spot at the back of the three-incher. Sometime after I left the gun, Marshall was killed there.

"As I moved toward my new firing position, a Jap rifle round caught me on the side of my head. Hurt like hell. Thought I was a goner. But evidently the round went in and came out quickly. It didn’t even knock me out. Actually it straightened me up from my crouched position and I fell forward. I remember I fired the round in my Springfield and moved the bolt to get a new round in the chamber.

"But when I tried to lift up the weapon, my left arm wouldn’t work. Later, the doctors told me that my brain had started to swell and that led to paralysis on most of my left side. I didn’t fire my weapon again. Before it was over that morning, we lost seven men dead. Stevens was one of the KIA and Virgil Martin was another guy near me who bought the farm.

"I remember earlier we had opened new boxes of rifle ammunition for our five round clips on the Springfield. The boxes were dated with the day of manufacture. Most of them said they had been made in 1918. Even though the rounds were over thirty years old, I never had any misfire.

"When daylight came on that 23rd of December, I was down on the coral and in the sand and hurting bad. The fighting slacked off when the light improved. We didn’t know what had happened.

"Then we saw a group of men walking toward us across Wilkes Island. A man in front carried a big white flag. As they came closer we could see that there were some Americans and lots of Japanese in the delegation. When they came close enough the Americans were shouting that the fighting was over. The Island had been surrendered to the Japanese.

"We couldn’t believe it. We had fought off the Japs to a standstill, and still had a lot of men and ammunition. Who had called the thing off? Then we saw Colonel Devereux in the group, and we knew it had to be true. A lot of Marines shouted no, and came close to disobeying the orders. But after a few tense moments the men realized that they had to do what the colonel ordered and they threw down their weapons.

"That wasn’t my problem. I was really hurting by that time. The Japanese in the group moved in and rounded up all the Marines and lined them up on the sand. Then they tied their hands behind them with wire and put it around their necks too, so if they moved their hands much the wire pulled hard on their throats.

"I watched some of it, then some Japs came and put me on a stretcher and took me away. I didn’t know where they were taking me, but discovered they had brought me to a hospital the Japs had set up for their own wounded.

"The first day I was there I tried to eat the Japanese food they served me, but I just couldn’t swallow it. I’m not sure to this day what it was. Later that first day a Japanese doctor came in and talked in broken English.

"You no like our Japanese food?"
"I told him I didn’t but what I didn’t tell him was that right then I didn’t think that I could eat anything.

"He left and five minutes later, much to my surprise, a Marine cook came in and asked me what I wanted for breakfast. I couldn’t believe he was there. When I got my wits about me I told the cook I’d like two soft-boiled eggs, toast and coffee. I wasn’t sure if it was a joke or a new kind of torture.

"Then about a half hour later the cook came back with my eggs, toast, coffee and a bowl of cereal and milk. I was floored.

After that, that Marine cook came three times a day and brought me food. It was all because the Japanese doctor had showed me a lot of kindness, and I’ll never forget it.

"I stayed there in the makeshift Japanese hospital for about twenty days. Then I and twenty other wounded Americans were moved to the Island’s main hospital which had been repaired and rebuilt. My left side was still paralyzed and it would take it a long time

December 23, 1941
Fireman Second Class, Dare D. Kibble, USN.
Meridian, Idaho

"On December 21, the Marine command decided they would put our machine gun crew (along with two other gun crews like ours, including two sailors per .30 cal) down on the beach. Our commission was to frustrate and impede the Japanese landing parties as long as we could stay alive. We were to stop the first wave of the enemy to land at this point on the Island.

"We were directly opposite Camp #1 on the ocean side or southern beach of the Island. The other .30 caliber gun crew on our left was about 300 yards and another one on our right the same distance.

"The civilians took a dozer and built us a bomb shelter on the beach with beams and coral stacked on top. We had to crawl down in and lay on your belly but it would hold all of the Navy crew who was on the beach.

"We set up our gun on five sand bags with the muzzle pointed out to sea and waited. My loader was Carl Moore from Los Angeles. I was thinking what a wonderful episode this could have been in my life. The air here in the South Pacific was so balmy and soft it actually caressed your skin and when the moon was shining its beams of light, they made the ocean glitter with a million star flecks. No matter where you were on Wake Island, you could hear the gentle crash of the surf on the coral reefs and the shore."

"I had loaded the gun, as much as you can load a gun. About midnight on the 23rd, we began to see flashes of light on the horizon. We figured the Nips were signaling from ship to ship.

"I can remember how utterly depressed I was while watching those lights on the horizon. I knew the war or my world was coming to a sudden climax and I was ill prepared to face the enemy.

"Our gun was about fifteen yards from the surf and we had no side arms. You can’t use hand grenades in hand to hand combat. I knew one thing for certain, this little machine gun hadn’t better fail me. I walked over and talked to First Class Bos’n Binny, who was over in the bomb shelter, about the lights. I could tell by his face that none of his thoughts on the subject were encouraging.

"I thought again how capricious life was for leading a twenty year old boy from the little old Rocky Mountain State of Idaho along a path which would place him in jeopardy such as this.

"I had found a pair of leather gloves to wear when firing the gun. The machine gun would get hot as the devil after firing continuously.

"I still get furious when I think of the damn Marines putting us Sailors down on the beach to take the brunt of the battle and thereby committing certain suicide, when they were the ones who supposedly loved a good battle. I was certain if anyone wanted a good battle, the little slant-eyed fellows who would be coming over the horizon pretty soon, we would give them one, especially when the odds were 500 to one.

"Along about 0200 even though still dark, we could see some of the ships coming over the horizon, and there were plenty of them. There were ships of all kinds, except we could see no carriers. We knew they would be lying farther off the island. We counted thirty or forty ships and then stopped.

"To bolster our faith in the U.S. Navy, I ran over to the bomb shelter and asked Binny if he recognized any of the silhouettes as being our ships. All I had to do was look at his face to know his negative answer. Binny later died in prison camp from tuberculosis. I’m not sure where he was buried, somewhere in China, I think.

"A couple of hours before daylight, we saw two destroyers run full speed to the beach and ground themselves about half a mile to our east. A three-inch gun position was situated directly between the two Japanese tin cans. I thought the Japanese used beautiful military strategy in their battle plan. The airstrip was just across the beach. The Nips had planned on running landing craft in between the two beached destroyers, using the ships guns for protection against the defending forces. The three-incher didn’t have a height finder so it couldn’t be used against the aircraft. So it was used against the landing craft and bore sighted against naval
ships.

"We started exerting extreme vigilance as far as surveying the surf in front of us. It seemed to get darker as the dawn awakened. As I recall the clouds moved in and covered the moon which had shone when we first had visions of the ships on the horizon.

"It must have been about 0400 when I heard something in the surf which sounded a little different. I asked Moore if he heard it and he said he did. We decided it was an engine running, a one or two-cylinder diesel. In a few seconds we could see the front end of a gray landing boat. It came directly at us.

"I told Moore I wasn’t going to let it get to the beach before I opened fire because if we could get them running scared before they beached, they might back the barge down and leave us alone. So much for wishful thinking. I told Moore to get some more belts of ammo and I turned the gun to fire on the landing barge and pulled the trigger.

"What happened next is difficult to explain. I became mesmerized. I believe for a person to know what it’s like to fire a machine gun at a human, the person would have to experience it.

"The old World War I water cooled .30 caliber Browning kind a gave you the feeling you were operating a trip-hammer. It made a sound resembling a "slam-slam-slam" in your hand. I held onto the gun with both hands and used the tracers for sighting. I remembered the Marine instructor saying you should fire the gun in bursts, but I wasn’t very sociable with the Nips at the time and didn’t care to get in any hand-to-hand combat. We could see the barge fairly well from the light given off by the ricocheting slugs and the tracers. I just kept firing and moving the stream of tracers like a water hose over the upper part of the barge.

"The Jap landing barge was built a lot like the design of our landing craft used later in the war. I can’t remember ever seeing a landing craft in the U.S. Navy up to the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. The Nip craft had a ramp in the front and an armored housing around the pilothouse to protect the bos’n while running the barge in under fire. I could see my slugs going right through the armor there. It wasn’t doing much in the way of protecting the man driving. By then I could see my slugs ripping through the bow of the barge.

"I kept firing a steady stream of slugs and Moore would have a new belt ready the instant I ran out of ammo. He and I were a pretty good team. We liked each other and got along fine. He had tuberculosis in prison camp and I lost touch with him in 1943. I saw in a bulletin published by the Defenders of Wake Island that there was a Moore living in Southern California, but I don’t know if it is him or not.

"The belt of ammo on a Browning .30 caliber machine gun has a metal leader attached to the front of the belt. The ammo man can push the leader through the slide of the breech opening and the gunner grabs the leader and pulls on it while working the breech. You can hear the lead round enter the firing chamber and you are ready to fire again.

"Moore and I could hear voices coming out of the barge and once in a while a scream or a yell. Then the most dreaded incident any machine gunner could experience, happened. We had a jam in the breech. I thought I was going to freeze up, but much to my astonishment, I was really quite calm. Moore asked me what I was going to do. I told him to grab a couple of the hand grenades and keep a watch on the beach.

"I had a screwdriver in my pocket and I flipped the breech open, reached down under the jammed cartridge with the screwdriver and flipped the offending shell out slick as a whistle. I closed the breech and pulled on the breech activator to load another shell and tripped the trigger and the gun fired again.

"After we had completely riddled the barge and the people inside quit making any noises, we slacked off the continuous firing and started watching for any signs of life coming out of the barge. All the time there was a terrific battle going on up the beach between the two beached destroyers. We could see explosions aboard the ships and an abundance of muzzle blasting from the beech. There was another Navy manned .30 caliber machine gun between us and the destroyers but we never saw them firing their gun.

"About 0500, it started to get light and was a rather cloudy day. Moore and I had fired about 8,000 rounds through the gun and we decided to try some hand grenades on the barge.

"Moore took a couple and walked down about 100 feet toward the barge, pulled the pins and threw the grenades. I kept the gun ready in case any Nip showed himself as a threat to Moore.

"Later on I took two grenades and threw them in the barge for some practice or maybe because I was sure that someone in the barge had a slug with my name on it. Then we settled down to watching the armada of ships cruising on the horizon and closing on Wake. During this whole battle Moore had been watching our backside, because we knew we couldn’t depend on the Marines.

"I kept wondering why the Nips had not tried to drop off the back side of the barge and go up or down the beach in the protection of the water. While I watched for some movement, I saw a man coming out of the water. From where I was I could see he must have been gut shot. He crawled across the beach and dropped behind a good-sized boulder. While he was trying to make it from the water to the boulder, I didn’t have the stomach to shoot him.

"The only thoughts going through my mind were how I hated the bastards who inaugurated this fracas and how it was changing my life, and here I was having to decide whether I was going to kill a man I had never met. "Moore and I talked about what to do. We knew if we took him prisoner, we ran the risk of being killed if he was booby-trapped. We had no side arms to use to guard him. If he had a hidden sidearm he could easily kill us both before I could cut him down with the machine gun.

"After a short period, the man climbed up on a rock and sat down. He was close enough I could see he was sick, probably from his wounds. Then Moore and I decided he had to be killed. I can remember right now as if it were yesterday, what horrible but wrenching pain I had when we finally made the decision. I asked Moore if he would shoot the man. ’Hell no,’ Moore said. ’You’re the gunner, you do it.’ The only solace I felt was having considered every possible alternative, it came down to his living, or our living.

"I put the gun on him and pulled the trigger. I saw the slugs tear into his torso, bouncing him off the boulder. I turned away and vomited. Why in hell couldn’t he have been a healthy Nip Marine charging me with his bayonet fixed? In that event I wouldn’t have blinked twice at cutting him down. I still to this day dream about the man.

"Shortly after that the Nips sent in waves of dive bombers. Moore and I decided we could stay on the gun position as sitting ducks. It was a snow-white beach with no cover or concealment.

Or we could retire several hundred feet to the bomb shelter, which was well camouflaged. It was then light enough we could see out to sea plainly and would have plenty of time to get to the gun if and when some landing party threatened our section of the perimeter."
+++
December 23, 1941
Guy J. Kelnhofer, Jr., USMC
Wesley Chapel, Florida

"I was captured on Wake Island after sixteen days of combat. I did not surrender and neither did my fellow Marines. We were, like many ex-POWs, surrendered by our commanding officers. We cried and we cursed at that command because none of us believed that Marines surrendered. We obeyed because of our discipline though we did not expect that the Japanese would spare us. We were stripped and bound facing firing squads armed with machine guns and grenades. At the last moment an officer appeared and rescinded our execution order. There were times later when some of us wished he had not interfered."

+++

Surrender:
Edwin J. Borne, USMC
Haines City, Florida

"I believe we never should have surrendered. Major Devereux, who surrendered us, had nothing to do with the actual combat indicated on his grave marker at Arlington National Cemetery. "The hero of Wake Island." Nothing could be further from the truth. The Marines were fierce fighters and did their job well. We were fighting to serve our country during a very difficult time from 8 December to 23 December 1941 on Wake Island.

"On our return to the United States after the war, I feel that we were completely ignored. Sometimes being told by my fellow Marines, ’I would never have surrendered.’ Also I believe that this affected my promotions. I was in the same pay grade before I retired for twelve years."

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS ABOUT WAKE ISLAND

What is Wake Island?
Wake Island is a group of three atolls in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 400 miles closer to Tokyo than to Honolulu. They are 2,300 miles west of Honolulu and l,290 miles east of Guam. Wake Island is an external territorial possession of the U.S. About 200 people live on the three atolls now. They cover about three square miles.

Why was it important in 1941?
Due to Wake Island’s location it became a strategic "high ground" for both the Japanese and the US military planners. It was to be the centerpiece of a string of Pacific Island that would form a fence to prevent any incursion by Japanese forces and attacks against Hawaii or the Pacific Coast. To Japan Wake Island was an American dagger aimed at the middle of the Japanese islands possessions. This could not be tolerated. Wake Island was scheduled for capture as soon as war began.

How was it defended?
Congress was asked to appropriate money to build defenses on Wake in 1938. They dragged their feet about the money and it wasn’t until January 1941 that l,l46 civilian construction workers began work to fortify the island. The job was scheduled to take three years. Few defenses were constructed, and only a few five-inch guns were in place along with machine gun positions and three-inch anti-aircraft guns. There were only 478 military men on Wake and twelve fighter aircraft.

When was Wake attacked?
The attack came about noon on December 8, 1941, only five hours in real time after Pearl Harbor was hit on December 7. Wake is across the international date line.
Twenty-seven Japanese bombers came out of a rain squall from the south and hit the islands before the defenders knew they were there. The bombers had flown 600 miles from their base on Kwajalein atoll in the Marshall Islands. The attack caught eight of the twelve Wildcat Marine fighters on the ground and seven were totally destroyed.

What were the odds?
On the island were 388 Marine infantry and artillery men, twelve Marine Corps pilots, 47 Marine aircraft maintenance men and thirty sailors. That’s 478 men against the whole Japanese Navy. The small force repulsed the first invasion try and sank three and maybe four Japanese destroyers. On the second try the Japanese came at night with 2,500 infantrymen and a heavy armada of ships and overwhelmed the force that had been reduced in size with casualties in the bombing and strafing.

Is it true the Marines had World War I weapons?
True. They used the old Springfield Rifle with a five round clip, single shot. Some of the ammunition was dated 1918. The five-inch artillery guns had been taken off battleships and then reclaimed. They had no radar, no fancy sighting equipment, only outmoded range-finding gear for their anti-aircraft guns.

Marines Never Surrender?
Up to December 23, 1941 no U.S. Marine had ever surrendered. It was a glorious point of pride in the corps. Then, after overwhelming odds and devastating attacks by air, ground and naval bombardment, the commanding officer of Wake surrendered the men to the Japanese. Most of the Marines didn’t believe it. Most figured they would fight to the death. They knew that the Japanese never took prisoners. Any man not killed in the fighting was killed when the Japanese captured him. It had happened that way for years in the fighting in the Orient.

Did the Japanese almost machine-gun the prisoners?
Yes, just after the surrender the prisoners were stripped naked and their hands tied behind their backs with telephone wire. They were lined up and machine guns brought up and made ready to fire. Only a last moment reprieve by the Japanese Navy Admiral spared the men.

Were the prison ships hellholes?
Worse than that. 1200 men were jammed into three holds so tightly that they barely had room to sit down. They were beaten, nearly starved, and suffered from the cold for thirteen days before they saw the sky again. They were locked into the holds. If the ship had been hit by torpedoes, all of the men would have died.

Were the 25,000 Americans really slaves?
Yes, they were slave laborers in conditions as worse as any in history. They were crammed into unheated warehouses, forced to work 8 to 12 hours a day. Provided with inadequate clothes for the freezing weather, slept on wooden platforms where they had to press together to stay warm. They were harassed, beaten, tortured,
stabbed, and starved.

Did the men live on 800 calories a day diet?
Most of the men lived, some died on the meager food. They had a marginal subsistence diet, just enough to keep them alive so they could work. Infractions of the maze of rules and regulations meant half rations for two or three days. Rice and thin soup were the staples, with many of the men losing a third of their body weight over the 44 months of captivity.

Was there medical care for the prisoners?
In some camps there was none at all. Some camps had a few Navy Medical Corpsmen who did what they could but they had no medicines or instruments or facilities. A few Navy doctors were captured, but they also had nothing to work with. In a few camps there were Japanese doctors who did little for the men. Some of the men had teeth pulled — with no Novocain.

What was the death house?
Another section of the barracks where men were put when they were too ill or hurt to work. Most of the men who went into the death house never came out. They died there and were cremated. No record was ever kept of those who died in the Japanese camps. The only tally was that of those missing when the others were freed.

Did the prisoners steal food?
Those men who worked in the rail yards where there were shipments of food going through stole anything they could get. Much of it was food, which they had to eat without being seen by the guards. Men who could steal food outside, usually gave their meal rations in the camp to other prisoners who did not get outside food.

Why didn’t the officers have to work?
The Japanese military had great respect for American and other foreign military officers. They were permitted to keep their uniforms, were not stripped on capture, had reasonable quarters on the prison ships, and had much better food during their 44 months of prison camp. They were usually housed in the same area, but in rooms rather than the cold warehouses. They were not required to work the 8 to 14 hours a day other prisoners did. This caused resentment among the enlisted men.

Will the prisoners ever get paid for their work?
There has been a continuing campaign to get "back pay" for the 25,000 American military and civilian prisoners who were slave laborers during the war. The class action effort is aimed at those huge Japanese corporations who had their start during the war, and succeeded partly due to the slave labor. The firms paid the Japanese army for each man’s work. The army never passed on the money to the men.

Will it ever happen? International law being what it is, the outcome is doubtful.

How many of the Wake Island Marines died in prison camps?
I have not seen any figures, official or unofficial, about the number of men who died in the camps. Men who couldn’t take the punishment and workload mentally, often broke down and became sick and couldn’t work and often died. Those with strong spirits and determination lived. Of every ten POW’s in Europe and the Orient who died in prison, nine of them died in Japanese camps. This in itself is a blistering condemnation of the Japanese Army, and its inhuman treatment of the POW’s.

>>Back to top<<

Hell Wouldn't Stop, by Chet Cunningham
ISBN 0-7867-1096-9