What Major Devereux Did While His Relief Ships Sailed Home — And His 449 Marines Fought to the Last-ZZ

December 23rd, 1941.

Before sunrise, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, the crew of USS Saratoga received a message.

Not from the enemy, from their own navy.

Turn around.

Not because they had been hit, not because they were out of fuel, because an admiral sitting in Pearl Harbor, more than 1,400 miles away, had decided the risk was too great.

The men who heard that order knew exactly what it meant.

600 miles ahead of them on a piece of coral smaller than some county fairgrounds back home, there were Marines who had been fighting for 15 days straight.

No radar, no resupply, no naval support of any kind.

Those men had held on because they believed one thing with absolute certainty.

The ships were coming.

Some of the sailors on Saratoga wept when the order came down.

Nobody said much after that.

And 600 m ahead, Major James Dearu and his 449 Marines kept fighting, still waiting, still holding because no one had told them the ships had turned around.

What those men had already done in those 15 days before the Navy made that call is a story that most Americans have never heard.

It starts not on a battleship and not in Washington.

It starts on a piece of coral in the middle of the Pacific that most people couldn’t find on a map.

Wake Island is not the kind of place that appears in history books under its own name.

It is a V-shaped sliver of coral and scrub, 3 square miles total, sitting alone in the central Pacific, 2,300 m from Hawaii, 2,000 mi from Tokyo, nothing but open ocean in every direction.

The only reason Pan-American Airways cared about it was fuel.

Their China Clipper flying boat stopped there to refuel on the Trans-Pacific run.

Without that one reason, Wake would have had no name that anyone outside a naval planning office had ever heard.

But in January of 1941, the United States Navy decided it mattered.

They sent construction crews, more than,00 civilian workers to turn that sliver of coral into a military base.

These were not soft men.

Many of them had built the Hoover Dam, the Bonavville Dam, the Grand Kulie Dam.

Men who had spent years breaking rock in conditions that would have turned most people around.

They came to wake with picks and shovels because that was what was available.

And they chipped gun imp placements out of coral that was hard as concrete.

The radar equipment the island was supposed to have never arrived.

It was still sitting at Pearl Harbor.

Of the 12 3-in anti-aircraft guns on the island, there was exactly one working director.

The device that calculates range and elevation for accurate fire.

One for 12 guns.

The garrison of Marines that arrived in August 1941 numbered 449 men.

Military planners had calculated they needed more than 2500 to properly defend the atal.

They got 449.

What they did have, six 5-in coastal guns, salvaged from an old battleship and bolted onto concrete pads, had been positioned carefully, sighted with precision, hidden from the view of any ship approaching from the sea.

They had been boreighted, test fired.

The crews had trained on them until they knew every adjustment by feel in daylight and in the dark.

That was the hand they were dealt.

Major James Patrick Sinet is deu arrived on Wake Island on October 15th, 1941.

His Marines hated him, not the ordinary grumbling that follows any commanding officer.

They hated him with the particular clarity of men who have been pushed past what they thought their limits were day after day by a man who gave no sign of caring what their limits were.

They called him just plain [ __ ] because of his initials, JPS.

He worked them 12 to 16 hours a day, 7 days a week in tropical heat, chipping coral with tools that should have been replaced months earlier.

He held inspections before sunrise.

He demanded precision from men who were exhausted.

He had no patience for corners cut or excuses offered.

What his men did not fully understand yet, what they would come to understand in ways that could not be explained in words afterward, was that every hour he drove them that summer, and fall was an hour he was buying them later.

He knew what was coming.

He had read the intelligence reports.

He had looked at the maps.

He understood that Wake Island was not a posting.

It was a position that someone had decided to defend with whatever could be scraped together in front of whatever came next.

So, he drilled them.

He positioned the guns.

He made them rehearse fire control until the routines were automatic.

He hid the 5-in batteries in positions that could not be observed from the water.

And he waited.

The morning of December 8th, 1941 began like any other Monday on Wake Island.

At 6:40 in the morning, an Army radio operator in a trailer near the airfield received a message from Pearl Harbor.

It was uncoded plain language, the kind of transmission that means someone decided speed was more important than security.

SOS island of Oahu attacked by Japanese dive bombers.

This is the real thing.

Deo read it.

He set it down.

He ordered every man to his battle station.

What happened next came fast.

At noon, 36 Japanese medium bombers came in low out of a cloudbank south of the airfield.

They had been flying since dawn up from bases in the Marshall Islands.

No radar on wake to pick them up.

No warning beyond the seconds it took a lookout to recognize the shapes and shout.

Eight of Wake’s 12 Wildcat fighters were on the ground, wing tip to wing tip, being refueled.

The four that had been kept in the air survived.

The eight on the ground did not.

In the first few minutes of the war on Wake Island, the garrison lost 2/3 of its air power.

23 men were killed, 11 more wounded.

Most of them the mechanics who kept those planes flying, men who could not be replaced.

Devo stood and watched the smoke rise from the runway.

He did not say anything that anyone recorded.

He turned and walked back to the command post.

There were gun positions to check.

There were men to account for.

There was work to do.

The island was still his for now.

For 3 days after that first raid, the bombers came back.

every morning from the marshals hitting the airfield, the gun positions, the fuel storage, anything that looked useful from the air.

By December 10th, Wake had four Wildcats still able to fly.

Four against everything the Japanese Navy could put in the air from the Marshall Islands.

The men flew anyway, three sorties a day, sometimes four.

Land, refuel by hand.

There were no fuel trucks, just men with hoses running out under the open sky.

Take off again, sleep under the wings between missions because the tents had been flattened and there was nowhere else.

On the night of December 10th, lookouts on the southern shore reported lights on the horizon.

Ships, Devo was told at his command post.

He didn’t reach for the phone to call Pearl Harbor.

He didn’t call a staff meeting.

He walked to the nearest battery position himself and told the crew what was out there.

Then he told them what they were going to do.

Nothing.

Not yet.

Admiral Sadamicha Kajioa had left Quadriline 2 days earlier with 13 ships, three light cruisers, six destroyers, four transports carrying 450 special naval landing force troops, some of the finest assault infantry Japan had.

He had watched his air groupoups work over Wake Island for 3 days.

He had read the reconnaissance reports.

He had studied the photographs.

He was confident the shore guns had been knocked out.

He brought his ships straight in close under the southern beaches in the dark before dawn.

No preparatory bombardment, no hesitation.

He had done this before.

His men had done this before.

In the past 72 hours alone, Japanese forces had hit American positions all across the Pacific, and those positions had fallen.

Guam, Hong Kong, the Philippines.

Every island they had hit so far had gone the same way.

He saw no reason December 11th would be different.

At Battery L on Wilks eyelet, the gun crew lay behind their weapon in the dark and watched the shapes come in.

Devo’s order had been passed down through every position on the island.

Do not fire.

Stand quiet until I give the word.

The Japanese ships were at 7,000 yd.

6,000.

The men at the guns could see the silhouettes clearly now.

Could hear the engines.

Could make out the bow waves catching what little moonlight reached through the overcast.

5,000 yd.

A destroyer in Kajayoka’s column was close enough that men on Wilks could see sailors moving on the deck.

Corporal Bernard Richardson at one of the shore positions said afterward, “We were scared to death.

We could see what was going to happen to us.

We seemed to be surrounded.

We could see that we were about to get it.

” At 6:15 in the morning, Devo gave the word.

Batteryel opened fire on the column of destroyers to the south.

The first salvo found the Hayate.

Two direct hits to the magazine.

The destroyer did not sink.

It ceased to exist.

The explosion tore the ship in two.

In less than 2 minutes, she was gone, taking 168 men with her.

One man survived.

One from a crew of 169.

The Hayate became the first Japanese surface warship sunk by American forces in the entire war.

Simultaneously, battery A on Peacock Point opened on the Yubari, Kajioa’s flagship.

Four rounds struck home along her starboard side.

Smoke poured from the holes.

The Yubari turned south and ran at reduced speed.

The four remaining Wildcats were already airborne.

Captain Henry Lrod, who had been flying three and four missions a day since December 8th, who had not slept more than a few hours at a stretch in 3 days, who was running a fighter patched and repatched by mechanics working in the open under daily bombing raids, put his wild cat into a dive.

The Kisaragi was already turning, already running, already headed away from the fight.

It did not matter.

Lrod’s bomb landed on the destroyer’s stern directly on the depth charge racks.

The Kisaragi exploded and sank with all hands.

157 men.

Kajioa looked around at what was left of his fleet.

Two destroyers gone, nine ships damaged.

Not a single soldier had made it ashore.

He ordered the retreat.

The entire invasion force turned north and withdrew.

The men on Wake Island watched them go.

“When the Japanese withdrew,” one of the battery l gunners said later.

“You’d have thought we’d won the war,” a sergeant on Deo’s staff wrote in his journal that night.

“I am certain every man on this island grew a good 2 in.

” “That was the only time in the entire Pacific War that shore batteries alone turned back an amphibious landing force.

The only time word reached the United States within days.

President Roosevelt had been preparing to tell the country that Wake Island had fallen.

Guam was gone.

The Philippines were crumbling.

Hong Kong was days away from surrender.

The news that came instead that a garrison of Marines on a three square mile piece of coral had just sunk two Japanese destroyers and driven off an invasion fleet, hit the country like a window thrown open in a room that had been sealed for days.

Americans did not know all the details.

They did not know how Devo had hidden his guns, or why his crews had held their fire until the last possible moment, or what it had cost to keep four wild cats flying when eight of the original 12 had been destroyed on day one.

What they knew was simpler.

Somebody had hit back.

449 Marines on a coral atal just did something the whole Pacific War had never seen before.

Most Americans have never heard their names.

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That is the only way stories that history forgot ever reach the people who should know them.

When the last Japanese ship disappeared over the horizon, Wake Island fell quiet.

Not the quiet of relief, the quiet of men who understand that what just happened will not be the end of it.

Dearu walked the positions after the fleet withdrew.

He checked ammunition.

He counted what was left.

He looked at the faces of men who had just done something they themselves didn’t fully believe yet.

He said what needed to be said, nothing more.

Then he went back to work because he knew what was coming next.

The Japanese Navy had never taken a defeat like that in this war.

They were not going to leave it alone.

He was right.

Kajioa returned to Quadriline and filed his afteraction report.

Tokyo read it.

The response came quickly.

The Japanese Navy dispatched two carriers to finish the job.

Not light carriers, not escort carriers.

the Soryu and the Hiru fleet carriers with experienced air groupoups that had been part of the same strike force that hit Pearl Harbor.

On December 16th, 9 days after Pearl Harbor, Admiral Nagumo detached them from the returning strike force and sent them south to take a three square mile island from 449 Marines.

Think about what that decision meant.

The most powerful carrier force Japan had ever assembled, the one that had just crippled the American Pacific Fleet, had to stop, turn around, and go deal with a problem that was supposed to have been over in hours.

Because it wasn’t over because Devo and his men had made sure it wasn’t over.

The bombing changed after that.

Before it had been land-based aircraft from the Marshals.

Now it was carrier planes, fresh crews, and more of them.

Devo walked his positions each morning and did the same arithmetic he had been doing since December 8th.

What do we have? What did we lose? What can we do with what’s left? December 12th, four wild cats still flying.

December 17th, 3.

December 20th.

Two.

There is something specific about watching a number that small get smaller.

In a large army, you lose men and equipment, and the machine absorbs it and grinds on.

On Wake Island, every loss was visible.

Every man who went down was a man the others knew by name.

Every wild cat that didn’t come back was a piece of the island’s ability to survive.

the next day.

The pilots who were still flying by the third week knew the math as well as Devo did.

They flew anyway.

On December 22nd, Zeros off the Soryu and Hiru caught them both.

One wildat went down in the air.

The pilot didn’t get out.

The other made it back to the runway, shot through, and rolled to a stop.

The mechanics looked at it, looked at each other, looked at the tools in their hands.

There was nothing left to fix it with.

Wake Island had no air power left.

Captain Henry Lrod had been a fighter pilot at the start of all this.

When the last Wildcat was grounded, he picked up a rifle.

He joined the infantry positions along the beach.

He carried ammunition.

He dug in alongside men he barely knew in positions he had only ever seen from above.

Doing work that no aviation training had prepared him for and that nobody had asked him to do.

He had already done more than almost any pilot in the war.

He had shot down two Japanese bombers in the first days of the battle.

He had put his bomb into the Kizaragi’s depth charges.

He had flown until there was nothing left to fly.

That wasn’t enough for him.

On December 23rd, in the darkness before dawn, when the Japanese came ashore for the second time, Lrod was at a gun imp placement on the beach.

The men there were almost out of ammunition.

He got up in the open and went for more.

He was shot while he was running.

He kept going.

He got the ammunition to the position.

Then he went down and did not get up again.

Henry Lrod received the Medal of Honor, the first aviator to receive it in World War II.

The citation was for December 23rd on the ground with a rifle after there were no more planes to fly.

There were men on Wake Island who had no obligation to fight at all.

more than 1100 civilian construction workers, contractors, engineers, laborers, men whose employment contracts said nothing about combat, men who had come out to pour concrete and string wire, not to hold a perimeter against the Japanese Special Naval Landing Force.

When the bombs started falling on December 8th, most of them kept working.

When the Marines needed help, some of them picked up weapons.

They carried ammunition under fire.

They pulled wounded men out of exposed positions.

They kept generators running so the command post could communicate.

They did a thousand things that don’t appear in afteraction reports because nobody thought to write them down.

When Wake fell, they became prisoners of war alongside the Marines.

Most were shipped to camps in China and Japan.

98 of them were kept on the island as forced labor.

In October 1943, American forces struck wake from the sea and air.

The Japanese commander on the island, apparently believing an invasion was coming, lined those 98 men up on a beach and executed them.

One man escaped into the surf.

The Japanese recaptured him.

He was beheaded.

Their names are not on the monuments that most people visit.

They went to Wake Island to pour concrete.

They stayed until the end.

History remembers the winners.

But sometimes the men who held on to something more valuable than victory, who held on to their duty, their dignity, and the man standing next to them, those are the ones who lost.

The night of December 22nd, Dearu made his last entry in the log.

He wrote that he was still waiting for the relief ships.

He did not know that USS Saratoga carrying reinforcements, supplies, and 18 new Wildcats had turned back that same day, 515 mi out.

He did not know that the order had come from an admiral who was holding the Pacific Command temporarily, waiting for Chester Nimttz to arrive from Washington.

An admiral who looked at the reports of Japanese carriers near Wake looked at USS Saratoga and decided he could not risk losing her.

He did not know that when the recall message came through to Task Force 14, the men on those ships, sailors who had been racing south for a week, who knew exactly what was waiting on the other end of that run, stood at their stations in silence.

Some of them wept.

Nobody recorded who.

Nobody asked.

The ships turned around.

On Wake Island, Deo closed the log.

He had positions to check before dawn.

At 4:15 in the morning, the first report came in.

Enemy landing.

Toki Point, the tip of Peel Island.

Kajioa had returned with everything he’d been given.

900 Special Naval Landing Force troops in the first wave alone.

The Soryu and Hiru overhead providing air cover.

The same two carriers that had grounded Wakes’s last two Wildcats the day before.

Two old destroyer transports deliberately run ground to get men on the beach faster.

One of those ships was destroyed by gunfire from a battery that had no business still being operational.

The other held.

Hundreds of Japanese soldiers poured off the grounded hull in the dark and spread across the southern end of the island.

Devo’s phone lines, the field wire his men had strung between positions over the past two weeks, repaired and re-repaired under daily bombing, started going silent.

Not because the positions had fallen, because the wire had been cut.

He could not call out.

He could not receive.

He did not know what was happening at any position he could not physically reach.

He did the only thing left.

He walked for 11 hours.

The fighting on Wake Island was the kind that does not appear on maps.

It was rifles and bayonets in the dark.

It was men behind coral berms who could hear Japanese voices in the brush and didn’t know how many were out there.

It was small groups cut off from each other, fighting without orders because there was no way to receive orders, holding whatever piece of ground was directly in front of them because there was nowhere else to be.

A group of Marines and civilian volunteers held the airfield for more than 2 hours after Japanese troops had cut off their escape route.

They knew they were surrounded.

They kept shooting.

By 7:00 in the morning, the Japanese controlled the southern runway.

By 8, they had split the island in half.

Devo stood at his command post and looked at the map.

He looked at the positions that had gone silent.

He looked at the ones still holding.

He looked at what was left.

He knew what the numbers meant.

He did not send a radio message.

He did not call his officers together.

He took a white cloth.

He walked out of the command post and began moving from position to position.

The same way he had walked the line every morning since October.

Same pace, same bearing, one foot in front of the other on the same coral he had been drilling his men on for 2 months.

At each position, he said the same thing.

The situation, the decision, the order.

The Marines at those positions had not surrendered.

Some of them still had ammunition.

Some of them had not been hit.

Some of them were positioned behind cover that the Japanese had not yet found.

Some of them refused, not out of panic, not out of confusion, out of something that had no name, a kind of unwillingness to stop that went beyond training, beyond orders, beyond what anyone had prepared them for.

Men who had been on that coral for 16 days did not lay their weapons down easily.

Devo stood in front of each one.

He waited.

He did not leave until the weapon was on the ground.

At 1:30 in the afternoon of December 23rd, 1941, 15 days and approximately 18 hours after the first Japanese bombs had fallen on Wake Island, the garrison surrendered.

Devou and his men were taken prisoner that afternoon.

Most were shipped to camps in China and then Japan.

They spent 3 years and 9 months in captivity through two summers and three winters in compounds far from anything they recognized.

They were released in September 1945 after the war had been over for weeks.

They came home to a country that had moved on.

Guadal Canal, Midway, Terawa, Ewima.

Those were the names Americans knew by then.

Wake Island was the beginning, the very beginning, before anyone understood how the story would end.

Back when the most realistic expectation was that things would keep getting worse before they got better.

What Devo and his men never knew in those years in the camps was what their 16 days had cost the other side.

The Soryu and the Hiyu were fleet carriers at the peak of their capability.

They had launched the planes that attacked Pearl Harbor.

They carried some of the most experienced aviators Japan had.

men who had trained for years, who had been flying combat missions since the war in China, who had refined their skills to a level that took a decade to build and could not be replaced in months.

They were supposed to be headed home after Pearl Harbor.

Instead, on December 16th, they were detached from the returning strike force and sent south to Wake Island because of December 11th.

6 months later in June of 1942, the Soryu and the Hiryu were at midway.

So were the Akagi and the Kaga.

On the morning of June 4th, 1942, American dive bombers came down out of high altitude.

The Japanese carriers had their flight decks loaded with armed and fueled aircraft.

Caught in the middle of rearming for a second strike.

The Akagi took one direct hit.

Enough.

The Kaga took four.

The Soryu took three.

Within 6 minutes of the first bomb hitting, all three carriers were burning from stem to stern.

The fires reached the armed planes on the flight decks.

The armed planes reached the fuel lines below.

The Hiru survived the morning and struck back, badly damaging USS Yorktown.

By evening, she was burning too.

Four Japanese fleet carriers gone in a single day.

The pilots who had flown off the Soryu’s deck to strafe Wake Island in December.

The crews who had launched the Zeros that shot down Wake’s last two Wildcats on December 22nd.

The men who had gone to sleep in their bunks the night of December 22nd, knowing Wake would fall the next day, most of them did not make it off those ships at Midway.

The Japanese Navy never recovered from what happened on June 4th, 1942.

The long road back, Guadal Canal, the Solomons, the push across the central Pacific, Ewoima, Okinawa, and finally the deck of USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay ran through Midway.

Midway had roots.

To take a three square mile piece of coral from 449 Marines, Japan had to spend ships and men that could not be spent elsewhere.

Had to detach its two finest carriers from their mission and send them on a detour.

had to write in their own afteraction reports that American shore batteries manned by men who had been blasted from the air for three days, who were running on almost nothing, had handed the Imperial Japanese Navy its first amphibious defeat of the war, and had to start asking themselves a question they had not needed to ask before December 11th.

What if the next one is harder, too? In the darkest week after Pearl Harbor, when Guam had fallen in three days, when the Philippines were collapsing, when there was no good news coming from anywhere in the Pacific, the story of Wake Island arrived.

It did not save the war.

It did something smaller than that and more necessary.

It told a country that was learning what it meant to be at war.

That somewhere on a piece of coral that most people couldn’t find on a map, American men had looked at what was coming toward them and had not moved.

That was enough.

For one week, that was enough.

Devo spent nearly four years in a prison camp.

He came home.

He didn’t talk about Wake Island much.

When he said anything at all, it was plain.

His men had done their job.

They had held as long as they could hold.

What he bought with 16 days on that coral.

What his men bought, and the civilians who stayed, and the pilots who flew until there was nothing left to fly, does not appear in any ledger.

But it was there, in every step of the long road back, in every man who followed, on every island that came after, who had learned first from Wake and then from the names that came after Wake now carved into stone somewhere, that the ground can be held, even when it feels like it can’t.

Even when the ships have turned around, and no one has told you yet.

If your father was there, if your grandfather wore that uniform, Army, Navy, Marines, Army, Airore, anywhere in that war, leave his name in the comments.

Tell us where he served.

Tell us one thing he said at the dinner table that you never forgot.

The stories that only your family knows, the ones that never made it into the history books.

Those stories are disappearing faster than most people realize.

Don’t let them go in silence.