Facing Fearful Odds

Although the siege of Wake Island was not one of World War II's biggest campaigns, it had a profound psychological effect on the course of that struggle. This was the battle that first raised American spirits in the dark weeks immediately following Pearl Harbor. For sixteen suspenseful days, 449 U.S. Marines, assisted by a handful of sailors and soldiers and a few hundred civilian construction workers, withstood repeated attacks by numerically superior Japanese forces. Although Wake finally fell on 23 December 1941, its garrison made the Japanese pay an embarrassingly high price for a tiny coral outpost. Based on interviews with over seventy American and Japanese participants, the riveting, you-are-there narrative pulsates with the crack of rifles, the stutter of machine guns, the roar of cannon, and the concussion of bombs. This is military history from the bottom up, an unforgettable reading experience told from the perspective of enlisted men and junior officers who manned the front lines. Gregory J. W. Urwin is a professor in the department of history at the University of Central Arkansas. His publications include "Custer Victorious: The Civil War Battles of General George Armstrong Custer" (Nebraska 1990), "The United States Cavalry: An Illustrated History", and The United States Infantry: An Illustrated History, 1775-1918."