Given Up for Dead by Bill Sloan

Author:Bill Sloan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307418081
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

Sublieutenant Shigeyoshi Ozeki, a Japanese medical officer who landed with invading Japanese troops on December 23, 1941, was later credited with helping save the lives of wounded Americans following the surrender of Wake. (Courtesy Shigeyoshi Ozeki)

11

A Battle That “Made the Gods Weep”

In years to come, most Wake Island survivors agreed that the night of December 22–23, 1941, was the darkest they could ever remember. Lookouts were literally unable to see their hands in front of their faces. The weather was foul, too, with a light rain falling out of a heavily overcast sky and a chill, penetrating wind blowing. The night hung above the atoll like a soggy blanket, so thick you could almost feel it. Even the snow-white beach that stretched away from right to left was as dark as a blot of India ink. The sound of the wind-driven surf pounding against the reef seemed strangely intensified by the blackness.

A few hundred yards from one of the lookout towers on Wilkes Island, at a .30-caliber machine gun emplacement near Kuku Point, Corporal John Johnson was feeling upbeat in spite of the wet gloom surrounding him. At the stroke of midnight, the quietly intense young Missourian would officially turn twenty years old, and he was looking forward to this milestone. Occasionally his thoughts turned to Dorothy David, a girl back in St. Louis, and the Hawaiian grass skirt he’d sent her as a high school graduation present. She’d asked for it, half jokingly, in one of her letters, and he would have loved to see her face when she opened the package.

Johnson also thought about First Sergeant Mike Hogan, his drill instructor back at boot camp. For a long time, it seemed as if Hogan had had it in for him, but then Johnson had figured out that Hogan was actually taking him under his wing as a mentor. Hogan was the main reason for Johnson becoming one of the younger corporals in the Marine Corps, and he wondered where Hogan was right now. Anyway, being a corporal and a teenager just didn’t seem to go together. Before his promotion, Johnson had felt he looked and acted more mature than most guys his age, and as he waited out the last few minutes before his birthday, he utilized that maturity to ease the mind of a worried civilian volunteer from East St. Louis, Illinois, named Leo Nonn.

“They say these planes that hit us the last two days came from a Jap carrier,” said Nonn, who was three years older than Johnson but seemed younger. “Does that mean they’ll be trying another landing pretty soon?”

Johnson smiled and shook his head. Despite his fretfulness, Nonn was an affable guy whom the corporal considered the most dependable of the six civilians assigned to him. Before the shooting started, Nonn had never been any closer to a machine gun than the soda fountain in the contractors’ canteen, where he worked. But since then, he’d taken an active interest in learning about the .30s and how to fire them.

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