December 11, 1941 0330 Wake Island
Every Marine on the island had been awake for the past three hours. Dauntlesses had detected the invasion convoy on the afternoon of the 9th. The patrol planes had attacked the convoy three times with 500 pound bombs. A single patrol boat had been damaged from near misses and after the landing party sailors had been transferred to other ships, he turned back to Roi-Namur.
Nell bombers had attacked the island twice more. The first raid was a high level raid at 22,000 feet to avoid the Marine fighters. That was successful, as only one bomber was shot down but the bombs moved sand and little else. The second raid was a low level attack by 12 Nells. They had succeeded in bombing the primary dispersal area, killing thirty Marine maintainers and destroying a pair of Wildcats and a trio of Dauntlesses on the ground. However the CAP descended on them and harried them out to sea. Only six bombers would ever fly again.
The invasion force had zigged and zagged. It was covered by two heavy cruisers and a trio of light cruisers. The half dozen transports held 1,500 men for the landing parties. Some of the men had been assigned to the Guam invasion but their landing team was re-allocated to Wake as pre-war overflights had shown that the Americans were evacuating Guam even as Wake was strengthened.
Major Devereux had planned to ambush any invasion force. He was confident that his Marines could defeat a landing but it would be far easier to prevent a landing.
The 8 inch guns had been well hidden on the island. They were always undercover when any civilian was within 50 miles of the island and twelve large and obvious fake gun barrels had been poorly emplaced at various locations around the island. The heavy guns were protecting the main lagoon entrance and the south beach. The lighter 5 inch 51 caliber guns were in heavily prepared positions at the points of Wake’s triangle shape. Each battery had its own director and each director position was tied into three redundant telephone lines. The rest of the garrison was either in reinforced concrete bunkers or in fighting positions with plenty of overhead protection.
The guns were loaded, the crews adjusting the range finders as the Japanese warships crept into position, first 10,000 yards away where the pair of heavy cruisers began to slowly steam parallel to the southwest shore. The rest of the force then they moved to 7,000 yards away before the light cruisers broke off from the destroyers and patrol boats, and then 4,500 yards away.
No one on either side had fired as the small dark blobs on the horizon became clearly defined occlusions of light that continued to approach the island. Guns tracked each their targets. The heavy cruisers were loading a mix of high explosive and semi-armor piercing shells for a hurricane bombardment that was scheduled to land just minutes before the first assault wave should be approaching the shingle. The American guns were focused on the nearer ships. As the light cruisers moved closer, the heavy eight inch guns slowly shifted to track their targets.
“Fire, fire, fire” came across the intercoms in each battery’s operation chamber. The voice was slightly high pitched, but sure and confident that they could now defend themselves. Within a minute, the coastal defense batteries of Wake opened fire. Batteries L and K, each with two five inch guns, concentrated on a destroyer apiece. Their first rounds were wild but corrections were being shouted as soon as splashes were seen.
Battery Boxboro, with two eight inch guns from USS Lexington, had been tracking the light cruiser Tatsuta. The Japanese warships were surprised as they believed their aviators claims that the defenses of Wake Island had been destroyed despite the heavy bomber losses. Battery Acton had no nearby targets, so the two guns lofted shells at the heavy cruiser Kinugasa. The last five inch battery was silent as no ships were within their field of fire.
Within minutes, a light cruiser and a pair of destroyers were sinking. The light cruiser had split in two when a pair of 8 inch shells penetrated the thin armor that boxed her forward magazine. One destroyer was flooding from a half dozen hits. Her engineers were trying to contain the damage and may have succeeded until she backed into a contact mine. Aboard Hayate, fires consumed her. Flames licked her superstructure. Her depth charges were cast overboard without arming. Shells for her guns were either fired rapidly at barely seen American positions or thrown into the sea. Suddenly, the western sky lit up as the oxygen tanks near the torpedo tubes overheated and added to the fires. American defenders could faintly hear the screams of burning men from two miles away.
Forty one minutes after the first shell was fired, the invasion force had turned around having lost a light cruiser and a pair of destroyers and suffering modest damage to a heavy cruiser and a trio of transports.
