Pacific Alamo: The Battle for Wake Island (review)

"How the 'Devil Dogs of Wake Island' battled long odds is one of the great stories in the annals of military lore," historian John Wukovits declares in his introduction to Pacific Alamo. However, how Wake's beleaguered understrength U.S. Marine defense battalion, augmented by a small aviation component, navy sailors, army communicators, and varying numbers of civilian construction workers, withstood almost daily bombings, gallantly withstood one landing attempt, and, in the end, reluctantly surrendered, is a tale that has indeed been told within the last decade. The knowledgeable reader will find no revelations in Pacific Alamo but may, in fact, be annoyed by the errors that appear not only in the main story but in its context.

The miscues are minor (some reflecting the vagaries of human recollection) but prompt one to ponder the larger issues of mastery of subject matter and context: for example, President Roosevelt did not change the Pacific Fleet's base to Pearl Harbor in October 1939 (it was May 1940) (p. 20); Major Devereux actually set foot on Wake on 12 October, not 9 October, 1941 (the ship arrived on the 9th but bad weather prevented him from going ashore until the 12th) (p. 35); and, the author's declaration to the contrary, the Philippine Clipper was being prepared for a reconnaissance flight when the first Japanese raid hit (hence the marine pilots at the field being briefed for escorting her) (p. 54). Interestingly, the author notes that Captain Elrod "scribbled" a letter to his wife—on a typewriter? (p. 129).

Careful editing might have caught statements such as the "Navy Roosevelt had loved since youth . . . lay in smouldering ruins at the bottom of Pearl Harbor" (p. 3) or that the destruction wreaked by the Japanese on 7 December 1941 left the fleet "a smoking ruin" (p. 2), or that "much of the fleet lay on Pearl Harbor's bottom" (p. 117) that sound dramatic but are gross exaggerations. There are puzzling omissions, too: outside of one reference to the appendicitis case transferred ashore from the submarine Triton before the siege, neither Triton nor Tambor, the subs deployed off Wake, are even mentioned. While neither boat accomplished anything of note, the submariners' presence should at least have been recognized.

Written in an easy-to-read, popular, acronym-free style, Pacific Alamo reflects solid primary research in the limited but pertinent American document collections, at the National Archives and the Boston University Library, as well as the standard secondary literature, although the way the primary sources are treated leaves a lot to be desired. The book contains some fresh perspectives from veterans (for whom Wukovits's warm well-founded admiration and affection is obvious) of that "magnificent fight" that do not essentially duplicate any previous accounts utilized by others who have written about Wake, and reflect their efforts to obtain compensation from the Japanese. The book's glaring weakness, however, lies in its lack of accurate Japanese sources, leading a knowledgeable reader to conclude that however well-written and absorbing Pacific Alamo may be, that shortcoming introduces errors into the narrative and thus limits its value to the serious historian. Pacific Alamo is not, as the liner notes proclaim, "the first complete picture of the historic events of that dark December."