Gregory J. W. Urwin, the author of Facing Fearful Odds: The Siege of Wake Island, poses with the book in his old office at the University of Central Arkansas, where he taught from 1984 to 1999. (Courtesy Mike Kemp, Log Cabin Democrat)
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The siege of Wake Island may not have been one of World War II's biggest campaigns, but 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.
Facing Fearful Odds offers readers an inside look at this gallant "last stand" with a riveting, you-are-there narrative that pulsates with the crack of rifles, the stutter of machine guns, the roar of cannon, and the concussion of bombs. Beginning his research in 1978, author Gregory Urwin interviewed more than seventy American and Japanese survivors of the Wake Island Campaign, received information from the widows and children of veterans who died before he could reach them, and consulted thousands of forgotten documents at the National Archives, the Marine Corps Historical Center, and other repositories. The result is military history written from the bottom up, an unforgettable reading experience, told from the perspective of enlisted men and junior officers who served on the front lines.
This is also the story of a remarkable community of Americans who defied the power of the hitherto invincible Imperial Japanese Navy for more than two weeks, and then went on to compile one of the highest survival rates of any group of Caucasian prisoners of war to fall into Japanese hands between 1941 and 1945.
Facing Fearful Odds received the General Wallace M. Greene, Jr., Award from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation for being the outstanding non-fiction book pertinent to Marine Corps history published in 1998. The History Channel has commissioned Greystone Communications to produce "Wake Island, Alamo of the Pacific," a two-hour documentary based on Facing Fearful Odds, which will air from 9:00 to 11:00 P.M., June 2, 2003.
(Left) Dr. Gregory J. W. Urwin (in Marine sun helmet) and Temple doctoral student David J. Ulbrich celebrate their arrival at Wake Island on August 25, 2002. (Right) Dr. Urwin gets set for a shot during the filming of "Wake Island, Alamo of the Pacific," the History Channel documentary based on Facing Fearful Odds, which was first broadcast on June 2, 2003. Behind Urwin is one of the British 8-inch guns that the Japanese brought from Singapore to strengthen their defenses on Wake.
