Richardson was in the thick of things on 23 December 1941, the American garrison's last day of resistance.  He wrote this account of those memorable hours in the winter of 1945 -- shortly after his return home from a Japanese prisoner of war camp.

        I tried to count the days of the war.  December 8 to . . . what date was this? 23? 24? or 22?  Too tired to really care, I could do no more than peer into the night, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, fighting exhaustion.

        It was midnight.  Rain fell gently, little more than a mist, but enough to soak completely in the course of a four hour watch. Goose bumps stood rigidly under our cumbersome ponchos.  Wake being a tropical island, we habitually wore only shoes and shorts under the useless rain capes and the coming of rain always caught us short.  A light breeze whipped the cold, wet canvas against us as we continued to shiver, curse silently, and strain our eyes peering into the impenetrable night.

        "What time is it now?" Red Stevens [Pfc. Robert L. Stevens] whispered hoarsely for at least the hundredth time.

        "Slip me the flashlight and I'll look," I said.  Though the fire control platform on which we stood was but six feet square, Red's figure was indistinguishable in the blackness.  He held the flashlight at arm's length and waved it slowly until my hand collided with it and took it from him.  Under cover of the tent formed by my poncho when I squatted, I looked at my Ingersoll by the dim beam of the tired batteries.

        "Ten past twelve."

        "See?" Red protested angrily.  "You ought to look at the time when I ask you to.  Now we're overdue for relief!"  He stomped to the top of the ladder.  "I'll go wake Gilley."  He cursed in low, vehement tones, and I knew he had once again walked into the barbed wire crisscrossing the path.  After his outburst, I remained isolated in a cocoon of damp, black ominous silence.

        I resumed the stolid, measured march about the platform, guided by one hand kept on the range keeper instrument bolted to the center of the floor.  Though my eyes ached from the constant effort to pierce the gloom, I was happy this was a night watch for they would ache worse when I came back at 4:00 A.M.  The tropical sun would be brilliant by five thirty.  Trying to stare into its intensity would surely bring back those momentary periods of blindness we had all begun to know.

        Suddenly, I was aware of something amiss.  Panic gripped me.  Had the Japs landed and sneaked up on me?  Then it came to me that I had merely stopped walking and closed my eyes.  Complete exhaustion near, but resolute, I resumed my measured march around the range keeper and sought a means to keep awake until Red returned with our relief.

        I counted steps, reversed my direction, but it was no use.  I could not even keep that straight. I was done, asleep on my feet.

        A muttered oath and the peculiar jangle of disturbed barbed wire penetrated my drowsy fog and shattered the silence.  Wide-eyed now, I stared toward the path.  "Red," softly, "that you?"  No answer.  "Red," more urgently, then, "Who's there?"

        "It's me, Gilley, Gilley, Gilley [Pfc. Ernest N. Gilley Jr.]."  He was inches from me, right there on the platform. I leaped back against the rail.  "Red crawled right into our foxhole and pushed us out.  He was sleeping before we were awake."

        "Do you have to run into that barbed wire, every time?"

        "Oh, go to hell," Gilley was always amiable.  "Shut up and go to bed, sorehead."  His tennis shoes slapped the floor in the swishy sounds of his soft shoe routine, his trademark.  I pulled the binocular strap over my head and lowered it through the neck of my poncho.  I tried to give them to Gilley.  "Give 'em to Skinny [Pfc. Clovis R. Marlow]," he insisted. "It's his turn to try to keep the damned things dry."

        Slowly, I felt my way down the ladder.  About two steps down, Gilley stopped me, "Rich?"

        "What now?"

        "When you get to dreamland, don't forget to . . ." again there was the sound of his dancing tennis shoes and a low hum in my ear, "Give my regards to Broadway and tell her I'll be back. . . ."

        "Old silly Gilley," I said and felt my way down the ladder.

        "It's blacker than the inside of a cow," Gilley's whispered observation reached me.

        "I'm pooped." Skinny sighed.

        "Who isn't." Gilley countered.

        "Good night," I called and walked toward my foxhole.  My flapping poncho caught on the barbed wire and I plunged headlong into the entanglement.  Even too exhausted to swear, I unhooked the barbs patiently to the accompaniment of Gilley's amused chuckles.

        Sergeant [Henry A.] Bedell shook my shoulder violently and repeated urgently in my ear. "Wake up, Rich! "Wake up! Japs! They've landed!"  Then he was gone, off to another foxhole and another tired Marine.

        Nothing really registered with me even though I heard his words with crystal clarity.  My head sank back to its position on my helmet in the coral sand.  My muscles and my mind lunged toward the complete relaxation and insensibility of sleep.  Then reflexes took over.  With a jerk, I crawled from my foxhole just in time to collide with Bedell who had returned to be sure he had wakened me.  I followed him through the night, startled completely awake by the whine of rifle fire and the terrifying streaks of tracer bullets.

        Though we were members of a 5"-51 coast artillery battery, all of us had small arms.  As I followed Bedell's indistinct, crouching figure through the inky mist, I checked my Browning automatic [rifle] and the heavy belt of magazines sagging from my hips.

2d Lt. John A. McAlister (left) commanded Battery L, Wake Island Detachment, First Defense Battalion, throughout the siege of Wake Island, and he displayed great gallantry in helping to lead the counterattack that destroyed the Japanese beachhead on Wilkes Islet on the morning of 23 December 1941.  He is shown here with 2d Lt. John F. Kinney, VMF-211's indefatigable engineering officer.  The occasion was a press conference in Washington DC, on 10 July 1945, following the two officers' daring escape from a Japanese prison train in China.  (Gregory J. W. Urwin Collection)

        Bedell led us to the grenade dump. He issued grenades and orders to the assembled range crew:  nine of us, Sergeant Bedell, Wag, Gilley, Skinny, Red, [Pfc. Gordon L.] Gunny Marshall, [Pfc. Wiley W.] Sloman, Bill Buehler [Pfc. William F. Buehler] and myself.  Bedell's urgent staccato:  "Foxholes by the channel, keep low, lots of grenades, keep low, zigzag, keep low," -- a reiteration of action orders already drilled into our minds.  Abruptly, he ceased talking, turned and disappeared into the night.  Sporadic tracers and a burst of artillery illuminated his departure.  With the first explosion, our group dissolved and individuals made diverse paths through the sparse underbrush which had been all but obliterated by the previous fifteen days of Jap bombings.  Intent on reaching the channel and again feeling the dubious comfort of being one in a group, I was the first to rejoin Bedell at the pre-arranged spot.  At once, he led me to the farthest of our positions by the partially dug new channel into the lagoon which severed our tiny island of Wilkes from the main island of Wake.  With final, fierce admonitions to remain put until he returned, he posted me and left me.

        Wilkes Island was so small we knew its topography like the backs of our hands. To my left was the expanse of semi-dredged channel leading to the open sea.  The narrow, boulder-littered beach was at my front. Gunny Marshall, a tall, lank, likable string of Oklahoma braggadocio was within a few yards of me somewhere at my right. On the interior of our island, to my rear, God knew what.

        My mind, already a little fuzzy from the grueling routine of the past two weeks, painted vivid pictures of the underbrush loaded with lurking Japs.  Time and again, I imagined Japs surrounded me, though, actually, I could neither see nor hear any. Artillery fire became heavier.  The misty rain eased almost to a stop.

        With greater frequency, assorted explosions shattered the night. Their scattered light, momentary as it was, restored my confidence in my faculties.  Occasionally, the searchlight outfit would send a sudden brief beam up the beach, then sweep back again and go out.  There was no action and there were no Japs on my little part of the beach.  The gunfire made a shattering backdrop of tremendous music which went almost unnoticed as I strained to pick out the small warning sounds; leather scraping against rock, brush snapping, the snap of a closing rifle bolt, the snap of a safety catch, any of which, if unnoticed or ignored might mean the end of me.

This map shows the Japanese landing on Wilkes Islet, 23 December 1941.  Corporal Richardson and the range section from Battery L, Wake Island Detachment, First Defense Detachment, deployed initially just east of the enemy beachhead, along the islet's unfinished channel.  (Courtesy Hyperwar, Patrick Clancey, and U.S. Marine Corps)

        "Listen for a lonesome drum.  Listen for a lonesome drum.  Listen for a lonesome drum."  Like a cracked record, the thought repeated itself in my mind.  With a detached part of my brain, I could see the Carl Carmer book of that title on the shelf of the battalion library. I had never bothered to read it.  Conscious effort to erase it from my mind failed.  "Listen for a lonesome drum."

        Across the lagoon on Wake, two gigantic explosions lit the sky and boomed across the water.  What caused them?  The remaining two gas storage tanks?  I could only guess.  Following them, a continuous barrage of artillery.  Whose:  ours or the Japs?

        I wished that Bedell would crawl back with information, would take me to the action, would send a messenger or a message of some kind.  Anything to end this isolation.  His guess, at least, would be better than mine.  And all the while it kept running through my head,  "Listen for a lonesome drum.  Listen for a lonesome drum."

        How long did I crouch there alone in the wet, black night? Less than three hours? Incredible! It was a lifetime in a vacuum.

        It was almost four when the misty rain blew away and day began to break. Orders or not, now that I could see a little, the isolation and inactivity were unendurable.

        I snaked my way among the boulders toward a big GI shoe sticking our and found Gunny.  "You had any messages?"

        "Nothing since Bedell told me to stay here till he got back.  You?"

        "Nothing."

        "Think it's safe to light up now?" he asked.  "I'm dying for a smoke."  We made a cover against the rock and lit up, cupping the glow in our hands at the base of the rock.  We smoked in short hot puffs and lit a second from the butt of the first.  "Can you see the horizon?" Gunny asked.

        We peered into the murk.  "It looks to me as if there are ships out there.  Some spots seem darker than others."  The sun was not yet up but soon it was clear to us that some blobs of horizon remained darker than the rest.  We were surrounded on all sides by ships.  Wake was encircled by ships of all kinds, big ones and little ones, waiting only for dawn to move in and finish us off.  We knew this and admitted it to ourselves and to each other. Isolation was now unbearable, inactivity impossible.

        We moved up the beach away from the channel, gathering the members of our crew as we progressed.  Bill was the eighth man.  He was pale and big-eyed, seeming even younger than usual in the wan light of dawn.  Quickly, Bill briefed us.  "Bedell took me down to the beach with him scouting.  A burst of, I think machine gun fire, got him.  I couldn't even tell where it came from.  There was nothing I could do so I came back."  Despite first close contact with violent death, Bill was calm and matter-of-fact.  "A landing barge is beached around the bend."  He gestured.  "There are more Japs on the island than there are of us."

        We moved on cautiously.

        As we rounded the bend, we spotted the red and black landing barge, half-in, half-out of the water.  Directly ashore from it stood the three inch AA gun we had never had enough men to man.  From the slender bamboo shaft beside the piece flew a Jap battle flag.

        We inched along.  As we moved, machine gunners and searchlight crews who had held positions on our right flank during the long hours joined us.  Down at the edge of the beach, behind boulders, I caught my first glimpse of Japs:  all of them dead. They wore split-toed canvas and rubber shoes.  We paused in wonder.  We stared at the dead men and their strange shoes. "What in the hell kind of people are we fighting anyway?"  We exchanged bewildered looks and moved on.

        Japs crouched behind the next bunch of boulders.  Gunny Marshall flung grenades instantaneously and effectively and we moved on, more cautiously.

        At the next boulder, near the water all by itself, a small group of Japs tried to keep the boulder between themselves and us.  We made a semi-circle and moved in, tense and determined and inexperienced.  Corporal  [William C.] Halstead, a gnome-like little searchlight man, dashed ahead of the line, leaped atop the boulder with an enormous leap, calmly and quickly finished them off one after another from above, then jumped back to the protection of the ground.

        Now we formed a line at a right angle to the beach and closed toward the flag.  Jap voices lifted in shrill, strange battle cries.  Gunny answered with an angry tortured rebel yell. It was a release from the tensions of the silent night.  We picked up Gunny's cue and drowned the enemy voices.  Then, as unexpectedly as the screams had sprung from us, they died away and ceased.  We inched along, firing and feeling our way.

        I eased myself into the prone position exactly as the instructor on the Camp Elliot firing range had taught me, wiggled until properly settled, keeping my eye on the patch of strange uniform which I imagined to be a Japanese, I sighted in cautiously and waited for identification of my target.  The patch of cloth raised and enlarged.  It was a shoulder.  Then a helmet edge appeared in my sights.  I held my breath, squeezed the trigger and killed the first game I had ever stalked -- a human being.

.

A U.S. Marine practices his marksmanship with a Model 1903 Springfield rifle, circa 1941.  The '03 Springfield was the standard weapon of the Marine Corps at the start of World War II, and the stress the Marines put on marksmanship raised the cost the Japanese paid for the conquest of Wake Island.  (Courtesy U.S. Marine Corps)

        Sergeant Peepsight Hassig [T. Sgt. Edwin F. Hassig] wished aloud for an automatic rifle and I sheepishly realized that in the excitement, I had switched my Browning over and was not using the automatic at all.  I felt foolish and ineffective and know I blushed with shame as I switched the Browning over to automatic in answer to Hassig's wish.

        A moment later, Gunny yelled, "Sloman got his!"  I had not adjusted, I thought he meant he had hit whatever he was aiming at, I yelled, "Good!"  Then while changing magazines, I glanced that way.  Sloman had been hit in the head.  The blood drained and gushed as I watched.  It bubbled over his eyes and onto his chest.  He crumpled.  [Pharmacist Mate 3C Ernest C.] Vaale, our corpsman, crawled toward him as I moved on with the line, feeling no nausea, no horror, no nothing.

Pfc. Wiley W. Sloman, Battery L, Wake Island Detachment, First Defense Battalion, received an ugly head wound fighting alongside Corporal Richardson on 23 December 1941, and he was left for dead on Wilkes Islet for three or four days.  Fortunately, he was found alive and survived.  He is shown here celebrating his return from prison camp in 1945.  (Courtesy Wiley W. Sloman)

        There was action by a tractor.

        Then action by another three-inch gun.

        Then beside a truck.

        Captain [Wesley McCoy] Platt and  [2d] Lieutenant [John A.] McAlister, grim-faced and dirty, crawled along with the line.

        There by the truck, our line swung toward the lagoon. Gunny screamed. I spun around to see him clutch his belly and topple.  I did not think, nor stop, nor feel.  Automatically I emptied the Browning.

        I turned to catch up with the line.  A movement in short weeds caught my eye.  The line had already passed over this area, I thought.  I swung my weapon toward it, advanced slowly.  The concealed movement continued.  My finger tightened on the trigger.  "Got a match, Rich?"  [Cpl.] John R. Dale stood up.

        For the first time since I had crawled away from my solitary night vigil by the lagoon, I noticed that I trembled again and all over.  We lit up and rejoined the line.

        Then the fighter planes from the carriers began to glide over us at will.  Somewhere a lone machine gun stuttered defiance at them. They roared over, circled and returned to strafe us again and again.  Each numbing time they came back, we scattered and flattened.  And with the impotent inaction, terror came.

        Once they came as I stood on the spot which had held the civilian contractors' dynamite shack -- 3,500 cases of dynamite which had been bombed on the third day of the war -- that seemed ages ago now.  The earth about it was flattened, all foliage gone.  Numbed and tired, I lay flat on my back and watched the planes come back, sweeping in from the horizon and trying to hold them, first one, then another in my sights.  After they roared over me so close I could feel the prop wash, I tried to shut my eyes.  I could not.  The false serenity engendered by action left me.  I was sick.  Too tired, too weak to roll over and protect my face from the new wave of planes coming back.  I saw them coming but I thought of Gunny and Sloman and Marlow and Wag and . . . and all of them dead.  The planes passed over me.

        The line, now jagged and sprawled over much of that portion of the island, each man for himself, moved on.

        The loaded magazines dragged the belt down over my hips so it kept sagging to my ankles.  I cursed and dragged it after me and damned the sons-of-bitches who prescribed that stupid belt instead of some kind of shoulder-slung bag.

        Between raids, by mid-morning, we had covered every inch of the island.  Wilkes was ours again.  Every Jap who had landed was accounted for.  Two of them were prisoners.  We saw [Pfc.] Delmar Cooley guarding them and had to laugh at the grim humor of it:  when a plane came over, Cooley drove his two prisoners into a foxhole and stayed topside himself.

Pfc. Henry H. W. Chapman, Battery L, Wake Island Detachment, First Defense Battalion, served in a five-inch gun crew on Wilkes Islet.  In the American counterattack on 23 December 1941, the straight shooting of a quick-witted friend, Pfc. Artie Stocks, narrowly saved Chapman from being bayoneted by a Japanese SNLF man.  (Courtesy Lucille Chapman)

    At the very tip of the island, we began to sweep back toward the channel to clean up any strays just as the planes made another pass at us.  I leaped into a tiny hole already containing a tall skinny civilian worker who had been lugging ammo for the machine guns.  Corporal [Clarence G.] Cooper [Jr.] from the machine gun outfit landed on top of me just before the planes got to us.  After they passed, we exchanged tight-lipped smiles -- silent congratulations at having survived them once more.  Cooper supplied us with yet another "final cigarette."  Then we moved out to rejoin the line again.

        The next time they came, Red Stevens and I ended up in a hole together. "Seems months since I left you on watch last night to wake Gilley and Skinny," Red said wearily. "Both dead now." His voice was flat and dead, too.

        The planes left, pulling their tail of deafening noise after them across the lagoon.  "We ought to hit our own hole next time," Red said.  "I've got some cigarettes there I could use."

        "We ought to hit it anyway," I agreed.  "It's the best on the island."  We rejoined the line, but before we had covered half the distance to our hole, the planes were back.  Red dived one way and I took the other . We were near the five inch ammo dump and the earth was black and bare, burned by the explosions when the ammo was hit.  I edged under a beam almost in the open and began to tremble out this pass.  But it didn't stop.  They came and kept coming until I could shake no more.  I just lay there with my face in the coral sand and waited.  And for the first time I began to relate this day, this action to me.  It came to me that I was about to die.  And I didn't want to die, that day or ever.  There was so many things I wanted to do.  So many places to see.  So many girls to love.  So many books to read.  Millions of books and me not reading them.  Somewhere from across thousands of miles life was calling me from this senseless coral grave.  She was calling me as she had never spoken before.  Flashing moments of the past came into focus and fled and left me sick at heart and full of pity for myself.  For a split second I saw the hundreds of pages of the Great American Novel as they had made such a impressive mass in the top of my foot locker until a bomb had fallen on our tent that first day of the war; and, for the first time I could think of all that wasted work and its destruction without a sinking feeling inside me because now I knew I wouldn't be around to worry about my novel.

        Oh, life was using honeyed tones.  But I knew I could never answer, could never get home again.  And I knew, too, the unimportance of being Bernard Elliot Richardson from Arkansaw, Wisconsin, USA.

        For the first time in that agonizing, endless day, I thought of my family and friends I was never to see again.  For a second, I wallowed in the scene of the memorial service that would surely be held for me in the little Methodist church on the hill in Arkansaw.  Tears of pity and all for me.  They'd be sorry!  That passed and I envied my Dad and his little circle of the familiar.  For the first time, the farm really invited, I thought I could smell the barn, I actually thought so.  A giant wave of self pity swept over me like the tide sweeping up on the beach.  As it ebbed, it left me calmer and, I think, stronger, than I had been before it came.  The planes stopped coming and I moved on toward our foxhole and Red Stevens.  To be in a hole alone is terrible.

        The planes returned before I reached the hole.  I saw Red duck into the protection of our beamed and sand-bagged haven, and I plunged into a fresh bomb crater.  Even though the hits were yards from me, the sides of my crater began to crumple in on me.  I clambered out, then ducked back again as another wave approached.  I decided, fatalistically, to lie in that hole until the end.  Then my mind was harassed by a single thought:  "I'm sure glad I didn't get tattooed, I'm sure glad I didn't get tattooed."  I suppose my subconscious giving voice to my self-satisfied vanity right down to the bitter end.

A map of the American counterattack on Wilkes Islet.  Corporal Richardson and his comrades killed or captured every Japanese SNLF man who landed on the islet.  (Courtesy Hyperwar, Patrick Clancey, and U.S. Marine Corps)

        The planes left.  Automatically, I raced toward my foxhole.  A few yards from it, Lieutenant McAlister tugged at the debris cluttering the entrance to another.  As I drew near, John R. [Dale] and Bill Buehler crawled out, covered with dirt.  "They were close!"  John said in a trembling voice.  "They only way I knew that they hadn't got me was because I was still scared."  I heard him but it did not register.  Where my foxhole should have been, there was a crater fifteen feet deep.  Red made it there all right.  None of us ever saw any sign of him again.

        Lieutenant McAlister led us to the 5-51 emplacements.  We thought we might somehow be able to right them for firing because we could see landing boats putting out from the Japs ships.  We found the guns useless, battered, burned, firing mechanisms beyond repair.

        The landing boats seemed headed for a spot near the channel where I had begun the day in the dark and the rain alone.  We raced toward it.  We passed Wag's riddled body, then Gilley's.  A few yards further, we passed Skinny sprawled on his back near several dead Japs under that still flying Jap flag.  We left the flag.  Skinny's head was thrown back and his mouth was open as if he were snoring as he had done almost every afternoon after lunch in our tent before the war.  His wasted blood had fried in the hot sun to a polished ebony.  Flies crawled in his mouth and out his nose.  For the first time, I realized how hot the day had become.

    Bill walked beside me.  "That leaves us out of our nine man crew," he said.  I noticed that he limped.  His instep had been creased, the leather was sliced through and bloody.

        We joined Captain Platt near the channel.  The landing boats were near the beach.  We dodged from boulder to boulder to reach the point where they would land.  The ships laying off then opened fire on us.  We dove into the coral.  A long salvo went over our heads.  We raced up the beach.  A short salvo landed on the beach right at the water's edge.  There was nothing more to do, no place to go.  We waited while they made the adjustment which would put the next salvo on top of us.  I had no thought, no feelings, no nothing.  There was no place to go, no place to hide.

        Screams came from the lagoon side of the beach.  A group approached.  Beyond them and above them dwarfing them waved a bed sheet tied to a long pole.  Grinning but bristling Japs surrounded all.

        "It's me:  Major Devereux [Maj. James P. S. Devereux].  Lay down your arms!  Lay down your arms!  The island has been surrendered.  Lay down your arms!  The island has been surrendered!"  His bald head glistened in the noonday sun.

        "Who the hell gave that order?"  Captain Platt screamed.

        "It's me, Major Devereux."

        The white bed sheet must have been visible to the ships.  Firing ceased.

        The Japs had command of our pinpoint island.  All our resistance on Wilkes had been in vain.  We now learned from Sergeant [Donald R.] Malleck who carried the flag that Peale Island had surrendered shortly after eight, Wake about ten.  Five of the men in our squad had been killed after Wake surrendered, Sloman and Bill were wounded, leaving only me unscathed.

        Ineffectual and pointless, that's all our resistance had been on Wilkes. Now the Japs had us.  They disarmed us, stripped us, herded us into lines and the endless waiting began.

        "What's the matter?"  asked the man next to me in line as we dropped our weapons in the pile.

        "What a hell of a way for it to end!"  Only then did I realize that I was crying.  I wiped my nose and eyes and glanced around to see who it was that had seen me weeping.  It was Cooper, the machine-gunner with whom I had shared a hole at the fat end of the island.  I tried to grin.  "What the hell does it matter," I said, "we're still alive."

        And we were still alive, for the moment at least.  That was something.  What would they do with us?  From the way they acted, it seemed that they didn't know themselves.

        It didn't matter, not really.

        What had gone before was but a prelude.  Had Major Devereux been moments later in arriving on our side of the lagoon . . . well, anyway, whatever the future brought, much or little, whether I lived to be ninety or died in the next instant, every moment from that time on the beach on Wake would be gravy.  I hoped that I could remember that and live in the future with a conscious courage I did not have as I faced death.