An American defeat, but an oddly inspiring one, occured today, as we earlier reported at Today In Wyoming's History: December 23:
1941 American forces on Wake Island surrendered to the Japanese.
The Battle of Wake Island would turn out to be a surprising American point of pride early in the war, in spite of the loss of the atoll. It took on sort of an Alamo image during the war.
Wake had been a U.S. possession since 1899. The presence of Polynesian Rats on the island proves that it had very early Micronesian contact, but it had no permanent population until 1935 when Pan American established a hotel station there for its Pacific flying boat route. The Navy did not establish a permanent base there until 1941, so everything located on it in terms of military installations was new.
The Navy and Marine Corps put up a very determined fight on Wake, and at first the Japanese were unable to successfully land on it. It provided a rare example of shore batteries successfully engaging naval vessels. Efforts by the Japanese to take the island commenced on December 8, but took until this day in order to be successful. Efforts to relieve the island from Hawaii failed.
98 American prisoners, all civilians, were held on the island by the Japanese until 1943 when the Japanese murdered them. Military prisoners were removed to POW camps. By 1943 the island had been cut off and the Japanese garrison began to starve, actually driving one of the birds species located on the island into extinction. 3/4s of the Japanese garrison died due to starvation. The island surrendered to a Marine Corps detachment that landed on September 4, 1945, having previously learned of Japan's surrender, and after reburying their murdered victims. The truth of the murders soon came to light, and several Japanese officers committed suicide over the incident.
While a Japanese victory, it was an early example of what was wrong with Japanese strategic planning. First of all, the Navy and Marine Corps put up a determined fight over the island, showing that American ground forces in particular were willing to hold ground until the bitter end, a lesson that probably wasn't really being learned at the time due to the next item we'll note. Secondly, the Japanese took the island, but in the end, it proved to be easy to isolate and the Japanese garrison was essentially taken out of the war and made subject to starvation, something other garrisons on remote islands would also experience.
In really bad news at the time:
Gen. Douglas MacArthur decides to withdraw to Bataan.
Japanese begin offensive against Rangoon, Burma.
The 440-foot tanker Montebello was sunk off the California coast near Cambria by a Japanese submarine. The crew of 38 survived, and in 1996 it was found that the 4.1 million gallon cargo of crude oil appeared intact.
British troops capture Benghazi, Libya.
A conference of industry and labor officials agrees that there would be no strikes or lockouts in war industries while World War II continued.
The first C47 Skytrain entered US military service.
Lots of the civilian variants, the DC3, were already in military service, but it wasn't until this date that the first example of the dedicated military version was delivered. The civilian airliner had been introduced in 1935.
Over 10,000 C47s were built, or over 16,000 if the Li-2 Soviet produced version is considered, and amazingly they remain in service with the Columbian, El Salvadorian and South African air forces. They were preeminently important as an Allied cargo plane during the Second World War, and they were used by every Allied power including the Soviet Union, which built 6,000 of them under license in addition to the ones that were supplied to the USSR via lend lease, making the Soviet Union the second-largest producer of the aircraft.
The role of the C47 in Allied airpower could hardly be understated. It and the DC3 are one of the greatest aircraft ever produced. Some DC3s remain in commercial use today (I've seen one in United Airlines colors as late as 2004) and they're actually being remanufactured as the Basler BT-67 for current use.
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