Wake veterans recall ordeals

Press, 9 November 1988, Page 21

Wake veterans recall ordeals

For 16 days they held out against the Japanese invasion force, some 1200 civilians fighting alongside 449 United States Marines, 68 sailors and six Army Air Corps men. All were either killed or captured when Wake Island, central Pacific, fell on December 23, 1941. Many of the military men returned recently to the island for the dedication of a monument to the civilian defenders. CHRISTINE DONNELLY, of the Associated Press, reports.

Palm trees and evergreens grow where once there was only ironwood brush. The once-count-less rats and gooney birds are gone, the coral runway has been replaced. “It’s strange, everything looks so different that walking around here, looking at the monuments and the old rusted-out guns is almost like looking at someone else’s life — like it never happened to me,” says Darwin Dodds, of Denver, a retired radio and television broadcaster. Dodds was a 22-year-old civilian construction worker captured when the Japanese invaded this remote tropical atoll in late 1941. He was one of the defenders of Wake Island who recently returned for a dedication of a monument in honour of the civilians who fought alongside the soldiers, sailors and marines, all of whom were either killed or captured. A memorial to the marines was erected soon after the war. But the civilians — including construction workers building military installations and others who worked for Pan American Airways — got little credit. It was 1981 before they were deemed eligible for veterans’ benefits, and for 47 years there was no official monument to them. The dedication ceremony drew 42 civilian defenders, 14 military men, and about 100 family members. For many of them, the reunion was their first visit to the island since the war. Ival Dale Milbourn, aged 64, a retired construction contractor from California, still has occasional nightmares about his war experiences. By bringing his wife, two sons and his 85-year-old father to the reunion, he iioped to put some of the old ghosts to rest. “This has been a 47-year-dream,” Milbourn said as he looked over the post he manned on the day of the first attack on December 8, 1941. “I just can’t explain how I feel, but by having my family here I feel like they understand why I’m the way I am, why I did the things I did.” Milbourn was 18 years old and

a private in the United States Marines when he landed on Wake in late 1941. He still recalls the details of that first attack, only hours after the Japanese struck Pearl Harbour. Wake is west of the international dateline, so it was the next day there. “We weren’t prepared at all,” says Milbourn, who manned a three-inch anti-aircraft gun. “We hadn’t even filled the first sandbag. We ran to our positions and trained right on those planes, but we were expecting reinforcements and we thought they might be our own guys.”

The next 16 days were a blur of daily bombing raids, thwarted invasions and close-fought battles. The outnumbered U.S. troops shot down 21 Japanese planes and sank at least two destroyers with outmoded weapons salvaged from warships from World War I. But with no reinforcements and little ammunition, they surrendered to the Japanese on December 23, 1941. “We were among the last marines to get the order to surrender,” Milbourn recalls, “And when we were told to give

up our guns, well, that was the first time we ever told an N.C.O. (non-commissioned officer) ‘up your bucket’ because we’d been told the Japanese take no prisoners.” The Americans were ordered to strip and march down to the old airstrip, where a ring of machine guns awaited. There they were tied up and ordered to crouch in the middle of the circle. “We were scared and praying and crying and everything else,” Milbourn says. “Then at the last minute, they took the guns down, because they learned there were

civilians among us.” The Americans — 449 marines, 68 sailors, six Army Air Corps men and 1200 civilians — were left on the airstrip overnight, still naked and tightly bound. The next day they were each given a small piece of bread and a drink of petrol-tainted water. It was December 25, 1941. “That was our Christmas dinner, and we had no idea how much worse it would get,” Milbourn recalls. Most of the prisoners were eventually transferred by boat to prison camps in Shangai and Japan. Several prisoners were beheaded and all were poorly fed along the way. The Japanese kept 98 civilians on the island as slave labour. At the reunion, the survivors, many of whom hadn’t seen each other since they were liberated from prison camps in 1945, gathered in little groups to compare experiences. They set off under the blazing tropical sun to find memorable spots: the bunkers, the old landing strip, the mass grave where the dead were laid to rest. Of the Americans, 120 were killed in the fighting and 231 died in captivity. The 98 civilians kept on Wake were executed on October 7, 1943. They left behind a reminder of their plight — a large coral boulder, painstakingly handcarved with their initials and the still-legible message that reads 98 US PW (for prisoners of war) 5-10-43. Five months later, they were machine-gunned on the beach in retaliation for a devastating American air strike the day before. The memory of those civilians and how they died has haunted many of the survivors. “When I heard about this trip I thought I wasn’t sure I wanted to go, I didn’t know what kind of memories it would bring,” said Oscar Ray, aged 67, of Idaho. The execution of the civilians “affected me so profoundly that I couldn’t sleep for weeks after hearing about it. I thought it was a religious duty that I should come back.”