Freedom's Forge (27 page)

On Christmas Day—the president had just given Bill Knudsen his new assignment as head of OPM, and the Arsenal of Democracy speech was still four days away—the first ship carrying Morrison’s people appeared off Wake Island. It was loaded with two thousand tons of materials and machines, in addition to towing a four-thousand-square-foot barge laden with supplies and other equipment. In command was veteran MK engineer Dan Teeters, accompanied by his wife, Florence, who would be one of only three women on the island.

The island itself was not much more than a 2,600-acre strip of sand and coral, without a single hill or natural obstruction for Teeters’s bulldozers. A cluster of huts and other buildings marked the detachment of Marines defending the tiny atoll. Yet everyone knew that in a shooting war, Wake would be of vital strategic significance. Twelve hundred miles southwest of Midway, and almost halfway from Hawaii to Manila, airfields on Wake could resupply the American garrison in the Philippines—while seaplanes and submarines could oversee the Japanese-occupied Marshalls. Teeters knew there was no time to waste, and he set his crew of eighty to work the next day.
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Six months later the number had grown to twelve hundred. By now they were joined by five hundred Marines under Major James Devereux. The work was already half-finished except for the submarine base. When Harry Morrison and his wife flew out in November, they found the place almost ready for operations. The only major job left for the airstrip was the construction of protective bunkers for the Marine planes. The Morrisons shook hands with Teeters and his wife, and greeted the workers, many of whom they knew from previous jobs. One of them was Joseph Crowe, son of Hoover Dam’s designer, Frank Crowe. They talked about Crowe’s prospects when he got back to Boise, and then had a sobering meeting with Major Devereux.
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War was almost certainly coming, he told Morrison, and Wake would be in the middle of it. The tiny island’s prospects were slim if the Japanese attacked. The Navy was ordering the women to leave, but there would not be time to evacuate all the civilian workers. As Harry and Ann took off to return to Hawaii, he must have wondered if he would ever see Teeters and his men again.

Teeters, meanwhile, wasted no time. Since not a single Marine could be spared from his duties, every available construction worker had to help with the defense. Teeters’s construction workers filled sandbags, redistributed and camouflaged Wake’s supplies, and built bomb shelters and revetments. Teeters, a veteran of World War I, pulled together 185 volunteers to serve alongside the Marines. Devereux was in no position to refuse, and soon MK hard hats were taking their place around the five-inch guns and machine gun nests, waiting for the Japanese.
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They didn’t have long to wait. On December 8, just hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese bombers seemed to appear from nowhere, the sound of their engines drowned by the pounding surf until they were virtually on top of the island. The island’s squadron of Marine fighters took off but lost the bombers in the clouds as death showered down on the tiny atoll. Eight of the Marine’s twelve Grumman Wildcats were blown up, and two out of three pilots were killed or wounded. Dozens of MK’s workers were also killed in the raid. Some of the survivors panicked and fled into the jungle. But most remained at their post, and stood shoulder to shoulder with the Marines through a second raid two days later, and when the first Japanese warships appeared on the horizon on December 11.
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It was a formidable force of three light cruisers and six destroyers, plus a contingent of transport with 450 soldiers loaded for an amphibious landing. Wake’s chances for survival went from slim to none. Only two things stood between defeat and captivity. One was the Marines’ four surviving Wildcat fighters. The other was the two batteries of five-inch guns, which Teeters’s workers had reinforced with Henry Kaiser’s cement.

As the Japanese troops tried to disembark, those twin batteries ripped into their escorting ships. Four shells hit the light cruiser
Yubari;
Platoon Sergeant Harry Bedell’s Battery L blew the destroyer
Hayate
in
half with three salvos. Battery B pounded away at three Japanese destroyers, scoring direct hits on two of them.

Meanwhile, the Marine Wildcats had zeroed in on the Japanese light cruiser
Kisaragi
. None of the young pilots had ever dropped a bomb before, even in a practice run. With sheer courage and determination, however, they scored the
Kisaragi
with perfect bull’s-eyes. She was already aflame from a previous hit near her ammunition storage when Lieutenant John Kinney pulled his bomb release lever and the one-hundred-pounder hurtled down. It caught the
Kisaragi
amidships. “A huge explosion engulfed the ship,” Kinney later wrote, “and she rapidly began to sink.”
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A cheer went up around Wake Island. They had held out, against almost impossible odds. But could they hold out the next time?

Miraculously, they did. The island was attacked every day after the eleventh except one, while the MK workers dodged bombs and lived on starvation rations. The four surviving Wildcats shrank to two, which the Marine mechanics kept going by cannibalizing parts and trying out bits from truck and bulldozer engines when the aviation equipment ran out. All America followed the epic struggle on Wake on their radios; President Roosevelt himself got daily bulletins. But on December 22, the last Wildcat was gone.

The next day, Teeters, Kinney, and the others watched a new Japanese flotilla appear, much more powerful than the first. This time there were four heavy cruisers and nearly two thousand Japanese soldiers—plus two carriers,
Soryu
and
Hiryu
, flinging in their carrier planes before the final assault. Remarkably, the Marines managed to beat off the Japanese who hit the beach on Wilkes. Captain Wesley Platt ordered his ninety or so Marines to fix bayonets and charge an enemy who outnumbered them five to one. Caught by complete surprise, the Japanese panicked and fled into the surf. Platt’s men killed almost all of them.
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On Wake itself, however, the Marines didn’t have a chance. Pounded by bombs and strafing planes, hammered by the cruisers’ guns, they were helpless to halt the Japanese advance. One of Teeters’s workmen, “Pop,” had served in World War I as a lieutenant and had been a corporate executive until alcohol had cost him his marriage and position and reduced him to menial jobs. Now he grabbed a bag of grenades and
waded into the surf. He tossed them into one Japanese landing craft and then another, until he ran out of bombs, and hightailed it back to safety. Workmen and Marines cheered, but Major Devereux knew they were doomed. He fired off an urgent radio message: “Enemy is on the Island. The issue is in doubt.” A few hours later, he was told that the task force on its way to relieve Wake had been ordered back to Pearl. He tied a white rag to a mop handle and marched out to surrender what was left of his command. The battle for Wake was over.
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More construction workers than Marines had died in the fighting—forty-eight, versus forty-seven of Devereux’s hard-pressed men. Two hundred and eight others would die in the brutal conditions of Japan’s POW camps. Twenty or so were kept on Wake Island to work as slave labor for their captors. When it was clear the war was lost and Wake would have to be evacuated, the Japanese shot them all.

Dan Teeters would survive the war, despite leading a desperate escape attempt that led to his recapture and a savage beating. Florence Teeters mounted an unrelenting campaign in Washington to provide money and relief to the workers’ families. Harry Morrison, Kaiser, and their fellow contractors pitched in $300,000.
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The harrowing experience of the Wake Island workers would help to force one of the biggest changes in the Navy’s way of conducting war—the creation of the Construction Battalions, or CBs, known to everyone else as the Seabees. From now on, the men who risked their lives building on the firing line would be in uniform, trained to fight and if necessary die facing the enemy.

The fall of Wake sealed the fate of the Philippines. The Japanese were now undisputed masters of the central Pacific. Yet the sacrifice at Wake had not been in vain. Even though they never sent the radio signal “Send Us More Japs” that rumor said they did, the Marines and Morrison’s men had shown that Americans were ready to fight and die, even against steep odds.

They inspired a nation. They also sent Washington an urgent message.

Give the armed forces the right tools, and in the right numbers, and America just might win. That’s what the Army’s new head of logistics, General Brehon Somervell, was thinking about, too.

Under his boss, Undersecretary Robert Patterson, the Army had grown like a field of mushrooms. From 260,000 men in May 1940, it had expanded to more than a million, thanks to the Selective Service Act. The new U.S. Army had two armored divisions, whereas in 1939 it had none. In 1939 it had 1,500 planes. Thanks to Knudsen and his friends, it now had 16,000, and 22,000 pilots. Already, British and American war production was equaling that of the Axis powers combined.

With the coming of war, Somervell was now looking at an army that was going to expand from a projected one million in 1942 to seven million by the end of 1943. He also figured that the Army’s supply of tanks, trucks, and planes would rise to 50 percent of its Victory Plan goals by the end of 1942. That meant America would be ready to go on the offensive. Until then, he told the War Production Board in one of its first meetings, the U.S. armed forces’ job would be to keep the lines of communication open to our allies Britain and Russia.
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That made Kaiser’s Liberty ship program more vital than ever.

Moving a prefab deckhouse section, Richmond Shipyard No. 2, 1942.
Copyright 2012, Penton Media, 84595: 112SH

“THE FOUNDATION OF
all our hopes and schemes was the immense shipbuilding program of the United States.”

Those were Winston Churchill’s words, describing the situation at the start of 1942.
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Merchant ships were no longer just the lifeline for Britain in its struggle against the Axis. They were now essential to America’s ability to project its power across two oceans, the Atlantic and Pacific.

The coming of war meant big changes for the Liberty ship program, as well. How many ships were being made suddenly became a decisive factor in their chances of victory. It was American as well as British ships that were being taken out by German U-boats—more than 6.4 million tons’ worth in the first half of 1942. The Germans’ Operation
Drumbeat set up patrols of U-boats to catch merchant ships as they came out of every harbor on the East Coast, their victims framed against the coastal lights like silhouettes in a shooting gallery.
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With losses like this, Knudsen’s and Admiral Land’s estimate before Pearl Harbor of needing five million tons of shipping in 1942 and seven million for 1943 looked out of touch with reality.

Something had to be done to expand the program once again—even though every shipyard in America was going flat-out building war vessels. The pressure of events, however, was inexorable. During Churchill’s visit to DC shortly after Pearl Harbor and just before Christmas 1941, the goalposts were moved yet again. The politicians agreed there would now have to be eight million tons built in 1942, and ten million in 1943.
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