Search -
Hell Wouldn't Stop: An Oral History of the Battle of Wake Island
Hell Wouldn't Stop An Oral History of the Battle of Wake Island Author:Chet Cunningham This gritty oral chronicle records with poignant and often disturbing immediacy both the bloody sixteen-day Battle of Wake Island and the forty-four months of hell that followed it. One of the first military engagements in World War II, the battle for this tiny, strategically located atoll in the Pacific began on December 8, 1941, just five hour... more »s after Japans surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. It ended on December 23, when the marinesdespite diminished forces, incapacitated fighter planes, and no communicationsstrove to stem an overwhelming Japanese invasion until their commanding officers ordered them to surrender. No sooner had the surviving marinesthe authors eighteen-year-old brother among themlaid down their arms than they were stripped and bound. For two days they sat naked in the hot sun; at night they shivered in the cold. For the next three weeks they slogged in the ruins of their bombed-out camp. They were then jammed into the hold of the ship that would take them to prison camps in China and Japan, where they would endure the cruelest indignities and grimmest tortures until their liberation in August 1945. Hell Wouldnt Stop tells their often horrific, frequently heroic, and unforgettable if long-forgotten World War II story.« less