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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.” 39 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. 40
    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 andwaded 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. 41
    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. 42 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