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Hell Wouldn't Stop - An Oral History of the Battle of Wake Island (2002)
Front Cover Book Details
Genre Non-Fiction
Subject World War, 1939-1945 - Campaigns - Pacific; World War, 1939-1945 - Prisoners and prisons, Japanese
Publication Date 10/15/2002
Format Hardcover (9.0 x 6.3 mm)
Publisher Basic Books
Language English
Extras Dust Jacket; Dust Jacket Cover
Description
In this gritty, poignant, often disturbing oral chronicle of one of the first and most tragic military engagements in World War II, Chet Cunningham gives the gallant U.S. defenders of Wake Island—among them his older brother, Kenneth, then a private in the Marines—their long-overlooked due. For Kenneth Cunningham, a serviceman in the defense battalion stationed on Wake Island, World War II began on December 8, 1941, just five hours after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It ended on December 23. That day the Marines on Wake Island—their twelve Wildcat fighter planes lost, their forces diminished—faced an overwhelming enemy invasion, with the Japanese arriving in so many ships that, as one eyewitness put it, they could have walked from one to the other on the open sea. Private Cunningham and his fellow Marines fought intrepidly, until their commanding officers ordered them to surrender. Their term in hell, though, had just begun. When the Marines laid down their arms they were stripped naked. With their hands bound, they sat naked in the hot sun all day; at night they shivered in the cold. They suffered endless days at sea jammed in the holds of ships that took them to prison camps in China and Japan. Forty-four months later, liberated at last, they would return home unheralded and largely forgotten. Their often horrific, frequently heroic story now stands recorded, for the most part in the words of the soldiers, sailors, Marines, and civilian personnel who were there, as well as of their wives and widows, in startling, unforgettable detail. Eight pages of black-and-white photographs add to this gripping reconstruction of the sixteen-day battle for Wake Island and its aftermath.
Personal Details
Store Black & Read
Purchase Price $12.99
Acquire Date 10/16/2010
Condition Fine/Fine
Rating 0
Product Details
Dewey 940.5426
ISBN 9780786710966
Cover Price $26.00
No. of Pages 282
First Edition No
Rare No
Notes/Review
This is the story of the battle of Wake Island and the 44 months the survivors spent in POW camps as told by the marines and sailors and airmen. The little "connective tissue" in the book is provided by Chet Cunningham, who embarked on the project to learn what happened to his brother. Each entry is from a few sentences to a few pages. Some of the stories are as simple as "I don't like to think about it". Many of the contributors have multiple stories. Most are from correspondence between Cunningham and the survivors and some was written in the months after the events. All stories are in the first person.

Because it is a collection of stories from many people, there is necessarily a lot of repetition for the combat. Everybody went through the same events - the bombing, the first invasion attempt, the surrender. But each tells the common events from a slightly different perspective.

I would have liked to have "heard" from some of the civilians who were there. I'm sure their stories were no less interesting. The only significant mention of the civilians, other than a few who manned gun crews, was the murder of the 98. Obviously none of them could tell their stories, but there were a thousand others.

Recommended.