Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 224 - The Battle of Wake Island

Episode Date: September 5, 2022

Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor the Japanese military set their eyes on a tiny speck of a rock staffed with a handful of Marines and civilian contractors. Trapped and with no hope of relief, the strange adhoc garrison made the invaders bleed. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/battle-of-wake-island-1941 https://www.historynet.com/battle-of-wake-island/ https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/npswapa/extcontent/usmc/pcn-190-003119-00/sec1.htm https://www.historynet.com/hard-luck-island-battle-of-wake-island/

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the

Legion of the Old Crow today. And now, back to the Lions of the Bidonkies podcast. I'm Joe and with me as always is Liam. Yay Liam. What's up buddy? Hey Joe. Good morning to you. Don't remind me. Sorry, buddy. If it makes you feel better.

So, obviously, we record on Tuesdays. We know this. And I would have remembered Shut the fuck up, Joe. And at 9.22pm I looked at my phone. I looked at Corinne. We were like in bed i was watching the

phillies game i was like i have to fucking record tonight she's like no you don't i was like yeah i do it's tuesday she's just like what the fuck like tell him you're dead and i was like i can't do that i have to record that's how i feel every night when i'm like on tuesday night when i'm laying down i'm setting my alarm for 5 30 like god damn it i don't want to fucking be here thankfully one of those people that like when i wake up uh if i get out of bed i wake up pretty quickly like i'm not a snoozer like i don't hit the snooze button um but i'm not a snoozer either i you know what's funny um i i wake up most days i would say around seven uh i don't start work till eight but i've i've uh given myself like i try to give myself like 20 30 minutes because i was younger i would wait

until literally the last possible second for i to get up for work and then i'm just like rushing the whole time uh now i sort of wake up like a little i would say i wake up a little more slowly but i wake up almost more fully interesting by the time i start work at 8 a.m like i'm ready to start work i don't feel like i've like you know just like opened my eyes and now i have to be fully functional and i also start work before any of my colleagues so uh it's nice to like be totally undisturbed and then i get uh an i am at 9 30 that's just like hey so everything's on fire can we have some help please i'm uh i think most people listening can probably um empathize with i used to be the exact same way like um when i set my alarm especially when i

was in the military and even when i got out because it takes it takes like years to get over these dumb ticks that you learn like oh i can sleep until like let's say like 6 34 oh oh i woke up in time so now i can bump that back to 6 36 yeah like i don't think that extra six minutes is really really making my whole day with it it's not like i feel better yeah i mean once you get rid of that extra six minutes i'm just gonna fucking go to hell man i can't survive speaking of not surviving uh we're talking we're talking island hopping again today yeah uh we're so we uh surprise uh joe and i uh both being dweebs grew up on battlefield 1942 so today we're going to talk about the battle that apparently happened

in real life from the demo cd of the video game battlefield 1942 the battle of wake island specifically we're talking about just the video game map um yes i used to be the biggest piece of shit with the plugins dude used to crash them into people yep i did that too that should track for you at home oh yeah i i still do that um it's it's great i think the thing that i used to do that pissed people off the most, I think it was Battlefield 2, where you could attach C4 to vehicles and then drive them into tanks. That was a lot of fun. I got banned from a lot of servers for that. It's a totally legitimate way to kill somebody.

Yeah. I was just preempting ISIS is all. Jesus, Joe. Now, Liam, before we get to Wake Island island this might come as no surprise to you today uh actually before we get started that i'm kind of we've talked about a few island based uh campaigns now i'm gonna i'm gonna be kind of curious where this falls in on the tier list of like how awful this is um i don't think it ranks that high uh wake island man basically by mostly civilians oh yeah yeah yeah uh who i assume are gonna get their shit

rolled by the japanese navy it does not go great um to be fair it doesn't go great for the japanese either good good we all we all suck down here let's let's like that uh that battle we covered where was it the uh the greeks have resorted to simply fighting and diving the Italians. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. If I have rabies, that guy's going to get rabies too. Sometimes you just got to literally tear the throat out of a Nazi. It could make the rest of them stop showing up.

Now, Liam, this might come as a bit of a surprise to you. Not really. Now, Liam, this might come as a bit of a surprise to you. Not really. When I say that by the attack on the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, World War II is not going too great. If you were not the Nazis or the Japanese, I will have a little caveat to this. Like it was still going badly for the Italians because Italy, they're not great at war. Not so good at war. Italy.

They're not great at war. Not so good at war. Even when they're on the temporarily winning side, they kind of lose the whole time. I do laugh that we could basically always go back to the Italians are bad at war minds, like whatever we have to. They got it all out of their system when they were Rome. It's been all downhill since.

Dude, I just, I love the idea. Just every time you show up just getting your absolute fucking teeth kicked in by just whoever happens to be resisting you at the moment imagine like you're like fighting the axis and you're like oh god they're setting another army like wait a minute wait a minute oh it's the italians thank god we're good we're good folks it's fine you guys honestly you guys go home if you want it's like when the so when the soviets are about to break through german lines at like stalingrad like oh thank god it's the bulgarians or whoever it was

not so good at wars yeah not not not famed for their warfighting prowess are the bulgarians they did all right in the early 1900s uh respect or respects too but by the 1940s a lot of time has passed uh but you know for the americans this is when world war ii starts um and we've kind of addressed that idea before but for a long time uh the war would actually not be going great for the americans like after pearl harbor america was quickly hit with a quite a quite a few l's um you know because they weren't exactly super prepared uh and it's hard to be prepared correctly when your fleet is vaporized right like you only can build another one so fast which is you know eventually what the u.s did they just hit the fleet go brr button and then spit out like a 18 fucking uh navy's worth

of ships pretty quickly then i'll crack in half until we fix that yeah it's fine don't worry about it don't worry about it because i'm asking questions the contractor said he'd build ships not good ships um now in the middle of all of this giant war machine spanning the world with fleets planes bombs let's say you happen to be a u.s marine condolences if you are um and you happen to be stationed in a tiny little speck of rock in the middle of the pacific ocean called wake island as the japanese military rolled towards you no thanks is how i feel about this like it's hard to describe how in the middle of fucking nowhere Wake Island is. I'm breaking my rule just to bring up Google Maps.

I promise I'm not doing anything nefarious. Freehentai.net. Yes. Okay. Oh, wow. It really is. Wow. So like Wake Island.

I just have to keep really is. Wow. So like Wake Island. I just have to keep scrolling out. Yeah, it measures only four miles across. It's a tiny coral atoll in the middle of nowhere. It is 1,500 miles east of Guam, 2,200 miles west of Honolulu, Hawaii, and 1900 miles southeast of Tokyo. And the closest, I guess, large inhabited island is Majuro, which is the capital of the Marshall Islands, which is almost 1000 miles away. The nearest inhabited island is 600 miles away. It is in the middle of nowhere. Holy shit.

It might be in the most middle of nowhere as you could possibly be. Point Nemo is what that's called. In case you're ever curious. Is that what the point of middle of nowhere is? Yeah. A pole of inaccessibility. Why is it Nemo? What did the fish do to deserve this?

Is that what it's called? Or am I making that up? And that's actually zero zero longitude latitude point nemo is officially known as the oceanic pole of inaccessibility yep i was right look it up on your own time kids yeah um now on well this isn't that uncommon but and for the sake of imperialism wake island is worthless um the highest point is 20 feet above sea level almost nothing grows there outside of some scrub brush that nobody ever bothered uh to like rip up nobody has moved there ever um i know during the you know thousands of hundreds and thousands of years of pacific

island migration it was used even as uh by by migrating pacific islanders as something as a stopping point because there's not even a source of fresh water on the island um like i think we've pointed this out before but in the pacific if nobody's ever attempted to inhabit an island there's a good fucking reason for that sorry i'm looking at the google photos of this place which is just like a good fucking reason for that sorry i'm looking at the google photos of this place which is just like a pickup truck a building this is wake island air airfield and nothing else it's pretty much it yeah it's like i said there it is four whole miles this is just a whole lot of fucking nothing and uh the island itself is is it's just like coral. It's like coral covered with a very thin layer of dirt and rocks.

It must suck to live there. Now, the best anybody can discover is that it used to be, like I said, something of a stopping point during long journeys by local Polynesians. And the evidence to that is that there's rats on the island um because they probably hitched a ride sure well credit where credit's due i suppose and they they were already there when white people found the island so like they had to have gotten there before we fucked it up yeah we didn't do it that's that yeah yeah scoreboard or whatever scoreboard for this island where they're uh there's smaller than the scoreboard people hell yeah cowboy stadium uh fucking cowboys at various points more white people showed up looked at it jotted it down on like a note or whatever and then left and this

actually included charles wilkes of uh the usxx that we talked about uh the mask mapping voyage episodes out now right or is it all yeah yeah go listen to that one it's a it's a real fun episode about uh a sociopath that uh goes on spring break gone real wrong is how i would describe it u.s navy rum springer this was after a while this is all anybody did with wake it was after this mostly a place where ships accidentally crashed into oh sure now the spanish-american war eventually happened uh go listen to our series about it american empire began rapidly expanding through the pacific whoops uh first stop was the philippines of course uh which became american possessions after the war and then hawaii was annexed after very briefly being the republic of hawaii after

a group of pro-american white plantation owners uh took it over though small addendum here those guys sucked so bad the usd want to annex them at first. But that changed quite rapidly. Now, after that, the US looked around and said, what is that chunk of useless rock over there? That looks like a good place for honkies. We could build a B-Dubs there.

You like that? $3 fines. we could build a beat up there you like that three dollar fights um three dollar rats three dollar rat wings it was it was a hunk of rock about halfway between honolulu and manila and it was decided this might make a decent spot for a telegraph relay station and coaling stations for passing ships. With the little added benefit of they wouldn't have to kill anybody to take this one over. Like they could just. Congratulations. Yeah. Well, depending on who you're talking to, it's actually a drawback.

Like we don't get to kill anybody. All right, we're out. So in 1889, part of the U.S. Army garrison, the Philippines dropped by Wake Island to raise the American flag. And that was pretty much all it took uh the next year president williams now at this point it was discovered that wake island actually made for a terrible telegraph relay station uh really yeah it made a lot more sense to put it at midway which was also under the control of the united states but uh nobody was going to un-anax the territory so they kind of did nothing with it for a very long time um they did so much nothing with it that wake island wasn't even added to publicly

available maps or globe this isn't like a top secret thing that people want to delete from like it's kind of like if you try to google map some shit it gets blurred out uh it was considered so insignificant it didn't even need to be on a map because why why would you need to know about it now this slowly began to change with the advent of commercial uh flight uh in pan am uh they wanted they wanted to build the air uh airstrips at wake and midway in order to create a commercial flight route from the united states to china and it would use these islands as stopping points for fuel because their planes back then were fucking terrible and they had enough fuel for like 30 minutes at a time thinking of the idea of like get out and stretch your legs but don't go too far because there are

fucking sharks there i i would be terrified of like, back then commercial air flight was like, commercial flight was so unsafe. Sucky dick, yeah. Everything, every plane sounded like you're breaking through the atmosphere of the earth. And now they're trying to land on these tiny little airstrips and get fuel. This is how you end because as the guy who worked for Pan Am found out when he approached the U.S. government, that no administration within the U.S. government had actually been given Wake Island to administer because the government just didn't care. Right. was the expanding power of the Japanese Empire post-World War I, because they were given the South Seas Mandate

that gave Japan a lot of the former German colonial territories of the Pacific, which, of course, led right into the expanding American Empire in the same region, then Wake Island being the most out-in-the-middle fucking nowhere outpost that they had.

By the 1930s, the Japanese Empire expanded even further and with the Second Sino-Japanese War... We can't do that to our empire. Only we can do that to our empire. That's right. And with the Second Sino-Japanese War, they were kind of burning down half the fucking world.

So FDR transferred authority of Wake Island over to the Department of the Navy and this is when the first complete survey of the island was finally done. I assume it took about 10 minutes. Like, yep, there's nothing. All right, we did it. Do you guys like shrub brush?

Do you guys like little shitty plants and these tiny pollination rats? Like, no. Oh, okay well i'm gonna go back to the hunt and so to go back and uh get the fuck off this island um there's no b-dubs here i thought we had a deal um there's a pan am was contracted out to build an airbase uh uh which was technically a civilian airport but this this was kind of a weird, you know how I said before that there was no plan to keep Wake Island a secret? Now there was.

They wanted to hide that it was being militarized from the Japanese. So they had a civilian contractor build the airport, which was uncommon back then. And in order to cleverly disguise all of us the

navy declared wake island a bird sanctuary i i will say there are things you know like obviously empire's awful nation states were a bad idea shout out propaganda but it does it does always make you laugh when like the military the navy the navy, I feel like a lot of the time, it's just like, we're going to call it a bird sanctuary. What are they going to do? That's going to fucking stop the Imperial Japanese Navy and just be like, I can't go there, birds. Birds and rats.

Ain't doing it. Ain't for it. Turn this fucking boat around. Sorry, fellas. We're coming back from this place called Nanking. Did you say that birds live there oh give it a wide berth like we can't fuck with birds those those are those aren't three-year-olds we can't just butcher them in the streets i would like to think that this was like a plan thought of

at like 5 30 p.m on a friday because everybody just really wants to go home together ship it like uh how do we keep this from the japanese it's like that scene where everybody that cartoon where everybody's around the table like how can we fix someone's like bird sanctuary to get thrown out the window now finally when it became kind of inevitable that the u.s and japan were going to start killing one another at some point fdr or fdr knew that's a joke that's a joke that's a joke that's a joke here come the emails of of people saying like joe you should probably fire liam because he's a knight uh he's uh he's a pearl harbor truther he's not he has his criticisms of roosevelt but don't worry that's not one of them

can't think of a single bad thing he did skimming right past the concentration camp yeah what's uh the jews were begging him to nuke the train tracks why didn't they bomb the train tracks joe oh good news uh that will come up in a future series that we're doing um good my mother my mother wants to know why we haven't covered that so oh uh it's it's because i'm being paid by uh the institute for historical review out of california someone is googling that right now, getting increasingly disgusted by that joke. Now, at this point, FDR ordered these small Pacific outposts

to be defended, and in January 1941, the first military garrison was sent there numbering a whopping 449 Marines and 69 sailors. So much ass. Yeah, and there's also a whole six guys from the Army as a radio operating detachment,

which I'm assuming the radio did not work great that far out of there. I can tell you right now, they just spent all day and all night doing the elephant walk. Which is fine. Which is fine. Thousands and thousands of civilian contractors are dumped onto the island as well to speed up the building process of a military airstrip as well as, you know, eventually maybe a real military base.

So if you pay attention to the date, you know that they're not going to get that far. Things are going poorly. So few actual fighting men were sent to the island and they didn't have like they were sent all sorts of heavy weaponry like coastal defense, machine guns, etc, etc. But they didn't have enough men to actually man all of those weapons. Also, the military didn't actually send enough rifles. There are several Marines who did not have rifles. Which is kind of funny. Yeah, yeah.

The enemy at the gates strategy. rifles which is kind of funny yeah yeah the enemy at the gates uh strategy honestly it kind of rules because the joke is like oh it's like how they the the marine marketing of like every marine is a rifle and it's like well except you uh which is the best crayon editor i ever did see who's a good crayon eater who's a good crayon eater so sorry i'm sorry the marine uh the uh there's also an air wing obviously they're building uh the airstrip uh it was still outfitted with biplanes uh the airway is just gonna be some guys like they were still waiting for their delivery of f4 wildcats uh so like the aviators were just flying these shitty little biplanes around what i i gotta actually ask the question why have

why fucking send planes in the first place the operational range has got to be pointless right what's the operational range of a of a world war of an interwar biplane oh and it's not great i think it was for so pilots could fly like his pilots need a lot of time behind the sticks yeah okay yeah okay that makes more sense yeah um like the plan was always to get them wildcats but as you can imagine from the distances we talked about it's gonna take up there yeah sure yeah uh no while people in dc were all mostly aware of the idea of a coming war like of course they know about the attack on pearl harbor or did they no they didn't they didn't japanese bombs don't melt steel aircraft carriers god damn it uh jesus you know what man

early morning podcast i have late night podcast delirium no but nobody knew how the war was going to start we kind of assumed it was going to be like an invasion the philippines or something like that but uh for the marine station on We kind of assumed it was going to be like an invasion of the Philippines or something like that. But for the Marine Station on the island, there wasn't really anything to do. Like nobody, nobody. Yeah, I mean, they're setting all time records of that, I'm sure. Men sat around doing nothing, living in shitty tents, though they did note that they watched the civilians do most of the work at the time. Yeah, which like, like okay that sounds kind of

rad um they did bitch and complain because civilian contractors lived in actual houses that they built themselves because they were contractors and while they were stuck in shitty tents and ate like the contractors are eating good too because their own company the contractor sent their food over while the u.s military was in charge of setting the marines food which according to one marine was mostly potatoes yeah what else would it have been hope motherfuckers like potatoes and rats yeah duh obviously i mean you see her you see her some rat flesh put some uh potatoes in that pan that's you are not eating you are not eating good in the neighborhood you are barely eaten in the neighborhood submarine writing a letter home to his mother like dear

dearest mother i was told there would be a buffalo wild wigs god damn it fdr lied to me now admiral husband e kimmel owner of the dumbass fucking name. What a fucking name. The Pacific Fleet commander pretty much knew for certain that Wake Island would be one of the first things attacked in the event of a war in Japan, mostly due to the geographic position and because

they had a military air base. If the Japanese didn't attack it, it would be a tactical blunder. They'd be able to reach out and hit the Japanese with their hypothetical F-4 Wildcats at this point as they steamed through the Pacific. They knew that no matter what was going to happen, Japan was going to attack Wake first and foremost. So this is actually Wake formed a defensive linchpin in America's plan. This is actually Wake formed a defensive linchpin in America's plan. Of course, this plan never happened, which was trap the Japanese off the coast of Wake and then launch the Pacific Fleet, which was based out of Pearl Harbor to smash them. This would work, I guess, like in a hypothetical situation where the attack in Pearl Harbor did not happen.

Sure, because then you're talking about something that is strictly imaginary. Why not, man? No, why not? As sometimes we say on the show, just why not? As we are all very aware now that this wouldn't exactly work out because by the time that the Japanese did attack Wake, there was no Pacific Fleet anymore.

So, whoops. He was right that Wake would be one of the, would be among the first things attacked when the war started, though he did kind of swing and miss and would be the first thing attacked, which is kind of important. Now, part of his plan was to turn Wake Island effectively into a fortress because it would have to hold up against a pretty significant Japanese attack for his original plan to work. And in order to do that, he would have to send a capable officer to command this desolate little dot of coral on the map. And this is where probably one of the most famous people of this battle shows up james patrick sino devereaux yeah very fancy name for marine um now he was not liked

by his own men he was nicknamed just plain shit uh based on his initials uh which i have to say pretty good it's pretty good yeah that was all right it beats uh john john pershing yeah oh boy um now devereaux is the is the kind of officer i have the hardest time speaking well of so bear with me on top of the fact he's a marine uh he was incredibly good at his job there is no doubting that however everyone fucking hated his guts anyway and i mean his his the the the marines under his command devra was well known for being a fucking asshole but in a good way like he was a stickler for details he didn't like randomly abuse his troops he was incredibly talented which is why he was pick-fist and he

drove his as his marines very very hard i'm trying my hardest not to call them soldiers um but he was a guy that if you were under his command during the time you'd probably hate his fucking guts but in retrospect he would get your respect which is kind of what happened nobody enjoyed being under his command for example when he got to wake he looked around and realized that virtually nothing had been done to make what amounted four miles of useless coral into anything resembling a defensible position so he ordered the marines to start working pretty much endlessly going from doing almost nothing to working 16 hours a day digging and building structures for seven days a week and unlike civilian contractors,

which were remember like 20 feet away, because there's nowhere to go on this fucking Island. The Marines had no construction equipment. So they had to do all of this with picks and shovels. And remember, they're not digging dirt. They're chipping through coral. They're effectively mining.

They're digging trenches, fighting positions, gun emplacements, all this shit needs to be built. Jesus, dude positions, gun emplacements. All this shit needs to be built. Jesus, dude. No thanks. Yeah, so you can see why they don't like him. Now, Wake was upgraded to a naval air station and naval command. I respect it, but I'm

really mad about it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, he's kind of a dick. That is the highest praise I can give an officer not named napoleon moving on um i'm gonna become the most insufferable prick on earth whenever we eventually cover like the hundred days it's gonna be great it's all gonna be a bit but everybody's gonna think i'm gonna be serious i mean he's arguably the greatest military commander in the history of mankind up until uh 1815 or so yeah up until he wasn't yeah i yeah and napoleonic you know i i yeah actually i think it would be very funny if we do the hundred days but it includes a full-throated full episode of us defending napoleon

i mean i kind of already did that once during the during the invasion of russia uh the other day i was out at a bar here and uh there was a british guy there and i as a joke started insisting that armenia needed to uh seat a member of the house of bonaparte and yeah like anybody who's ever listened to this show or met me in person knows that i can look you directly in your eyes and like make a joke and not even crack a smile yep he was not one of the people that could uh recognize a joke who likes that he he thought i was being serious he thought i was being he thought he just ran into a bar of a random like bonapartist did you that's fucking funny dude i didn't want to ruin it so he left and i mean if he's if if he ever meets anybody that knows who i am like oh yeah the bonapartist like yeah yeah well you know it's like that one is not a

rot who is it's a habsburg that's just on twitter a lot yeah he's a huge weeb he talks about Evan Gillian all the time. God damn it. The internet rules sometimes. Wake Island was upgraded to a naval air station and Naval Commander Winfield Cunningham, the most normal name of this episode, was sent to take overall command from Devereaux,

though Devereaux was still the commander of the Marine Defense Unit. Devereaux normally gets demoted or was he just like replaced by like a superior basically like a guy who was already going to oh okay no i get it became necessary to have a naval commander in charge because it's a naval air station rather than just like some dudes coral right sure got it so major devereaux is still in charge of the the ground defensive unit while uh commander cunningham is in charge of the air wing and the base as a whole uh like for instance for instance

uh people often say that like devereaux never surrendered which it wasn't his choice like like it wasn't up there but uh i feel like that he's still typing we didn't yeah yeah he didn't it wasn't up to him uh now cunningunningham showed up on November 28th, 1941. And no matter how hard Devereaux had worked, there was only so much you can do in a couple months with such a stretched out supply line. Picks,

picks and axes. Yeah. And obviously Marines doing it. So God knows they're doing Marine stuff. Very unskilled construction work. And I'm not saying this a dog on the marines i've seen me have to build stuff when i was in the army and it was fucking bad uh they don't teach you how to be a construction worker unless you're the job who's the guy whose job is to actually be a construction worker which i should note i never met a single one of those guys

so like you know they just like they assume that you can do these things it's like the math is an important part of construction ground hold by the army baby yeah exactly in that dimension like you know you need pieces you need tools you need concrete etc etc etc you need like stuff to build military fortifications and every time they needed something they would have to wait this incredibly long amount of time for the next supply ship. How often were the supply ships coming? Not that often.

That doesn't shock me. So over with this super stretched out supply line, shelters to protect aircraft from bombs were not built, which will become very important. And Devereaux still only had enough men to command about 24 machine guns,

which was the linchpin of any beach-based defense. Things weren't good. Yeah, things going poorly here. And for example, they didn't even have enough time to get them a radar to give them, oh, look, planes or ships or whatever they're just they're raw dog in it that's what i'm learning here uh that's the worst way to put that yes how would you put it i'm fucking i'm staying with it um like the way that they uh um had their early

warning system was a guy with binoculars yeah that, that's what I was going to say. A guy in like, not even what you would call, I don't know, just like the shit pirates use basically. I think the pirates would at least have like a tower for him to stand in. Like, so remember the highest point of 20 feet above the level, baby.

The source I used for this, which will be in the show notes, said like they put a man at the highest point i'm like it's 20 feet four feet that's that is lower than the place i'm currently sitting in like uh but uh yeah like the they they did eventually have a water tower built uh because no potable water on the island so So like... Potable? Potable? Is it potable? It's potable, bud. Potable. I hate that word. It sounds like it's pootable.

Yeah, Joe Kasabian syndrome. But eventually the guy got to stand in the water tower. So things got better. The water tower is just 20 water tanks on top of each other, actually. Now, eventually 12 F4 Wildcats, which were the air portion of the air station finally did show up but when it showed up it only showed up four days before america would enter the war oh

come on dude oh another another bad thing here and just to just to go to show like how much dudes rock sometimes when they showed up i remember none of these pilots had ever flown an f4 before right they've been trained in biplanes uh which was not uncommon at the time at all but you know planes are different they have different speeds uh different maintenance requirements you know whatever nobody had sent in instruction or maintenance manuals with the force just a big big crate that says figure it out yeah block letters like pilots uh okay fine i get that maybe i don't know enough about flying a plane uh but like imagine if you're the guys put in charge of of keeping these things running like these are complex even Even Wildcat is more complex

than I would know what to do with. Yeah, I mean, I'm not a pilot. If you're a pilot, right in. Could you fly a different plane, assuming it's not like a fucking Cessna 2747? But if you're a mechanic and you're used to fixing, I don't know, like biplanes from the 20s

and you suddenly get what is effectively a modern fighter bomber. Basically a fucking rocket ship. Yeah. I mean, by comparison. And I should note that both pilots and mechanics kind of just kind of flawlessly winged it here. Literally? Yeah. I didn't mean for that to be a pun.

Wing. It's a plane. Whatever. But like nobody on the... Planes have wings. Very good. Thank you. Now, there was also no spare parts were sent.

And when you're in a desolate island thousands of miles away from resupply, you might as well be in a different planet. So for people who don't know, that meant if a plane broke down bearing some kind of mechanical wizardry which some of these mechanics would be able to pull off yeah like uh they would be able to uh uh just make parts on the fly uh sane yeah it's it's wild

uh but yeah outside of out of like out of what is my i guess i have some shit lying around but even so sometimes they cannibalized parts off the biplanes and just like force them to fit um and also for reasons we'll get to two sets of wings on an f4 because that's the only thing i know what to do stretching canvas over broken piece of plane like i only know how to sew i'm a biplane mechanic and for reasons we'll get to there were some spare f4 parts laying around but yeah bearing some kind of wizardry these these planes would stay broken also like like we kind of pointed out that none of the pilots are familiar with these things at all nor how to use them offensively um all this has to be figured out

as they went making things worse because they always get worse yeah they should say it say it joe yeah it got worse um the communications were fucked um for example uh we've already been talking about how they they chipped out a ton of new fighting positions trenches command posts whatever in order to fuse all these positions together into a central command area they'd have to lay out command wires uh to hook up to radios right sure all these were old frayed and barely worked uh you effectively had to hotwire your radio to get it to work and just like do not like that i just hope it's not good uh kind of like an oxport in like a shitty car from high school you know they wear out after a while you just have to rotate it slowly until you're yeah yeah i'm familiar maybe that's just me showing my age i don't know but nope i had a volvo i had a volvo that uh i mean it was my baby but it it didn't cooperate often. Because it was a Volvo.

I loved my Volvo. Don't speak ill of the dead. Now, Devereaux assumed that all of these wires would eventually be replaced. Like, the next supply ship's going to come in. We're going to get more rifles. My poor sweet baby. Yeah. Oh. In the meantime, he was drilling his men constantly that sounds bad

even though yeah he just pegging and pegging and he's he's really riding them to the bone um even so he set up like a system of runners to because he was operating under the idea like well the radios aren't going to work we need runners um he was uh just running them constantly uh like every time at night i guess is my question yeah every time at night he was like making them get to their battle stations and get ready to fight uh with like within minutes until they had it down to a science he would leave them for hours and then have them do it all over again. He was sure that some fucked up shit was going to happen. And to be fair, Devereaux was not given advanced warning. And also not to mention, officers will make you do stupid shit when they're bored and there's time.

Right. It's the way of nature. He assumed that all these minor problems would be fixed. There not being enough machine guns, problems would be fixed there not being enough machine guns not being enough rifles not being enough repair parts not having like enough uh um uh wires anything right but they didn't around 6 40 a.m on december 8th 1941 the army radio trailer at wakes airfield received an uncoded emergency message from Pearl Harbor, located east of the international date line. So it was Sunday, December 7th in Pearl Harbor that said, quote, SOS, island of Oahu under attack by Japanese dive bombers.

This is the real thing. Not wrong, I guess. Now, I'm not going to blame anybody for not looking at a map at the moment, though, Liam, I know you already did. But Oahu, which is, of course, one of the islands of Hawaii where Pearl Harbor is located, is behind Wake Island. You have to bypass Wake Island to attack Oahu. Most people assumed, especially the Marine station on the island, including Devereaux, that the war would start with an attack on the philippines followed by the attack on wake nobody thought they would bypass wake entirely and attack pearl harbor right taking on the entire goddamn pacific fleet to do it right yeah they also had no way to know

that there were already japanese subs sitting off of Wake and monitoring them. So as soon as Devereaux got the message from Pearl Harbor, he ordered everyone to their battle stations. An order that would be given via bugle, interestingly enough, which the bugler was so nervous when he was told this was not a fucking drill that he completely

botched the bugle alert. So everybody just kind of stood around confused. What the fuck is it? what is that boy tooting at us hey boy why why are you why why is your tooting all fucked up i'm very nervous excuse me sir my mouth and my ass really botched your big moment there man it's the one time the bugler is gonna shine but uh everybody eventually got the point and uh they they went to their their their battle positions knowing for sure this is not a drill this time only a few hours after hitting pearl the japanese bombers appeared over the sky awake however because they had no radar station

according the marines they only had about 15 seconds notice oh i'm gonna rain down on the island that's that's that's not cool i can't believe i can't believe the imperial japanese navy would do something that wasn't cool shocked i tell you noted party poopers the imperial japanese navy not wrong really yeah um and obviously they have the guy on the water tower. And the guy on the water tower was like, planes! And everyone was like, yeah, we could fucking see him, idiot. We know Dave.

Get your ass down from there. So, yeah. Now, some say that they didn't know that these were Japanese planes. And that isn't hearsay. And that isn't like hearsay. According to one Marine position,

the eastern end of Wake... Because you don't know what the hell is going on. Yeah, exactly. And it's not like you can tell. This is an area called Peacock Point. He said, quote, I was standing on the top of my dugout talking to Colonel Hanna

when 18 to 19 planes popped out of a hole in the clouds. And I said, what's coming in? I thought they were B-17s because they were supposed to be coming in for the last few months. And then we would gas them and then they would leave again. Suddenly, these bombs fell out and the runner near me started shooting up at them. But we only got off about 18 rounds and then the planes were gone. So yeah, surprise, you're under attack.

Okay, bye. The first wave of bombs almost cut the aviation wing of the island in half, killing four of the pilots, as well as totaling seven of the 12 planes. So, whoops. Remember, they didn't have the bomb-proof shelters

built yet. Though, purposefully, the Japanese did not bomb the airstrip itself. Because they wanted to use it? Yeah, they thought they were going to pull up into this island pretty much without airstrip itself because they want to use it. Yeah. They, they thought they were going to pull up into this Island pretty much without a fight. And then they'd immediately have to use the airstrip.

In fact, ah, and we will throw our civilian contractors at them and see how they like that. Like the Japanese thought this entire ordeal would take them two, three hours. Now, after the first bombing run,

Devereaux initiated his defensive plan. Such that it was. Yeah. Now, a small Navy supply ship was blown up and sank in the middle of the island's main channel to stop any large ships from entering. Civilians pulled construction equipment onto

the airstrip to stop any Japanese troop transports from landing. Yes. If you're going to die, be a dick about it. Yes. If you're going to die, be a dick about it. Yes. And, uh, they were like the Japanese or the Japanese,

uh, the civilian contractors would also stay in these, like, uh, um, the, these construction, uh,

these construction vehicles, because they would have to pull them out of the way for, uh, American planes to take off. So like they, a lot of them were like effectively gatekeeping the uh the airstrip with themselves that's outstanding defensive work man now there was also they finally did get some rifles so there's enough rifles to go around but that's pretty much it

a lot of civilian contractors grabbed any weapons they could find and went to go join the marine defenders while others formed an ad hoc supply system. How else you do? Right. Yeah. I mean, people had heard about the Japanese, like the U S and the J and Japan had not been fighting each other. Well,

other than Pearl Harbor at this point, but there was no shortage of horror stories coming out of China. Like people knew like we were all fucking soldiers here, whether we, we want to be or not right um now devro legally could not tell these civilians to go grab a weapon they were not actually part of his plan nothing that they did was his plan was for them to all go fucking hide and wait for the shit to pass if it did um hence why all of these guys uh some of them were like former military

most of them were not so when they showed up to the line they were like uh so how do i use this thing like holding a rifle like marines who were then like the marines gave them about like five second class about a rifle or like this is how you load ammo into a machine gun for me shoot shoot and uh cute good luck to you yeah uh like you you you set. Good luck to you. Yeah. You set the bolt down. Now you're killing. Now you pull the bolt up. Now you're not killing. Good? All right. Now, the poor bastards

on Wake knew that Pearl Harbor had been attacked, but they had no idea how bad it was attacked. They were assuming that the U.S. Navy would come steaming right out to save them, and were now wondering how long they would have to hold off the Japanese before they would show up. A while. Sorry. It turns out several years if you ended up in a POW camp.

We'll get there. We'll get there. And they were mostly wondering like, oh, the Navy will get here before the Japanese land troops on wake. Like that's how out of it that these guys are. They have no idea. In the meantime, Deverell recognized the reality of his situation. They were going to be fighting the entire Japanese invasion force alone. The Navy would not be coming to help them. But he also realized if he rolled out his big five-inch anti-chip guns, his coastal defense defense guns to slug it out the japanese navy the navy the japanese navy would end that fight pretty quickly uh before the they got close

enough um to for the native the marine gunners actually hit anything so as the japanese navy under the command of admiral uh kajioka sorry, I'm not. You're a member of the Japanese Imperial Navy. Appeared off the coast of Wake on December 11th. Devereaux gave orders for everybody to hold their fire, to not shoot at all without explicit orders to open fire.

Now, this is because the Japanese are kind of fucked up. Of all the planes they've been flying overhead, none of them are recon flights. They were just bombing the islands um yeah i mean they they weren't noting down the marine defenses nothing so they could kind of just hide in their in their positions because the japanese didn't actually know where their positions were now as the admiral and his flagship the yubari led three light cruisers six destroyers and 450 soldiers

in transports and an old and an old destroyer like one of their tactics was going to be to beach this thing on wake and use it as a landing craft which is very stupid um and kind of interesting that this was going to be their tactic when they so overwhelmingly overpowered the defenders. They're still going to be crashing a ship into this fucking island. But they had been given reports by the bombers that there'd been no activity on the island, which led the Admiral to believe

they had surprised the defenders and not the fact they'd just been so well drilled they refused to leave their defensive positions. Yeah. I would rather get bombed than... I ain't don't like i'd rather get bombed yeah i ain't coming out i ain't coming out i would rather get bombed than get yelled at by devereaux again so i'm just gonna stay in here honestly i have no idea why they would have thought that uh other than like the the defenders hadn't shot at them and that there wasn't they like there

weren't marines running around like a like an anthill down there. However, while they had been shot at a little bit, like their first pass is dead, they probably came... The shots are probably so far away, it didn't matter. But they had no idea how many Marines were on the island, and they wouldn't have seen any moving

around. It's David, friends. The defenders had been given explicit orders that forbade them from leaving their positions during daylight hours they only came out at night so the japanese could not tell what was happening um so the and the japanese were only bombing during daylight hours and they would not have seen them they would all they would simply assume that since nobody was shooting at them they uh they must not know or or have the guts or maybe they're waiting to surrender. Marines in their forward positions demanded to be allowed to open fire, but each time Devereaux told them no. One man said, quote, what does that dumb little bastard want us to do? Let him run over us without spitting back. I should put it devro was quite small devro was a little guy devro and these guys must have had balls of steel because they held their fire until the japanese

navy was only 4 000 yards away which is pretty much point blank as far as like naval gunfire is uh is concerned and at that point he he ordered his five-inch guns to open fire. And they did not fucking miss at that range. Within a few minutes, every single ship in the Japanese landing force was hit at least once.

A destroyer was sank and killed 168 sailors and the admiral was forced to order a retreat. Scoreboard, baby! Now, as the fleet retreated, the tiny surviving air wing of f4 f4 wildcats in the garrison took off the whole again four whopping planes began dive bombing the japanese landing force and annihilating it once again nearly every ship was hit the

kisaragi was sank and the admiral was killed by a strafing run, which was supposed to be a quick assault on a tiny, worthless speck of island had now cost the Japanese 340 dead for the price of so far one dead Marine. Who died heroically with both middle fingers in the air to shape. He couldn't fire back. with both middle figures in the air. It's a shame he couldn't fire back. This small, nondescript hunk of coral defended by a bunch of bored Marines and civilians had given the U.S. effectively the first victory of World War II.

And the word got back, of course, to the mainland. Yeah, that just slurred back because the radio didn't work. It's just one Marine like a note clenched between his teeth doggy paddling back towards California get there eventually god damn it

they like newspapers in the US kept headlines or read headlines saying Marines kept awake and they compared their heroic last stand to or the heroic stand at Wake Island to the Alamo,

which I really don't think the guys on the island wanted to hear that comparison. If I'm going to be honest, like there's, there's also the saying that like Devereaux said something about surrendering. And when he was asked about it, he's like,

I never said that, but that sounds really good. Keep it up. Imagine you're at this position where you still fully believe the U.S. Navy is coming to save you and people are comparing you to the Alamo. Like, oh, shit. I've seen this movie and I don't like how it ends. I know how the story ends and it's not happy. However, as the guys in the island celebrated, everybody knew that the Japanese were coming back.

As the guys in the island celebrated, everybody knew that the Japanese were coming back. But it's not like they could rely on their crack radar station to tell them when because they didn't have one. So the men staying at their post, sleeping only for a few minutes here and there as the Japanese Navy shelled and bombed them around the clock for two fucking weeks. The only free time from the bombing was spent rushing around in the bunkers to repair anything that may have been blown up a little bit too bad and then running back into shelter fucking Christ what's interesting is you know who else took shelter the rats oh no the huge rat population

of this tiny island took cover in the same bunkers as the men and like because they were constantly getting fucking rattled and like so I assume the marines taught them uh how to hold knives with their tiny little rat claws and go get the japanese congratulations tiny brother you're now in the marine corps i mean i imagine trapped in this coral bunker because everything's built out of like cemented coral there's a bunch of rats chanting one two three four united states marine corps as they try to claw a bunch of imperial japanese navy's dudes to death with their tiny claws i cannot imagine like the case of like

creeping dread that was on everybody also um one of the guys uh pointed out that they were being they're so like hit around the clock with naval gunfire it caused the entire island to shake constantly without end um and it gave them all diarrhea like it shook their insides until they were just shitting water uh that probably all said something to do with like intense anxiety uh there's so many air bursting shells exploding above the island that it killed the entire bird population. It already made it a sanctuary. That's right. And like, as someone noted that the entire four mile stretch of Island was just coded a dead bird.

Fuck you dicks. Like, how do we make this words a blanket of dead birds? Perfect. The defenders of the Island pretty much slipped into like a catatonic state. Devereaux said, quote, the days blurred together in a dreary sameness of bombing and endless work and always that aching need for sleep. I have seen men standing with their eyes open, staring out at nothing, and they did not hear me when I spoke to them.

Like, everybody's just going nuts from shell shock. Yeah, I'd be going nuts too, man. Like, I'm a bitch, dude. I would be losing it. And not to mention, they're not sleeping like they're they're under siege like they're there's everything is so loud and being so obliterated by gunfire they cannot sleep so like people are just losing their shit if not from gunfire from lack of like if for anybody who hasn't stayed up more than like a day or two the human body is not supposed to do that.

Yeah, I think the longest I stayed up was three days. And I was a fucking mess, dude. I was hallucinating. You name it. The only defense at this stage came from their anti-aircraft guns and their tiny air wing, which was still operating somewhat. Devereux ordered the AA guns to be moved. It's hard to fly planes with balls that big we should clarify and also not sleeping at all but also the balls talk

about the balls joe i don't want to talk about the balls i don't want to talk about the rats but here we are motherfucker sometimes you gotta talk about rat balls now devereaux gave strict orders that every single night their a guns would be moved so the Japanese could not zero in on them. And I see what I did there. Again, did not do that on purpose, but I wish I did. And the four wild cats were being bolted back together from anything the mechanics could find because

they were getting punctured with gunfire as well. At one point, the mechanics pulled replacement parts from a burning plane before it exploded out of something like an action movie. Though it didn't matter how hard they tried. By the end of the month, all of the fighters were out of commission. There wasn't enough replacement parts for any of them.

And it was a minor miracle they even lasted that long. And at that point, all of the pilots shrugged, took off their pilot clothes, put on their Navy fatigues, and went off into the trench lines where they are now soldiers. Joe, they're not soldiers, they're marines. Technically, they're semen pilots, whatever. Be mad. The last four Wildcats had managed to kill

literally hundreds of Japanese attackers, sinking a destroyer and a submarine who fucked up and surfaced just a little bit too close to wake. There's also a small rescue attempt by the U.S. Navy known as Task Force 14, which was supported by the USS Enterprise.

That's how you know it's good. While all of this is going on, the invasion force is being reinforced. Japan sent heavy cruisers, tumor destroyers, two mine layers, and one seaplane tender and the aircraft carriers Soryu and Hiryu which had just gotten done bombing

Pearl Harbor they also received 1600 additional troops because they started to realize that this shit was getting a little bit spicier than they planned when Navy intelligence heard of this massive flex of ship towards Wake Island by the Japanese the relief task force 14 was called off because

they originally were planning on, if we have to fight the force off of Wake Island, we can do it. But now we can't fight off this bigger one. Now what's interesting is everybody aboard task force 14 knew what these orders meant. They were leaving Wake Island to die. And it barely nearly led to a mutiny. Like one of the closest times that a US Navy ship during World War II almost said, fuck you and did its own thing. But at the last second, it turned around.

This actually led Tokyo Rose, the famed English language propagandist in Tokyo, in one of her broadcasts say, quote, where, oh, where is the United States Navy? A broadcast which could be heard by the men on Wake Island on radio. Now, the Japanese command had previously learned they didn't really want to fuck up and end up toe to toe with the Marine shore batteries again. So the next attempt, next attempted landing would target the South Shore, where the combined Marines, sailors, civilians, pilots held a four-mile-long line. They're not going to fuck with the defensive cannons anymore.

The only reserve that Devereaux had was eight whole guys in a pickup truck. Now, what's interesting is in this pickup truck, a machine gun was bolted onto the back. So the Marines had a technical. We need a tactical. marines had a technical marines had a technical i hate to say it but one two three four united states marine corps they are geniuses in their own little way yeah at this point a lot of the construction workers had previously stayed out of a fighting reported to devro's uh outpost to volunteer for duty devro told them the japanese would almost certainly kill them all if they fought uh and they volunteer anyway i'm gonna kill them all anyway

fuck it who gives a shit yeah i mean yeah you might as well shoot back they're gonna kill you again uh it's the wisest thing shane davidson if you're listening uh that my friend shane davidson ever said which is that if you're gonna die you might as well be a dick about it. Yeah, you might as well go down the most amount of spite possible. That's a lion's love by donkey's promise. At 2 a.m. on December 23rd, the Japanese made their second landing attempt, outnumbering the

defenders 3 to 1 because this time they were not leaving anything up for chance. It did not take long for the pure weight of this japanese landing force of over 2 000 men that seems unnecessary i mean where are you gonna fit 2 000 people on wake island like it is it is four miles apart the dead bird pile everywhere you're stepping you hear the crunching sounds of birds um and like the defenders held the best they could but the civilians marines and sailors refused to retreat um they were holding their lines until everything

devolved into hand-to-hand chaos bayonets rocks like at one point a construction worker upended a shovel and began beheading Japanese soldiers with a sharpened edge. I mean, that's a war crime, but yeah. It's not a war crime. They were attacking him. It's self-defense. It's the South Park rules of he's coming right for us. He's like, bring him with a shovel.

According to actually one Japanese soldier, he said, quote, americans are blazing away with a machine gun from the hip as they do in american gangster films which is dudes rock like a marine named rolf walensky and two civilians paul paul gay and bob bryan god these names are interesting um sat in a foxhole and spammed grenades at the japanese soldiers as they rushed around them like it was battlefield 1942 and you were loading off of a box or whatever they killed at least 30 of them another civilian john sorensen tackled a japanese soldier and began strangling him and biting him on the face when he got done killing that guy he took off at a dead sprint unarmed at the japanese braining several worth rocks before he was shot dead like just civilian air uh like airport worker

turned into fucking wolverine at the drop of a hat what are you supposed to do with that that guy missed his calling in life imagine you imagine being a Japanese conscript too and just like seeing your buddy just get absolutely rocked by just a guy wearing like an airport service uniform I was like telling your lieutenant like but we're treating oh is it the Marines

no it's the construction workers oh my god they're coming out of the trees at another point a Japanese soldier and a Marine stabbed each other simultaneously with bayonets, killing each other and falling to the earth, locking them in place. Like those dinosaurs, like everybody's heard about. Despite each pocket of defenders holding on, none of them could support one another due to this being so badly outnumbered devereaux lost contact with everyone pretty quickly due to previously mentioned shitty radio lines and he found himself shooting at oncoming soldiers with his sidearm from his

command post like i talked about the pilots before they were like on the line braining people with like crescent wrenches and Tommy guns and shit. Now the commander Cunningham cabled Hawaii with probably the biggest understatement of the American war so far. Quote, enemy on island issue in doubt. As Japanese soldiers and NCOs carried flags with them at the

time so their commander could see where they were like people could actually see like an encroaching line of Japanese rising sun flags coming towards their position as men all around them were fighting to the death with everything they could get their hands on. Now, Cunningham did see the situation was completely futile. Like, we have lost. And he hoped to save as many of his men's lives as he could. He told Devereaux quote, well, I guess we better give it to them.

And he ordered Devereaux to order his men to surrender. When Devereaux went towards his men and told them to sell, he went under a white flag to go to, uh, their, their positions. He, uh,

told them that like the commander Cunningham has told us to, to surrender. And it led to men screaming at him and like he was saying that they were going to refuse and devereaux had to counter with shut the fuck up it is not my order art like are you like absolutely arguing with his own men about uh taking the order i mean some of it was like inner service rivalry right like the guy giving the command was navy and well yeah the marines are in the navy he wasn't a marine he wasn't devereaux so he's like fuck the navy we'll keep fighting like never was like oh that's not such a good idea

you come out here and make me take the... You come out here and take the shovel. Yeah. You could take this rock from my cold, dead hands. Devereux's like, well, the Japanese are planning on it. In the end, the defenders of Wake Island lost 49 Marines, three Navy personnel, and 70 civilians. The Japanese lost around 400 dead,

but also two ships and a goddamn submarine. They're also not sure how many planes they downed, but they fucked up a good couple of planes as well. There were so few Marines on the island that when they surrendered, the Japanese commander refused to accept

that this was everybody and demanded that the men hidden somewhere on this island where there's nowhere to hide turn themselves over. Oh yeah, that's just Jod. He's in the bird pile. Only to be told by Debra like, no, this is everything we got, man.

Maybe you just suck at war. Maybe you just are really unhappy you got brained by the local construction workers union. Yeah, maybe you just are really unhappy you got brained by the local construction workers union. Yeah, you bad? You bad? You messed with Shovel Pete. Now,

only a few civilians were kept on Wake Island as labor, with the rest of the defenders being, I think it was like 90-something civilians were kept on there for labor, as the rest of the defenders were loaded onto prison ships en route to a POW camp. Now, as they set off, five Marines

of the garrison were chosen at random and beheaded in revenge for putting up such a fight. Yeah. They wanted to get their hands on the pilots as well, but the pilots had changed into Marine uniform and they were kind were in hiding.

All of the labors kept on Wake Island were eventually executed in 1943. And we actually only know about this because one of them escaped, got to a part in Wake Island and scratched the number of POWs executed, like 93 POWs on the date. And then that man also was eventually found executed because where are you going to hide in Wake Island? Now, after the fall of the island to the Japanese, the U.S. Navy pretty quickly just ignored it. They strangled it off with the submarine-based blockade. He strangled it off with the submarine-based blockade. And because there was no food on the island, it quickly turned to a pit of starvation and human misery for the garrison of Japanese forces. By the time that the island finally surrendered at the end of the war without a fight, pretty much all of the vegetation had been stripped bare.

And the Japanese garrison had almost eaten all of the rats on the island. Fair enough. What else is there? Yeah, I mean, they would have had birds to eat, but they killed them already. Now, the Wake Island is still part of the United States today. It is a tiny little air station. I think they use it for testing or something.

And the Japanese garrison commanders that were in charge of of of the invasion and then the garrisoning of wake island were all captured and executed in guam in 1947 for the execution of american pows and the civilians but uh yeah that's the story of the united states first kind of sort of victory in world war ii united states first kind of sort of victory in world war ii again hard to it is sort of hard to to uh shoot two machine guns from the hip like a scene out of terminator with balls that big yeah like gangsta like when the japanese attackers like they're a come as like guy like action movie stars from gangster films like you've done something simultaneously wrong and right and it fucking rules now

I'll leave it up to the listeners where they place this on our growing list of island invasion episodes I still think Taro is the worst until we of course get to Iwo Jima and Okinawa but we haven't done that yet or Saipan for that matter now

Liam we do a thing called Question from Legion on this show. If you'd like to ask us a question from Legion, donate to the show, even a dollar, and you can ask us through our Discord. You can ask us through Patreon or failing that, you can write a letter, put it in between the teeth of a Marine

and make him swim to Philadelphia and deliver the letter to... Or give him a large rucksack and a sizable supply of water and make him hike over the Caucasus Mountains and find me. And we'll answer it on the show. Today's question comes from the Discord.

What was your worst pet or the worst pet you've known that a weirdo keeps that insists that all of the animals are perfect? Okay. So I... Man, I don't really know. I haven't had any bad pets. All of my pets have been normal.

I've loved each... I had a cat when I was a kid named Lucrezia Borgia after a murderess. She lived in the basement. She was a black and white Persian cat cat and i loved her very much uh i have loved all of my cats uh i'm actually going to turn this question on to ted and uh talk about how much i love my cat toby uh okay because so i have a cat named toby he lives at my parents house he's 12 He is the fattest, dumbest, orangest cat in the universe. Sounds lovely. He is incredibly stupid.

Sometimes he forgets where his food is. He wanders around in circles, meowing at nothing. I love him more than life itself. Cats are just weird little guys. I love Toby. I love that. My parents took him to the vet because they were worried about him. And the vet told him, no, no, it's okay for male orange cats to be stupid and happy.

That's what they do. I love I love to Toby. The clinical diagnosis of your cat is like, no, he's just dumb. Yeah, I told my mom and I and i believe this with my whole heart uh i can prepare for her death a lot more than i can prepare for toby's and uh i will not be i will be more upset when toby dies than when either of my parents die i mean i kind of understand uh i love toby since we're spending this question i have like everybody knows i have a dog named laika and i love her very much. She's not in Armenia yet. She will be here soon because in order to transport dogs internationally, you have to get rabies titer tests and boosters, and they take months to get done correctly.

out anybody else that I left behind in the United States. So I adopted her in Texas when I was living there when I was just out of the army. I was going through a lot and I wanted a dog. And she had been abandoned three different times before I adopted her. And she was not even a year old yet. I don't know why. She's the most affectionate fucking dog i've ever owned in my life she's attached to my hip like velcro um and like will never let me be in a room alone by myself to include the bathroom no matter how much i don't want her to hang out in the bathroom yeah uh so yeah like and uh every time i bring her to the vet it's like uh your drunk friend who you're telling like bro it's gonna be fine you don't need to fight them like they're not trying to fight you but like is ready to fight the vet it's it's amazing um i apologize to any of the vets or

vet techs who have had to take care of like it during this time sorry about it um yeah sorry um yeah we we're we're big dumb softy boys and we love our animal children um uh liam thank you for joining me today uh it's it's always fun to talk about uh island-based misery um everybody thank you for listening uh if if you like our show consider supporting it on patreon you get all sorts of bonus stuff now the bonus catalog is four years long at this point we have two bonus series we have the history of rome or sorry the rome cast uh where we definitely not the history of rome uh we watch hbo's rome and make fun of it and do not talk about hbo's rome and i also have the history of armenia where i uh put on my best npr voice and attempt to teach people about the history of my lovely adopted homeland.

And occasionally there's interviews with other Armenians about ongoing events because our political atmosphere is deeply strange here sometimes. So maybe donate to the show and get access to that stuff. Or don't. Leave us a review.

Reviews are nice. Give us your money. I keep getting email alerts that people are leaving us five-star reviews. And it's really nice. Because otherwise, we don't know what you think of what we do here. So leave us a review. Donate to the show. William, plug your shit.

10,000 losses. See you at the script. Well, there's your problem. Yay. Also, buy my books. Buy his books. uh until next time don't invade wake island