Monument Dedicated to Civilian Defenders : Battle Veterans Journey to Wake Island

Palm trees and evergreens grow where once there was only ironwood brush. The once-countless rats and gooney birds are gone, the coral runway has been replaced.

“It’s strange, everything looks so different that walking around here, looking at the monuments and the old rusted-out guns, it’s almost like looking at someone else’s life, like it never happened to me,” says Darwin Dodds of Denver, a retired radio and television broadcaster.

Dodds was a 22-year-old civilian construction worker captured when the Japanese invaded this remote tropical atoll in late 1941. He was one of the defenders of Wake Island who recently returned for a dedication of a monument in honor of the civilians who fought alongside the soldiers, sailors and Marines, all of whom were either killed or captured.

Got Little Credit

A memorial to the Marines was erected shortly after the war. But the civilians--including construction workers building military installations and others who worked for Pan American Airways--got little credit. It was 1981 before they were deemed eligible for veterans’ benefits, and for 47 years there was no official monument to them.

The dedication ceremony drew 42 civilian defenders, 14 military men, and about about 100 family members. For many of them, the reunion June 13-16 was their first visit to the island since the war.

Ival Dale Milbourn, 64, a retired construction contractor who lives in Santa Rosa, Calif., still has occasional nightmares about his war experiences. By bringing his wife, two sons and his 85-year-old father to the reunion, he hoped to put some of the old ghosts to rest.

“This has been a 47-year-dream,” Milbourn said as he looked over the post he manned on the day of the first attack on Dec. 8, 1941. “I just can’t explain how I feel, but by having my family here I feel like they understand why I’m the way I am, why I did the things I did.”

Milbourn was 18 years old and a private in the U.S. Marine Corps when he landed on Wake in late 1941. He still recalls the details of that first attack, only hours after the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor. Wake is west of the International Dateline, so it was the next day there.

Anti-Aircraft Gun

“We weren’t prepared at all,” says Milbourn, who manned a 3-inch anti-aircraft gun. “We hadn’t even filled the first sandbag. We ran to our positions and trained right on those planes, but we were expecting reinforcements and we thought they might be our own guys.”

The next 16 days were a blur of daily bombing raids, thwarted invasions and close-fought battles.

The outnumbered U.S. troops shot down 21 Japanese planes and sank at least two destroyers with outmoded weapons salvaged from warships from World War I. But with no reinforcements and little ammunition, they surrendered to the Japanese on Dec. 23, 1941.

The Marines were commanded by Maj. James P. S. Devereux, who was acclaimed the “hero of Wake Island.” During the fighting he was reported to have sent the message, “Send us more Japs.” He later denied the story.

Devereux, who served as a congressman from Maryland after the war, died Aug. 5 of pneumonia at age 85.

“We were among the last Marines to get the order to surrender,” Milbourn recalls, “and when we were told to give up our guns, well, that was the first time we ever told an NCO (noncommissioned officer) ‘up your bucket’ because we’d been told the Japanese take no prisoners.”

The Americans were ordered to strip and march down to the old airstrip, where a ring of machine guns awaited. There they were tied up and ordered to crouch in the middle of the circle.

‘Took Guns Down’

“We were scared and praying and crying and everything else,” Milbourn says. “Then at the last minute, they took the guns down, because they learned there were civilians among us.”

The Americans--449 Marines, 68 sailors, 6 Army Air Corps men and 1,200 civilians--were left on the airstrip overnight, still naked and tightly bound.

The next day they were each given a small piece of bread and a drink of gasoline-tainted water. It was Dec. 25, 1941.

“That was our Christmas dinner, and we had no idea how much worse it would get,” Milbourn recalls.

Most of the prisoners were eventually transferred by boat to prison camps in Shanghai and Japan. Several prisoners were beheaded, and all were poorly fed along the way. The Japanese kept 98 civilians on the island as slave labor.

Lied About Age

Roger (Chick) Bamford of Texarkana, Ark., lied about his age to join the Marines when he was 15 years old, so he had not even turned 20 when he was released from prison camp in September, 1945, after the Japanese surrender.

“I got the name Chick in boot camp because I was such a kid,” says Bamford. “In prison camp the older guys looked out for me, tried to get me food, because I was in my growing years.”

Across the atoll, the survivors, many of whom hadn’t seen each other since they were liberated from prison camps, gathered in little groups to compare experiences.

They set off under the blazing tropical sun to find memorable spots; the bunkers, the old landing strip, the mass grave where the dead were laid to rest.

“That’s what this trip is really about,” said Walter Kennedy, 71, of Orange Cove., Calif., who as a 23-year-old Marine sergeant was injured during the first attack.