Facing fearful odds

the long version

Although the siege of Wake Island was not one of World War II's biggest campaigns, it had a profound psychological effect on the course of that struggle. This was the battle that first raised American spirits in the dark weeks immediately following Pearl Harbor. For sixteen suspenseful days, 449 U.S. Marines, assisted by a handful of sailors and soldiers and a few hundred civilian construction workers, withstood repeated attacks by numerically superior Japanese forces. Although Wake finally fell on 23 December 1941, its garrison made the Japanese pay an embarrassingly high price for a tiny coral outpost.