Hell Wouldn't Stop

by Cunningham, Chet

"For Kenneth Cunningham and the 387 other U.S. marines in the defense battalion stationed on Wake Island in the Pacific, World War II began on December 8, 1941, just five hours after Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. It ended on December 23. That day the marines on the tiny atoll - their twelve Wildcat fighter planes lost, their forces diminished, their communications down - 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 servicemen fought intrepidly. against impossible odds, until their commanding officers ordered them to surrender. Their term in hell, though, had just begun.". "No sooner had the marines laid down their arms than they were stripped of all their clothes. With their hands bound behind the back, they sat naked for two days in the hot sun; at night they shivered in the cold. After that they slogged and sle