The following day, 13 December, found VMF-211 conducting its patrols as usual with three available aircraft. Meanwhile, ground crews dragged Captain Elrod’s old plane over from the beach and propped it up across the runway to serve as a decoy. The contractors promised Kinney that a light-proof hangar would be finished that night.
Listening to the radio that evening provided little inspiration. As Kinney noted in his diary, Kay Kyser, the reknowned bandleader, had dedicated a song to the “Wake Marines,” while commentators noted that Wake’s defenders, when asked what they required, had said “Send us more Japs.”
“We began to figure out,” Kinney wrote, “that the U.S. was not going to reinforce us.”
At Pearl Harbor, however, efforts proceeded apace to disprove those who despaired of relief: the Tangier began discharging aviation gasoline to a barge alongside, as she prepared for her impending mission. Early the following morning, she began unloading warheads and torpedoes and commenced loading aviation stores earmarked for Wake. Later, she shifted to the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard, where she continued discharging gasoline and unloading torpedoes. “Wake Island,” Rear Admiral Claude Bloch, the Commandant of the 14th Naval District, wrote on 12 December (13 December on Wake) “is putting up a magnificent fight. Kimmel is doing his best to devise means for reinforcing it and getting out the civilians....” The Lexington and her consorts entered Pearl to fuel on 13 December, while Saratoga (CV-3) and her escorts (three old destroyers) steamed toward Oahu—also delayed by heavy weather.
The enemy, meanwhile, maintained aerial pressure on the atoll. Three flying boats bombed the island at 0437 on Sunday, 14 December, but did not damage anything. The Marines, sailors, and contractors went about their daily business of improving their defensive positions. The artillerymen replaced the natural camouflage with fresh foliage.
Wake had little need for “more Japs,” despite media claims. It did, however, need tools with which it could defend itself. Cunningham radioed to the Commandant of the 14th Naval District a lengthy list of supplies—including fire control radars—required by his 5- and 3-inch batteries, as well as by the machine gun and searchlight batteries.
At the airfield, the 14th dawned with just two planes in service. Kinney determined, though, that one of those, an F4F “bought” from VF-6 (embarked on the USS Enterprise), required an engine replacement. They would scavenge the parts required from two irreparably damaged planes. As a work crew tackled that task, 30 Nells from the Chitose Air Group began sowing destruction across Wake. One bomb hit one of the aircraft shelters and set afire an F4F.
National Archives Photo 19-N-25360