World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF THE PACIFIC: Wake's 378

It was Christmas week out there under the wide open sky on a sandspit in midsea, just as it was back home, where stores bustled, and parti-colored lights blinked from the trees in a million windows. But for the Marines on Wake Is land it was the week when they fought and died in their last, hopeless stand.

Since the 8th of December (the 7th on the U.S. side of the International Date Line) the little band of 378 sea-soldiers had been under repeated Jap attack. Frying in the Pacific sun on their desolate...