"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…
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50 Secrets
