Sgt. J. Edward ‘Swede’ Pearsall: The Surrender of Wake Island

Warriors In Their Own Words | First Person War Stories

On this day (December 8th) in 1941, Japanese forces attacked Wake Island. After the Americans surrendered, Sgt. Pearsall and his fellow Marines were taken as prisoners of war, and spent 3 ½ years at a prison camp in China during WWII.

Sergeant John Edward ‘Swede’ Pearsall served in the Marines as a part of the 1st Defense Battalion, D Battery on Wake Island in 1941.

Wake Island is located 2,458 miles west of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean. The U.S. knew a Japanese attack was coming, so men were stationed on the island to protect it.

On December 8th, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese attacked Wake Island. The Battle of Wake Island lasted for a little over two weeks until American forces surrendered in order to protect civilian lives.

After the surrender, Sgt. Pearsall and his fellow Marines were almost executed before the Japanese decided to take them as prisoners. They would eventually be taken on a prison ship to Yokohama Harbor, and then transported to Wusong China, where they would spend three and a half years in a prison camp.

At the camp, conditions were brutal. They had little water to drink or bathe with, were beaten often, were not adequately fed, and were forced to do physical labor. During the interview, Pearsall had this to say about the camps:

“Starvation, I found, was the toughest thing. The beatings you took. Almost daily, you took beatings from the Japanese, but you kind of became punch-drunk, so to speak. You expected them and you lived with them. But starvation you don't live with. When you're hungry, you're hungry 24 hours a day. You go to sleep hungry. You wake up during the night hungry, and you're hungry all day. Starvation is one of the toughest things we found to face. The work and labor that they made us do was tough, but the food was totally inadequate for the work and to sustain life. Myself, I went from a 200 pound Marine. When the war ended, I weighed somewhere around 85 pounds, so that when the war finally came to end, there wasn't much left of us. We couldn't have sustained life, under the food we were getting, much longer.”

Finally on Easter Sunday, 1945, American forces arrived and liberated the camp, saving Sgt. Pearsall and his fellow prisoners. Upon arriving home, Pearsall was awarded the Purple Heart.

To learn more about J. Edward Pearsall and the Battle of Wake Island, check out Son of Wake Island. It's written by J. Edward Pearsall's son, David Pearsall, with the help of his father and the other surviving defenders of Wake island.

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