Overshadowed by the attack on Pearl Harbor, and sometimes forgotten amidst the more famous campaigns of the Pacific, tiny Wake Island suffered its own sudden attack just five hours after Pearl Harbor on that "Day of Infamy." Under-defended due to strategic confusion and without reinforcements due to upper-command incompetence, the small garrison of navy personnel, marines, and construction-contract civilians endured constant bombing over much of the short conflict. With only a handful of aircraft and AAA, and a few dozen light machine-guns, the force managed to repulse one attempted landing and sink several ships in the Japanese fleet. Severely out manned and with dwindling supplies and no hope of reinforcement, the island was eventually surrendered on Dec. 23. What followed was almost 4 years of misery and hardship as those captured were scattered throughout POW camps in Japan, China, & Korea and subjected to untold starvation, abuse, and hard labor.

Cunningham's book is a fairly straightforward oral history, comprised of the stories of around 70 participants across the spectrum of rank and service. Originally started as a project to track down information on the author's brother -- a Wake veteran -- the book focuses exclusively on the military participants. Given the presence of so many civilians on the island, from contractors to the employees of the PanAm seaplane port, the book would have benefited from the inclusion of a variety of voices. Many of the civilian contractors, after all, participated heavily in the fighting, manning artillery positions and serving in the infantry and suffering the same POW experiences as their military counterparts. Still, the action on the island, and the horror of the POW experience, is ably and thoroughly recounted, and the book is capably organized.

At times, though, Cunningham's work suffers from some of the problems that plague so many oral history books - poor editorial control and narrative redundancy. Given the personal nature of the project's origin, it's understandable that Cunningham is loath to amend or rearrange much of the material provided to him. But that doesn't make the reading any easier. The stories Cunningham presents sometimes effect the overall narrative stream. While he should be commend him for feeling the need to include each and every Wake veteran's story, some of these submissions consist of nothing more than a few sentences, and often the material seems taken from a short, aimless telephone conversation or postcard-sized written response. To include late in the middle of the chapters dealing with the island's defense, for instance, a vet's 5 sentence summary of his enlistment, service, imprisonment, and return to civilian life, is to necessarily diminish the impact of the stories surrounding it. Including these featureless and non-descriptive summaries (provided by vets clearly uninterested or unwilling to offer a more descriptive or contemplative recounting) can make the story feel tiny and lost.

Thankfully these moments are few and far between, and generally appear in the first half of the book. Other aspects of the battle and its aftermath are vividly described in many of the transcripts: the shock and surprise of the war, the tiny, nowhere feeling of the island's defenders, the sometimes lingering recriminations of the veterans towards their captors. Certainly, the stories of the veterans' POW experiences contains the strongest and most effecting material (understandable given the brevity of the conflict itself (less than 3 weeks) compared to their term of imprisonment (44 months)). From the brutality of their captors to the back-breaking labor, this section of the book paints a bleak picture of the POW experience at the hands of the Japanese. Torture, abuse, the officer corps' abdication of leadership (officer POWs did little to no work and received dramatically more rations), and the daily struggle for survival all are depicted in great detail in powerful personal stories and vignettes.

Given the dearth of memoirs about Wake Island and the battle's brief and early occurrence in the timeline of the Pacific theater in WWII, Hell Wouldn't Stop is a worthwhile addition to both the library of military studies and to the canon of oral histories. ( )