Wake Island (film)

Wake Island
Directed by	John Farrow
Written by	W. R. Burnett Frank Butler
Produced by	Joseph Sistrom
Starring	Brian Donlevy Macdonald Carey Robert Preston Albert Dekker William Bendix Walter Abel
Cinematography	William C. Mellor Theodor Sparkuhl
Edited by	Frank Bracht LeRoy Stone
Music by	David Buttolph
Production company	Paramount Pictures
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release date	September 1, 1942 (1942-09-01) (New York City)
Running time	88 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$826,000[1]
Box office	$3.5 million (U.S. and Canada rentals)[2][3]

Wake Island is a 1942 American action drama war film directed by John Farrow, written by W. R. Burnett and Frank Butler, and starring Brian Donlevy, Robert Preston, Macdonald Carey, Albert Dekker, Barbara Britton, and William Bendix. The film tells the story of the United States military garrison on Wake Island and the onslaught by the Japanese following the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Wake Island was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Outstanding Motion Picture.^[4]

The film shows how the Marines, after being pounded for days by Japanese aircraft, caught the Japanese invaders by complete surprise by unleashing a wall of fire that stopped their first attempt to land on the island. The next attack was successful, in part because communications among the Marines had been cut, leading the Marine commander to believe his three hundred men were being slaughtered by the more than three thousand Japanese invaders. Because of their fierce defense of the island and because a Japanese cruiser was sunk, Marines were beheaded on the way to Japan to work as slaves in the mines there.