The Surrender of Guam, December 1941: The Governor's Letter and Report

Guam fell to Japan on 10 December 1941; the first bombs had fallen on 8 December. Three documents from those days survive: the surrender letter signed by the island's naval governor, Captain George J. McMillin; a proclamation from the Japanese commander to the people of Guam; and the report McMillin wrote to the Secretary of the Navy after his release in 1945.

The letter of surrender

Government House, Guam, 1930. National Archives 80-G-1014613.

After a brief fight at the Plaza de España in Hagåtña (Agana), McMillin called for a surrender at 5:45 in the morning. He was taken to Government House, and there, in front of Commander Hayashi of the Imperial Japanese Navy, he signed a short letter addressed to the senior officer of the Japanese forces on Guam.

The letter made three points:

• Acting on his commission from the President, and because superior military forces had landed that day, McMillin surrendered the post to Japan "as an act of war."
• Responsibility for the island's civil government passed to Japan from the moment of signing.
• He had been assured that the civil rights of Guam's people would be respected, and that the surrendered troops would be given every right that international law and "the laws of humanity" provide.

The Japanese proclamation

After the surrender, Major General Horii issued a proclamation setting out how the occupation would work. It announced that the Japanese Army had taken Guam on the Emperor's order and presented the occupation as part of freeing Asia's peoples and building a lasting peace — a "New Order" for the world. Residents were promised their lives and property would be safe, but had to provide quarters on demand, paid for in Japanese currency. Anyone who resisted or spied would be court-martialed and shot. The proclamation was dated both in the Japanese calendar and as 10 December 1941.

McMillin's report

Lieutenant Commander George J. McMillin, November 11, 1925. Naval History and Heritage Command.

McMillin spent the rest of the war as a prisoner. He was freed on 20 August 1945, when Russian forces occupying the Mukden area of Manchuria told the prisoners there that they were free, and on 11 September he wrote his account of the surrender for the Secretary of the Navy. He wrote from memory: his notes had been destroyed when his captors began taking prisoners' written papers. All dates and times are Guam's.

Before the attack

Tension in the Pacific had been assumed all summer. After months of effort, every dependent, civilians included, had been evacuated by 17 October 1941 — all but Mrs. J. A. Hellmers, wife of Chief Commissary Steward John Anthony Hellmers, who was expected to give birth before the transport Henderson could reach San Francisco. A warning from the Navy Department had arrived around 4 December, the first word from Washington about the international situation, and on 6 December classified papers were burned as instructed.

8 December: the first bombs

At about 5:45 a.m. on 8 December a message arrived that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. Under a plan already drawn up, civilians were moved out of Agana and away from likely targets. Every Japanese national on the island was arrested and jailed. Navigation lights went dark, schools closed, church gatherings were banned, and the Bank of Guam was told to stay shut. Nothing was to be destroyed without an order from Government House or clear evidence of a landing.

About 80 local men of the Insular Force Guard, a unit authorized in April 1941, gathered at their headquarters on the Plaza in Agana. The Marines were at their barracks at Sumay.

Planes came in from the direction of Saipan a little after eight. The first bombs fell on the Marine reservation at 8:27. Several Marines were hurt running across the golf course for cover, and a direct hit on the Pan Air Hotel kitchen killed several local employees. Outside the harbor the Penguin, which carried the only guns on the station bigger than a .30-caliber machine gun, fought back until she was sinking. Ensign White, U.S. Naval Reserve, was killed at his anti-aircraft gun. The crew abandoned ship and reached shore on life rafts, bringing his body with them; the captain, Lieutenant J. W. Haviland 3rd, was wounded. The ship went down in deep water off Orote Point.

The Navy Yard at Piti was bombed and strafed, the Robert L. Barnes was holed at her buoy in the harbor, and the radio station at Libugon was hit. The most planes seen at once that day was nine, usually coming in at about 1,500 feet.

9 December: warnings and more bombs

Bombing stopped around 5 p.m. and resumed at about 8:30 the next morning. Overnight a dugout had landed near Ritidian Point at the island's northern tip. The men aboard, who had crossed from Rota, said they were from Saipan and had relatives on Guam; the Japanese had sent them ahead to act as interpreters. They warned that the landing would come the next morning near Recreation Beach, east of Agana. McMillin suspected a trick to pull the Marines away from Sumay and leave Apra Harbor open, so he had them jailed. Their warning proved right in every respect but the day.

On 9 December the bombers hit the Marine reservation, the Pan Air site, the Standard Oil tanks (burning since the day before), the Navy Yard and Libugon again. Lookouts at Ritidian Point and the villages of Dededo, Inarajan, Merizo and Umatac were machine-gunned. A bomb demolished the old Spanish house across a narrow street from the jail; the Japanese residents held inside were shaken but protected by its concrete walls. The Marines at Sumay moved into the butts of the rifle range under Lieutenant Colonel William K. MacNulty.

10 December: the landing

At about 4 a.m. on 10 December, flares were seen off the beaches east of Agana. There were no defenses there, or anywhere else on land. By 4:45 there was shooting and fire in the San Antonio district. The Insular Force Guard took up positions in the Plaza with a few machine guns and rifles, and when the Japanese came up the narrow street beside the Naval Hospital and the cathedral, the Guard's fire stopped them for a short time. "The situation was simply hopeless," McMillin wrote.

At about 5:45 someone sounded three blasts on the horn of a car parked outside Government House. It was not an agreed signal, but both sides seemed to understand it, and the shooting stopped. A voice called across the Plaza from the cathedral: "Send over your Captain." Commander Donald T. Giles, the governor's aide for civil affairs, went out with Chief Boatswain's Mate Robert Bruce Lane to find the commander of the Japanese naval landing force.

About twenty minutes after the ceasefire, Japanese troops found McMillin in the reception room of his quarters, made him take off his jacket and trousers, and marched him to the Plaza, where his officers and men were being gathered under machine guns. At about 6:45 Giles came back with a Japanese officer and identified him as governor. None of the Japanese party spoke English, so Japanese residents were fetched from the jail, and one of them, Shinahara, translated. The officer introduced himself as Commander Hayashi, and after some discussion McMillin wrote and signed the letter of surrender. He was held in Government House, with no food, until about 8:30 that night, then moved to the Naval Hospital.

What was destroyed, and what was not

The magazine at the Marine barracks and the Quartermaster's storehouse were destroyed, one Y.P. boat was destroyed by fire and another nearly so, and the small craft's engines were generally destroyed. A civilian Public Works employee, H. H. Sachers, set fire to the newly completed 25,000-barrel fuel oil tank and destroyed it. But about 4,000 barrels of gasoline at the Pan Air site fell to the Japanese because the burning Standard Oil tanks beside them blocked the way, and the island's vehicles, apart from the contractors' large diesel trucks, were taken almost intact.

McMillin singled out the Insular Force Guard. Green troops, organized only that April, they held their ground in the Plaza until they were called back, and he wrote that they deserved recognition. He estimated the invasion force at a naval battalion of about 600 men in the first wave, followed by roughly 5,000 Army troops.

Sources

• National Park Service, War in the Pacific National Historical Park: "Surrender of Guam to the Japanese," reproducing McMillin's letter of surrender (10 December 1941), Major General Horii's proclamation, and McMillin's report to the Secretary of the Navy (11 September 1945), as reprinted in the Guam Recorder, Vol. 2, No. 2–3 (1972). The report spells the ship Penquin; it is given here as Penguin. It speaks of about eight men landing from Rota and later of three informers, so no number is given here, and it dates the surrender to about 6:00 a.m. while its own narrative puts the signing after 6:45.