“The aviator who nearly washed out of Marine flight school single-handedly attacked a formation of 22 Japanese airplanes.”

By William L. Ramsey

THINGS NEVER came easy for Henry Talmage Elrod.

From 1922 to 1926 — when he was between the ages 17 to 21 — he was expelled from high school, dumped by his girlfriend and forced to drop-out of college due to his father’s suicide.

Running away to join the Marines, he enlisted as a private in 1927; joining up was about the only thing that seemed to work out for him.

He did well enough in the service to gain admission to Officer Candidate School in 1931 and did well enough there to become a second lieutenant and begin training as a naval aviator the following year.

Yet Elrod’s penchant for hardship once again caught up with him, this time in Pensacola. No matter how much he studied the flight manuals, he exhibited an extreme case of nervous anxiety whenever he came up for evaluation. Elrod could solo with no problem, yet under the piercing gaze of his in-flight evaluators, he grew tense. He was shaky on both takeoffs and landings. He even struggled to taxi the airplane properly. When presented with emergency scenarios, he panicked, second guessed himself, and made matters worse.

In evaluating Elrod’s handling of emergencies, one instructor rated his “judgement poor in nearly every case.” On one such instance, he “froze on [the] throttle in one emergency when throttle was needed in a hurry; barely missed hitting trees.”

When the Advisory Board met on April 17, 1933, it concluded that he had demonstrated “a lack of ability ever to acquire the proficiency required of a naval aviator.”

That would have been the end of it for most Marine aviators. Yet Elrod persisted. He pleaded his case for a second chance to anyone who would give him a hearing, and a few notable officers heard him out and supported him. The commanding officer at Pensacola responded with a firm “no,” repeating the board’s assessment that Elrod’s “progress to date indicates a lack of ability ever to acquire the proficiency required of a naval aviator.”

A new commanding officer arrived later that year, however, one who had never witnessed Elrod’s near-death encounter with the trees.

By 1934, Elrod had managed to get himself reinstated in the program and began his training again from square one. His nervousness when under observation never went away, but he learned to control it a little better. He won his wings, just barely, in 1935.

With all the testing over, the Marines began to see a new side of Elrod’s flying. Alone in the cockpit, his nervousness disappeared. In fact, he mastered every plane he flew.

By 1937, in addition to his regular duties with an observation squadron at Quantico, he was regularly assigned to fly with the Marine exhibition team around the country. The following year he was transferred to a fighter squadron, VMF-2, in San Diego, where he began to hone the aerial combat skills that would eventually make him a terror in the skies.

As American tensions with Japan mounted in 1940, the squadron was deployed westward to Hawaii and redesignated VMF-211. Elrod became executive officer under squadron commander Major Paul A. Putnum.

In late 1941, Elrod and Putnum selected 10 of their best pilots to go further westward with them to the isolated outpost on Wake Island. The tiny coral atoll lay about 2,000 miles west of Hawaii and roughly the same distance east of Japan.

Flying Grumman F4F-3 Wildcat fighter planes, the detachment touched down on December 4, 1941. Although they did not know it, they were just 72 hours away from the day that President Roosevelt declared would “live in infamy.” It was not enough time.

The Japanese attack on Wake came less than a day after the strike on Pearl Harbor. It caught the island’s handful of defenders as much by surprise as the raid on the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Hawaii. The damage was heavy; Japanese bombers destroyed eight of Wake’s 12 Wildcat fighter planes and killed over 60 per cent of the squadron’s personnel on day one. Captain Elrod was among the survivors.

When the Japanese bombers returned on Dec. 10, Elrod was among the four Marines in the air to intercept them. Unfortunately, he was the only Marine in a position to engage. Elrod, the aviator who nearly washed out of Marine flight school, single-handedly attacked a formation of 22 Japanese airplanes.

Observers on the ground could hear the fighting in the distance before they could see it, but soon enough Elrod and the Japanese planes were mixing it up within sight of the island. Had he known he had an audience, his nerves might have ruined him again as they did in flight school. But Elrod believed he was alone. Personnel on the ground watched as he plunged his Wildcat into the thick of the Japanese formation, weaving in and out among the planes, delivering machine gun fire with each pass and taking a good deal of punishment himself.

One of the bombers began tumbling from the sky, trailing smoke. As the enemy planes came within range of the island’s anti-aircraft batteries, they too opened up.

With shells bursting all around him, Elrod continued pounding his Wildcat through the formation again and again, trying to disrupt their discipline, shove them a little off their line of attack. Two more bombers went down.

Someone on the ground was heard to shout “Hammerin’ Hank is sure giving ‘em hell!” That Marine must have had a lot of friends close by. For once Elrod landed, he was always “Hammerin’ Hank” wherever he went. He was credited with two kills and ground-based gunners with one. Not bad for a man who instructors wrote off as a pilot.

The next day, December 11, the main Japanese invasion fleet showed up. Hostilities kicked off at dawn, with Elrod and squadron leader Putnam, along with Marine aviators Frank Tharin, and Herbert Freuler, making repeated strafing and bombing runs on the enemy vessels throughout the morning. Because the Wildcat could carry only two light bombs, one under each wing, they had to return to the island to re-arm after each sortie.

During one such landing, Elrod asked Major Putnam for permission to target a particular ship that he believed to be the command vessel. Putnam okayed it, albeit reluctantly; he was worried that a lone fighter plane had little chance of seriously damaging, much less sinking, a destroyer-class vessel in a one-on-one fight. Even Elrod’s wingman, Tharin, expressed his doubts as they jogged back to their planes, suggesting that it might be “impossible.”

Without breaking stride, Elrod was heard to respond: “Well, if it’s impossible, it will take a little longer, so we better get started.”

Elrod and Tharin dove through withering antiaircraft fire again and again to deliver their bombs at the closest range possible, returning to the island for fresh ammunition after each attack. On his last effort, Elrod succeeded in punching one of his bombs through the deck of the Japanese destroyer Kisaragi. The ship was seen to slow and ultimately come to a complete stop in the water. It then exploded and sank with all hands. The loss of this ship, Japanese records show, influenced Admiral Kajioka to call off the invasion and sail back to the Marshall Islands.

It was a rare victory for American forces in the early days of World War Two. Elrod’s Wildcat suffered mortal damage as well. He managed to nurse it back to Wake Island but crashed on the beach a few hundred yards short of the runway. Elrod survived the crack up.

He would be killed days later as Japanese forces landed on Wake Island. With all American fighters destroyed, Elrod was killed while serving with a gun emplacement ono Dec. 23, 1941.

The Japanese would overrun Wake. Hundreds of U.S. military personnel and civilian contractors would be taken prisoner, many would be executed by the Japanese or perish in captivity.

It took years for the complete story of Elrod’s heroism on Wake to be officially recognized by the U.S. military. In 1946, he was posthumously promoted to major and awarded the Medal of Honor. In 1985, a U.S. Navy Perry-class frigate (FFG-55) would bear his name. A decade later he’d be inducted into his home state of Georgia’s Aviation Hall of Fame.

William L. Ramsey is the author of Wake Island Wildcat: A Marine Fighter Pilot’s Epic Battle at the Beginning of World War II. A historian, poet, and a professor of history at Lander University in South Carolina, he received his PhD from Tulane University in 1998 and has taught at Tulane, SUNY Oswego, the University of Idaho, and Lander University. His historical articles have appeared in the Journal of American History, Georgia Historical Quarterly, and the South Carolina Historical Magazine. His first book, The Yamasee War: A Study of Culture, Economy, and Conflict in the Colonial South, received the 2008 George C. Rogers Jr. Award for best book of South Carolina history, sponsored by the South Carolina Historical Society. He lives in Greenwood, South Carolina.