The Aleutian Islands campaign, 1942 to 1943: the war in the fog

Why the Aleutians?

The attack on the Aleutians in June 1942 is often called a diversion for Midway. Samuel J. Cox, director of the Naval History and Heritage Command, argues that it was not: the Japanese navy general staff wanted the islands to keep the United States from using them as a base for bombing Japan from the north, especially after the Doolittle Raid of April 1942. Admiral Yamamoto accepted the operation only reluctantly, and the two carriers it took, Junyo and Ryujo, would have been useful at Midway.²

Dutch Harbor

On 3 June 1942 planes from Rear Admiral Kakuji Kakuta's two carriers struck the U.S. base at Dutch Harbor on Unalaska, the only base of consequence in the islands. Fog and cloud spoiled much of the first strike; a second attack on 4 June did real damage. The National Park Service records that the beached steamer Northwestern, used as housing for workers, was set on fire, that four fuel tanks with 22,000 barrels of oil were destroyed, and counts 43 Americans killed. Cox, who warns that accounts conflict, puts the dead at about 78 Americans and 10 Japanese.³

When Kakuta heard of the disaster at Midway he was ordered south, and a planned landing on Adak was cancelled. But the Japanese went ahead elsewhere: on 6 June they occupied Kiska, where the only Americans were a ten-man Navy weather station, and on 7 June Attu, where they found a schoolteacher, her husband and about forty Unangax̂ villagers. The villagers were taken to Japan; the Park Service notes that 16 of the 40 died in captivity.⁴

The cost to the Unangax̂

The war fell hardest on the people of the islands. After the attack the U.S. government evacuated 881 Unangax̂ from nine villages, some of whom watched servicemen burn their homes and church as they left. For about two years they lived in abandoned canneries and camps in Southeast Alaska without plumbing or electricity, where pneumonia and tuberculosis killed the very young and the old, and when they came home they found houses damaged and some villages never rebuilt.⁵

A war against the weather

Both sides soon found, in Cox's words, that they had badly underestimated the climate. For a year the campaign was a struggle of bombers, submarines and blockade. Army Air Forces bombers raided Kiska from June 1942, U.S. troops occupied Adak on 30 August 1942 and Amchitka in January 1943 to build airfields closer to the enemy, and the submarine Grunion was lost with all hands off Kiska. In January 1943 Rear Admiral Thomas Kinkaid took over the naval command, with Rear Admiral Charles McMorris at sea.⁶

Cut off, the Japanese garrisons depended on convoys from the Kuril Islands. On 26 March 1943 McMorris's small task group intercepted one of them, escorted by Vice Admiral Boshiro Hosogaya's Fifth Fleet, in the Battle of the Komandorski Islands, a long gunnery duel fought entirely by surface ships. No ship was sunk, but Hosogaya broke off and took his convoy home.⁷

Attu

On 11 May 1943 about 12,500 American soldiers landed at both ends of Attu, supported by old battleships and an escort carrier. The fog that had covered the landing turned the fighting into eighteen days of misery. The Park Service notes that more American soldiers were taken out of action by cold and disease than by enemy fire, and that the Army's winter equipment proved hopelessly inadequate.⁸

On 29 May, with no hope of relief, Colonel Yamasaki led his remaining men in one of the largest banzai charges of the war, which broke through to the American rear before it was stopped on Engineer Hill. Yamasaki was killed. The Americans buried 2,351 Japanese dead, and only 28 were taken prisoner. The Park Service gives American losses as 549 dead and 1,148 wounded, with some 1,200 severe cold injuries, and ranks Attu, relative to the number of troops engaged, as the second deadliest battle of the Pacific war after Iwo Jima.⁹

Kiska: the empty island

The Japanese decided to abandon Kiska. After getting some 800 men out by submarine and abandoning a first surface attempt for lack of fuel, Rear Admiral Kimura's ships slipped into the harbor under heavy fog on 28 July 1943 and took off the whole remaining garrison, 5,183 men, in less than an hour. Two days earlier American battleships and cruisers had fired hundreds of shells at radar contacts that turned out to be nothing at all, the so-called Battle of the Pips.¹⁰

Unaware that the island was empty, the Allies went on bombing it, and on 15 August 1943 an invasion force of 34,000 American and Canadian troops landed on Kiska and found no one. In the fog, nervous troops fired on each other: Cox counts 17 Americans killed by friendly fire, while the Park Service gives over 100 friendly fire casualties. Days later the destroyer Abner Read lost 71 men to a drifting mine. The campaign was over. Cox reckons its cost to the United States at about 1,500 killed, 600 missing and 3,400 wounded, and Japan's at over 4,300 killed, for islands that neither side, in the end, could use as a road to the other.¹¹