While no one knew it at the time, Japan’s visions of Pacific empire would be checked in less than a year after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In May 1942, however, the situation looked terribly grim throughout the thinly stretched Allied front. It ran some 6,000 miles from Alaska and the Aleutians in the north, straight south through the middle of the Pacific and a little atoll appropriately named Midway, around the Japanese-held Gilbert and Solomon Islands, and on west to Australia and New Guinea. Ironically, one of the few who thought that the time of Japan’s undisputed triumph would be brief was Fleet Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, architect of Japan’s naval power and mastermind of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Well aware that once engaged, America’s industrial and military might would quickly dwarf Japan’s, Yamamoto sought to destroy the U.S. Pacific Fleet in one giant battle and use the ensuing victory to broker peace.
But where to fight it? For a time, Yamamoto thought that it would occur in the Coral Sea en route to the conquest of Australia. A four-day running battle there during the first week of May 1942 showed the fury of two navies battling each other with carrier-based planes. The U.S. carrier Lexington went to the bottom, and another, the Yorktown, was thought by the Japanese to have been sunk. The Japanese claimed victory, but hindsight suggests that what really occurred was a blunting of their drive toward Australia and the first stumble of their expansive advance. So Yamamoto’s eyes turned to charts of the North Pacific. Tiny though it was, Midway stuck out like a sore thumb.
Not until after the war did Japan learn for certain that Jimmy Doolittle’s B-25s had been launched from an aircraft carrier. At the time, some on the Japanese Imperial Staff thought that they had come from airfields in the Aleutians. Both sides were critically aware that the great circle route put San Francisco 1,000 miles closer to Tokyo via the Aleutians than through Hawaii. In fact, the great circle route between Seattle and Tokyo lay just forty miles north of Dutch Harbor, a protected anchorage on the north shores of Unalaska Island. So when Yamamoto devised a massive assault against Midway, he also planned a coordinated thrust against the Aleutians.
Vice Admiral Boshiro Hosogaya was chosen to lead Japan’s northern force, which planned to land troops on Attu, Kiska, and Adak Islands in the western Aleutians and also to attack Dutch Harbor, at the time the only American base of consequence in the Aleutians. These attacks in the Aleutians were calculated to be diversions that would draw American attention and forces away from Japan’s primary goal: Midway. Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who had led the carrier strike force against Pearl Harbor, was assigned to lead a similar carrier force against Midway a day after the Dutch Harbor attack began. Meanwhile, Admiral Yamamoto with the main Japanese battle fleet would lurk nearby in the North Pacific, ready to pounce on the American fleet and annihilate it whether it steamed north to rescue the Aleutians or west to support Midway.
On the morning of June 3, 1942, the Japanese carriers Ryujo and Junyo steamed out of a thick fog bank less than 170 miles south of Dutch Harbor and launched their torpedo-bombers and accompanying Zeroes. Hosogaya and his task force commander aboard the Ryujo, Rear Admiral Kakuji Kakuta, had been hoping for the surprise of another Pearl Harbor. But thanks to a PBY patrol plane spotting the two carriers amid the fog the day before, Dutch Harbor was ready—sort of. Early that morning its installations held an air-raid drill. One of the PBY pilots, Ensign Marshall C. Freerks, recalled that after the drill, “everybody went back to bed and then the Japs bombed us.”32
For twenty minutes planes from the Ryujo bombed and strafed the harbor and shore facilities. The planes from the Junyo never made the target. They became lost in the fog—the first of many such occurrences on both sides in the Aleutian campaign—and barely managed to return to their carrier. On the American side, communications between widely separated commands were far from reliable. When the Dutch Harbor radio operator tapped out a frantic and uncoded “About to be bombed by enemy planes,” P-40 fighters at Cold Bay, 180 miles to the northeast, were airborne within four minutes and en route to join the fray. Other pilots on alert at Umnak, less than sixty miles to the west, never got the word; they continued to play poker throughout the morning.
When all but one of the Ryujo’s planes returned safely with reports of widespread destruction at Dutch Harbor, Admiral Kakuta was elated. The truth of the matter was that things were a mess, but American forces had suffered less than 1 percent casualties and lost nothing of major strategic importance. They were, however, determined to strike back.
Through the short midsummer night, PBYs and other planes searched for the Japanese carriers. During the morning of June 4, as contact was established and then lost and then established again in the swirling fog, a strange assortment of early-model B-17s, twin-engine B-26s, and anything else that would fly—even a PBY hurriedly jerry-rigged to carry a torpedo and bombs—harried the Japanese force. Seas were so rough that for a time Kakuta could not even launch his protective fighters from the wildly pitching carrier decks. His ships suffered no major damage, despite the near miss of a torpedo launched within yards of the Ryujo, but the attacks convinced Kakuta that the Americans were far from beaten.
Originally, Kakuta’s instructions had been to proceed west to Adak after the Dutch Harbor attack and support Admiral Hosogaya’s landings there. In the confusion of the fog and the American attacks, his fleet was crawling westward at barely ten knots when reports of favorable weather back over Dutch Harbor prompted him to reverse course and steam at full speed to launch a second assault against it. Late in the afternoon, seventeen bombers and fifteen fighters—Kakuta dared send only his very best pilots off into the fickle weather—took off from both Japanese carriers and headed for Dutch Harbor. At four in the afternoon they were over their target.
Kate bombers dropped incendiaries and high explosives from above, while Zeroes strafed the shore facilities. The only ship left in the harbor was the aging Northwestern, a fifty-year-old steamer that had been beached earlier for use as a barracks. The vessel was something of an Alaskan legend, having run aground and survived sixteen times over the years. The Japanese bombed her and set her afire, but she survived yet again. Most of the rest of Dutch Harbor did likewise, although 750,000 gallons of fuel went up with such a roar that it could be heard on neighboring Umnak. The radio was still not working there, but its P-40 pilots heard the explosion and this time scrambled to the attack.
As this second wave of Japanese aircraft was halfway to its target, Admirals Hosogaya and Kakuta both received urgent messages from Admiral Yamamoto that they should break off the entire attack on the Aleutians and steam south to support the main Japanese fleet off Midway. Kakuta had no choice but to wait and recover his planes, and by that time—despite reports that things had not gone well at Midway—Hosogaya had convinced Yamamoto that some face could be saved by continuing the Aleutian invasion. Yamamoto begrudgingly agreed, but Hosogaya chose to occupy only the western two islands of Attu and Kiska. He feared that Adak lay too close to the newly discovered airfield on Umnak—especially now that its pilots were done playing poker. So after the skies cleared of aircraft over Dutch Harbor on the evening of June 4, Kakuta’s carriers picked their way westward into the fog, having lost fifteen men and less than a dozen planes.33
In the global picture at the time, the attack on Dutch Harbor seemed a mere footnote. But was it? On the second day of the Dutch Harbor battle, Admiral Nagumo’s massive carrier force tangled north of Midway with the American carriers Enterprise and Hornet and that phantom survivor from the Coral Sea, Yorktown. When the sun set in the North Pacific on June 4, 1942, Yorktown was crippled for good, but four Japanese carriers, 332 planes, one-third of Japan’s combat pilots, and over 3,500 men were on the bottom. It was, as historian Walter Lord characterized it, an “incredible victory” for the United States. Might the outcome have been different had Kakuta’s carriers turned south on June 3 to threaten the American flank rather than attacking Dutch Harbor? Captain Hideo Hiraide, chief of the naval press section at Japanese Imperial Headquarters, put a different spin on the entire outcome. “The enormous success in the Aleutians,” he reported to the Japanese people, “had been made possible by the diversion at Midway.”34
So remote were Attu and Kiska that the Americans did not even confirm the Japanese invasions there until a patrol plane flew over Kiska on June 10 and was fired upon by unidentified ships. Before dawn on Sunday morning, June 7, 1,250 Japanese troops had landed on Kiska, which was occupied only by a ten-man weather team. A few hours later, a similar force landed on Attu. Here, in the little village of Chichagof, there were an older white couple and forty-two Aleuts, more than a third of them children, who were eventually sent to a prison camp at Otaru City on Hokkaido for the remainder of the war.
The American response to the landings was unequivocal all along the chain of command, from General Buckner and Rear Admiral Robert A. Theobald on up to General George Marshall and eventually President Roosevelt: American territory had been invaded; drive out the invaders. But given the terrain, the weather, and the great distance from the main bases at Anchorage, on Kodiak Island, and even at Cold Bay and Dutch Harbor, that was far easier said than done.
Colonel William O. Eareckson, “Wild Bill” to his navy buddies and “Eric” to his fellow bomber pilots, personally led flight after flight against Kiska in what historian Brian Garfield called the Kiska blitz. General Buckner commandeered commercial aircraft temporarily assigned to the Northwest Ferrying Command and organized an airlift of men and materials to Nome in response to an intercepted message that the Japanese intended to strike there next.
In fact, the Japanese had their hands full and were trying desperately to hold on to what they had already captured. They augmented their landing forces on Attu and Kiska and made plans to construct airfields on the captured islands. The occupation wasn’t without risk. On the Fourth of July, after Admiral Hosogaya had dispatched a convoy of reinforcements to Kiska, the submarine Growler quietly slipped into Kiska Harbor and sent one Japanese destroyer to the bottom and damaged two more.
Back in Japan, the heavily censored Japanese press spoke only of glorious Aleutian victories and the newly won safety of Japan’s northern gates. But there was almost unparalleled censorship in the American press as well—live reports on the evening news were still a war or two away. One reason for the news blackout that descended across the Aleutians and much of the war in Alaska was that it was frequently difficult to get a complete and accurate picture of just what the devil was going on across a 1,000-mile front. Witness, were the Japanese attacking Nome or not? More important, of course, there was a general and concerted tendency to downplay reports of any hostile operations that were taking place on American soil, even if that soil was on some rocky islands more than halfway to Siberia.
By the end of the summer of 1942, attention in both Japanese and American high commands was heavily focused elsewhere. The battle for Guadalcanal and the Solomons was raging in the South Pacific, and forces on both sides, particularly naval units, were diverted to that front. In one of the ironies of war, the carrier Ryujo, which had launched the first attack on Dutch Harbor, was sunk in the Solomons by a task force commanded by Rear Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, who would soon be tapped to head the Aleutian campaign.
As the brief Arctic summer drew to a close, it soon became more apparent than ever that both sides were fighting the weather as much as each other. Against both sides, the weather usually won. Witness the score. During the fall of 1942 in the Aleutians, the United States lost only nine planes in combat, but sixty-three planes went down due to weather and mechanical troubles. “When you could see a hundred feet,” recalled Captain Lucian Wernick, a B-17 pilot with the Thirty-sixth Bombardment Squadron, “that was a clear day.”35
The weather fostered indecision and uncertainty on both sides. The Japanese Imperial Staff couldn’t decide whether to fortify Attu and Kiska or abandon them. In September, Admiral Hosogaya ordered the evacuation of all troops on Attu to Kiska in order to concentrate forces and ease supply lines. Though frequently lumped together, the islands were, after all, some 200 miles apart. This evacuation was completed, but then the admiral thought better of the idea and Japanese troops reoccupied Attu a month later. The following spring, American commanders would rue the fact that they hadn’t landed on Attu in the interim, but at the time it would have been much too long of a leap.
Meanwhile, the American counterattack had begun in earnest with the occupation of Adak, a rocky enclave in the Andreanof Islands dominated by 3,924-foot Kanaga Volcano. Adak was some 350 miles beyond the current advance base on Umnak. Despite fears of Japanese opposition, the landings on August 30 were unopposed. But where to build an airfield amid such rocky terrain? The flattest spot on the island was the long, narrow tidal flats at the head of Sweeper Cove. The solution was both ingenious and speedy. Army engineers dammed the mouth of the cove to keep out the high tide and in the remarkably short period of ten days had an airstrip ready to receive aircraft, including the Thirty-sixth Bombardment Squadron’s B-17s and a squadron of new P-38 Lightning fighters. The facilities on Adak more than halved the distance required for fighter and bomber operations against Kiska. In keeping with the shroud of secrecy over the Aleutian operations, the navy did not report the landings on Adak until almost six weeks later, and then only with reference to “an island somewhere in the Andreanofs.”36
Next in line was the island of Amchitka, a slender sliver forty miles long and two to three miles wide at the eastern end of the Rat Islands. Amchitka pointed directly at Kiska, just fifty miles away at the western end of the Rats. But Amchitka would have to wait until after the icy gloom of the winter solstice. On January 4, 1943, Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander in chief of U.S. naval forces in the Pacific‚ put Rear Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, Annapolis class of 1908 and a no-nonsense, fight-with-what-you-got sort, in charge of Aleutian operations with instructions to make things happen. Kinkaid was just the opposite of his predecessor, Rear Admiral Robert A. Theobald, who had used his naval units cautiously and sparingly. Of Kinkaid it was said by veterans of his battles in the South Pacific that you could tell where the action was going to be by looking for him.37
While air corps bombers continued to harry Japanese supply lines to Attu and Kiska—sinking two freighters loaded with soldiers and supplies off the islands in early January alone—Kinkaid lost no time in taking Amchitka. It was the middle of January, seas were running high, the wind was howling, and the temperature was flirting with zero. It was an Arctic-style hell, but 2,100 army engineers and troops under Brigadier General Lloyd E. Jones did the impossible and secured the unoccupied island. Amchitka was flatter than Adak, but it turned into one great muddy quagmire once the spring thaw came. Despite attacks from Japanese bombers out of Kiska that kept cratering the runway and slowing construction, the field was operational on January 28, in time to receive much-needed P-40 fighters led by Lieutenant Colonel Jack Chennault, the son of Flying Tiger legend Claire Chennault.
Once Amchitka was secure, it was time to tighten the noose around Attu and Kiska. Admiral Kinkaid ordered Rear Admiral Charles H. McMorris to blockade the islands and prevent Japanese resupply convoys from reaching them. McMorris had earned the moniker “Soc,” short for “Socrates” because of his scholarly ways, in the Naval Academy’s class of 1912 and had gone on to teach English and history there. Now his two-star flag flew from the World War I–vintage light cruiser Richmond, which was accompanied by four destroyers and the heavy cruiser Indianapolis. Because his force was small and Attu and Kiska were several hundred miles apart, McMorris chose to concentrate his ships southwest of Attu and intercept Japanese convoys as they steamed out of the Kuriles—before they could disperse among the Aleutians.
During late February and early March 1943, McMorris’s blockade began to disrupt Japanese supply lines. When ships did manage to elude the blockade and reach Attu, American bombers continued their attacks. They sank the Chieribou Maru in the deep waters of Holtz Bay before her cargo of bulldozers intended for airfield construction could be unloaded. On March 10, another Japanese transport slipped into Attu, but during the next week, half a dozen ships turned back in the face of McMorris’s force.
At Japanese Imperial Headquarters, the debate over what to do with the island garrisons continued. There were those who had long written off the Aleutians as a no-win situation and were still calling for a complete withdrawal. The other faction looked at the map of the North Pacific and argued that the islands had to be defended because of their proximity to Japan and their value as a wedge between the Soviet Union and Alaska. (Never mind that by now ALSIB was functioning quite safely and effectively 1,000 miles to the north.)
Consequently, Admiral Hosogaya decided to run the American blockade with all of the firepower at his disposal. He loaded three transports until they were bursting at the rivets, stocked more supplies onto the decks of four destroyers, and then gathered four heavy cruisers around them. On March 22, with his flag flying from the cruiser Nachi, Hosogaya steamed east from Paramushiro in the northern Kuriles, determined to blast McMorris’s blockade apart.
Early on the morning of March 26, 1943, the Richmond and her consorts were cruising in a long line about 200 miles west of Attu and 100 miles south of the Komandorskie Islands, where Vitus Bering had met his end more than two centuries before. The squadron now included the aging heavy cruiser Salt Lake City, which had recently replaced the Indianapolis. PBY patrol planes had been reporting intermittent contact with what appeared to be a major convoy, and soon radar on the destroyer Coghlan confirmed the presence of surface ships. But McMorris received a rude surprise. It was not a lightly guarded convoy but the backbone of Japan’s northern force. He was clearly outgunned, but the stakes were too high to run because such a major resupply might prolong the war in the Aleutians indefinitely. Besides, McMorris was cut from the same cloth as the man who had sent him out there, Admiral Kinkaid.
McMorris closed his line of ships and swung to the attack, attempting to get at the defenseless transports. Hosogaya responded in turn by shielding the transports and bringing his guns to bear on the Salt Lake City. The two biggest cruisers, Salt Lake City and Nachi, quickly engaged in a running battle of eight-inch and five-inch guns at a range of ten to twelve miles. Each admiral called for air support and expected it to arrive, but there were no available bombers at Paramushiro to aid Hosogaya and Eleventh Air Force bombers at Adak were already loaded with the wrong ordnance for an attack against Kiska. In the time it took to rearm them, the Battle of the Komandorskies would be over.
The battle lasted for over three and a half hours and became the longest continuous gunnery duel between surface ships in modern naval warfare. Finally, the Salt Lake City signaled McMorris on the Richmond, “My speed zero.” Salt water in the main fuel line from numerous near misses had flowed into the Salt Lake City’s burners and extinguished them. As the Japanese closed in for the kill, McMorris ordered one destroyer to lay smoke around the crippled ship, and the other three to launch a last-ditch torpedo attack against the oncoming Japanese cruisers.
The tiny destroyers had one-tenth of the displacement of the onrushing cruisers, but they gamely steamed forward to close within range and fire a spread of torpedoes. The opposing ships were still five miles apart when McMorris received a surprise query from the destroyers: “The enemy is retiring to the west. Shall I follow them?”
Ironically, although airpower played no direct role in the battle, the possibility of its appearance had decided the outcome. In the confusion of the battle and smokescreen, Hosogaya did not realize that the Salt Lake City was sitting dead in the water. Moments before, the big cruiser had run out of armor-piercing shells and started shooting high explosives, whose white phosphor trails looked somewhat like bombs falling from the sky. Hosogaya ordered his antiaircraft batteries to open up and became convinced that his ships were under attack by bombers from Adak.
As the Japanese fleet, including the three transports, retired to the west, the crew of the Salt Lake City got steam back up and fired its remaining salvos. Miraculously, in this last gunnery duel of surface vessels where aircraft played no direct role, casualties were only seven Americans and fourteen Japanese killed. Despite a number of hits on each side, no ships were sunk or permanently damaged. It had been a wild contest, but it was decisive in its outcome. The Battle of the Komandorskies broke the Japanese supply line to Attu and Kiska and put the Japanese navy on the defensive in the North Pacific. And Admiral Hosogaya? He was relieved of his command for failing to finish off the Salt Lake City. Admiral McMorris and his men got a hero’s welcome upon their return to Dutch Harbor.38
No one expected the invasion of Attu to be a cakewalk, but neither did anyone expect it to be the epic that it became. Originally, Admiral Kinkaid’s plan had been to keep on marching right down the Aleutian chain. After Amchitka came Kiska. But the U.S. Navy was still spread terribly thin in the Pacific in the spring of 1943. Guadalcanal was finally secure, but the battles for the remainder of the Solomons and New Guinea still raged. When ships were not made available in the numbers that Kinkaid and Vice Admiral Francis W. Rockwell thought sufficient for an invasion of Kiska, Kinkaid promoted a plan to bypass Kiska and use the smaller force to drive the Japanese off less heavily defended Attu once and for all. Operations planners in San Francisco warmed to the idea and soon decreed that Attu was so lightly defended—500 troops at the most—that a single regiment could take it in three days flat.
By this time, General Buckner had close to 150,000 troops under his command spread out across Alaska. But the units had no amphibious landing training, let alone experience, and to strip soldiers from far-flung posts across the territory was not the answer. So the combat-trained Thirty-fifth Infantry Division was recommended for the Attu landings. Both the division’s commander, Major General Charles H. Corlett, and its assistant commander, Brigadier General Eugene M. Landrum, had Aleutian experience. Landrum had in fact commanded the occupation of Adak. It seemed a perfect fit, but in the humdrum of global war, the War Department worked in mysterious ways.
Rather than assign the Thirty-fifth Infantry to the Attu landings, planners in Washington gave the job to the Seventh Motorized Division. Until then, the Seventh Division had been training in the California desert for deployment against Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Scrap the tanks, they were told. Instead of a desert-warfare tank division, the Seventh was going to become an Arctic infantry force.
Major General Albert E. Brown, the Seventh’s commanding officer, had fought in the trenches of World War I and pulled no punches. Brown took one look at the maps of Attu—the fact that the army, navy, and air corps were all using a different coordinate system was a clue in itself—and snorted, three days, hell. The mountainous terrain alone would be enough to keep his men from crossing the ten-mile-wide island in less than a week—without opposition.
When reconnaissance reports indicated that the estimate of 500 Japanese on Attu was decidedly low and that there might be as many as 1,600 troops dug in on the island, the entire Seventh Division of 10,000 men was mobilized for the invasion. General Buckner was told to assemble the Fourth Infantry Regiment on Adak and hold it in reserve as reinforcements. Meanwhile, the Seventh Division practiced amphibious landings in the surf of California’s sunny Monterey Bay and San Clemente Island.
For a while, typical spring weather in the Aleutians grounded even the Thirty-sixth Bombardment Squadron. Frederick Ramputi, a bomber pilot who had first discovered the Japanese ships in Kiska harbor the summer before, recorded in the squadron’s log, “No flying this station due to inclement weather.” It seems that the 110-knot (126.5 miles per hour) anemometer at Adak had been destroyed in what was the worst storm recorded until then in the Aleutians.39
As plans for what was called Operation Landcrab wound into high gear, General Brown picked Captain William H. Willoughby for a special assignment. Willoughby was given free rein to handpick 410 men from among the Seventh’s regiments and organize them into a special battalion. Willoughby’s Scout Battalion—not to be confused with the Alaska Scouts—was akin to specially trained commandos or later special-forces units. Loaded up with grenades, armor-piercing bullets, light mortars, and plenty of guts, they had the job of landing undetected on the western end of Attu, crossing the island, and seizing the high passes and ridgelines above the Chichagof Valley to block a Japanese escape into the mountains.
Meanwhile, one regiment of 1,500 men would land north of Holtz Bay on the northern side of the island, and another regiment of 2,000 men would land on the south side at Massacre Bay—named for an early encounter between Russian promyshlenniki and Aleuts, but soon all too appropriate. These two forces would converge with Willoughby’s Scouts on the high ground above the Chichagof Valley and trap the Japanese below them.
When the big storm finally blew on through, Colonel Eareckson’s bombers and Admiral McMorris’s cruisers pummeled Kiska as a diversion. But somehow Colonel Yasuyo Yamasaki, the garrison commander on Attu, knew that his island, and not Kiska, was to be the target of the assembling invasion fleet. In fact, after months of a news blackout over most operations on the Alaskan front, it seemed as if everyone was talking about the coming campaign. Even radio commentator Walter Winchell told his listeners early in May, “Keep your eye on the Aleutian Islands.”40
An invasion force of thirty-four ships put to sea from Cold Bay, including the escort carrier Nassau and the battleships Idaho, Pennsylvania, and Nevada, the latter the only battleship to get under way at Pearl Harbor. The fleet slipped through the Aleutians and into the Bering Sea, circling wide of Kiska and converging upon Attu from the north. By now, intelligence was estimating Yamasaki’s strength on Attu at 2,600 men and confirming that he knew of the coming invasion.
But first there was another battle to be waged with the weather. As the invasion force assembled north of Attu, ships were tossed about like toys by high seas and ferocious winds. The flight deck of the Nassau looked like a swimming pool. All land-based planes were grounded. Infantrymen crammed aboard the transports turned six shades of green, and more than one of them thought fondly of those pleasant, practice landings on the beaches of sunny California. D-day had been planned for May 7, but as the storm continued, it was postponed day after day. Finally, in the wee hours of May 11, submarines Nautilus and Narwhal landed the first half of Willoughby’s Scouts in Austin Cove, and the invasion was on.
At first, things were pretty tentative. Numerous rocky shoals hampered the northern force’s landing at Holtz Bay. Poor visibility delayed the landings of the southern force until late afternoon. By evening, the two regiments had secured tenuous beachheads, and Willoughby’s Scouts were climbing eastward across snow-covered mountainsides. So far, there had been no Japanese resistance. The silence emanating from the low clouds and fog blowing across the hills above the beachheads was eerie. Then all cold hell broke loose.
Colonel Yamasaki had decided that his 2,650-man force could not repel attacks on two beachheads simultaneously, so he grouped his troops along the snow-covered ridges and high ground at the head of the Massacre and Holtz Valleys. As the Americans began to move up the valleys, they were met with a hail of rifle and mortar fire. Three days tops, the planners had said. It took a week of intense fighting just to gain the heights of what came to be called Jarmin Pass at the head of Massacre Valley. Meanwhile, Willoughby’s Scouts had clawed their way into position in Yamasaki’s rear above Holtz Bay, but most of the men were suffering frostbite and hunger—the thirty-six hours of rations with which they had landed were long gone. “Wild Bill” Eareckson braved the fog to fly sorties and try to direct the fire of the navy ships, but for the most part, it was far too foggy for any kind of air support.
Thousands of miles to the rear, the desk-bound brass couldn’t understand what was taking so long. General Brown was relieved of his command and replaced by Major General Eugene Landrum, who had almost drawn the assignment with the Thirty-fifth Infantry in the first place. This Aleutian veteran found no fault with Brown’s operational plan and continued to slug it out one foot at a time. There really wasn’t any other choice.
By now, all of the Seventh Division and Buckner’s Fourth Infantry had been committed to the fray. When the weather cleared momentarily on Wednesday, May 26, Eareckson directed bombing runs against the main Japanese camp in Chichagof Harbor and their positions on the surrounding ridgelines. Atop Fish Hook Ridge at the head of Holtz Valley, Japanese defenders hid in snowdrifts and ice-encrusted crevices and rolled hand grenades down the hillsides on the advancing Americans. Private Joe P. Martinez of Taos, New Mexico, the BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) man in his squad in Company K of the Thirty-second Infantry Regiment, finally had enough. Martinez led the way up the final ridge spraying bullets right and left. Company K scrambled to the ridge behind him and secured it. Private Martinez won the Medal of Honor—posthumously.41
By May 29, the nineteenth day of the battle, Colonel Yamasaki had 800 fighting men left. Surrender was not acceptable in the Japanese warrior’s Bushido Code. Yamasaki’s only option was to attack. If he could seize the 105-mm howitzers that had been pounding his positions from the head of Massacre Valley, he might be able to turn them around and use them to drive the Americans back to the beachhead. Accordingly, Yamasaki ordered his wounded killed with morphine overdoses and grenades, and moved forward to attack.
Yamasaki advanced against the spot in the American line that was held by Company B of the Thirty-second Infantry Regiment. By coincidence, the company had been ordered back to the battalion kitchen for a warm breakfast prior to resuming their attack. As the company marched off to breakfast, the Japanese struck. For a short time, Yamasaki was heartened. This might work, after all. Japanese troops swept up Engineer Hill toward the howitzers but then encountered heavy hand-to-hand fighting on the ridgeline. Incredibly, as Yamasaki’s forces fell back down the slopes and dispersed, about 500 Japanese soldiers committed mass suicide by pulling the pins on their grenades and holding them to their chests. Yamasaki himself took a bullet while leading one last charge. The Americans were stunned.
By Sunday morning, May 30, the Battle of Attu was over except for some mop-up operations. Of the 2,650 Japanese on the island when the fighting started, only 28—none of them officers—remained alive to be taken prisoner. Five hundred and forty-nine Americans were dead. In proportion to the number of Americans engaged in the operation, it was the most costly American battle in the Pacific during the entire Second World War, save for Iwo Jima. Among the thousands of wounded and injured were numerous cases of severe frostbite, exposure, and trench foot.42
The lessons of Attu were bitter and many, and they would resonate far beyond this rocky island and have a major impact on American operations throughout both the Pacific and European theaters for the remainder of the war. Never again would American troops go into combat in cold climates—the mountains of Italy, for example—without improvements in footwear, clothes, and other gear. Command structure for joint army-navy operations would be refined for future amphibious landings. Colonel Eareckson’s pioneering forward-air-controller role would be adopted.
Operationally, the Attu campaign had caused the Japanese navy to shift forces to the North Pacific in its perpetual quandary of whether to reinforce Attu and Kiska or abandon them. This robbed Japanese naval forces from the Solomons and left the American invasion at Rendova (just west of Guadalcanal) virtually unopposed. Finally, Kinkaid’s thought to bypass Kiska evolved into the island-hopping strategy that became the centerpiece of operations in the South Pacific during 1944 and 1945.43 The Aleutians were no place to fight a war, but American GIs, sailors, and airmen had done it.