JULY 26, 1943. KISKA, ALASKA, AFTER MIDNIGHT.

When the Japanese guards, who were on duty at an outpost at Vega Point on Kiska, looked out across the horizon, they were perplexed. It wasn’t because they could actually see the moon and the stars twinkling in the cloudless night sky. Nor was it the surprise that the fog had lifted and the weather had cleared. What confounded the Japanese guards were the flashing lights that were illuminating the dark sky like fireworks.

To them, it looked and sounded like a battle was raging out at sea, but they didn’t see how that was possible. They knew the Japanese ships and submarines were steering clear of the American naval blockade that surrounded the Japanese troops on Kiska.

Entrance to one of the Japanese tunnels

At the same time, deep inside an underground tunnel at the Kiska naval headquarters, the Japanese telecommunications intelligence unit was listening in on the U.S. Navy’s radio transmissions. One of the people listening was Karl Kasukabe, the interpreter who had been stationed at Attu. Karl had arrived on Kiska when the Imperial Military Headquarters transferred the troops in Attu to Kiska. Karl had been on Kiska ever since, and he’d fared pretty well until about two months ago. It was on June 10, 1943, during an air raid, that a bomb was dropped on Karl’s barracks. Karl was buried alive and knocked unconscious. He was rescued but his left leg and hip were crushed. Despite his severe injuries, Karl worked diligently translating and decoding American radio transmissions and weather code telegrams. The Japanese knew the Americans were coming to fight for Kiska any day now, and an unshakable feeling of doom weighed heavily on their hearts and minds.

Inside of an underground Japanese bunkhouse

Tonight, Karl’s job was made easier because the Americans were transmitting messages in plain English. Since Karl didn’t have to waste time decoding messages, it wasn’t long before he heard something very interesting. In fact, it was critical to the entire Japanese unit on Kiska. He immediately alerted the others.

The Japanese troops on Kiska may have been surrounded by an American naval blockade, but they had one more trick up their sleeves. And the magician who would make it happen was Rear Admiral Masatomi Kimura.

Three days later, on July 29, 1943, the USS Zeilin left the port of San Francisco and headed west. Crammed onboard were three thousand mountain soldiers. They were the U.S. Army’s Eighty-Seventh Mountain Infantry, Tenth Division, an elite group of top-notch skiers and intrepid rock climbers.

Belowdecks, it was a tight squeeze with eleven soldiers sharing one cabin furnished with narrow bunk beds. Each soldier carried an eighty-five pound backpack and was outfitted with blanket-lined pants, skis, snowshoes, goose-down sleeping bags, camping and climbing gear, and weapons.

When they left San Francisco, none of the soldiers knew where they were going — it was top secret. They could only guess.

When they weren’t on duty, the soldiers passed the time playing cards and telling stories, but when the ship made a sharp turn to the north, they knew they were in trouble. They were headed to the American military base in Adak and would be sent to Kiska to fight the Japanese.

The Tenth Mountain Division had never been in combat before, and everyone knew the battle for Attu had been a bloodbath.

“We were all scared stiff,” said Lieutenant Roger W. Eddy, a Tenth Mountain Division soldier who was a world-class skier and Yale-educated farmer.

The American soldiers knew the Japanese forces were entrenched and ready to attack. The mountain soldiers heard a rumor that 90 percent of them were expected to die at the hands of the Japanese.

On the ship, they tried to enjoy their last moments by listening to popular music on the shortwave radio, but it didn’t help. Tokyo Rose interrupted their program. She taunted them with a warning: “All you boys on the Zeilin headed for Kiska Island, there’s a big surprise waiting there for you.”

Kiska Island was shrouded in the thick pea-soup fog on August 15, 1943, when the first wave of 34,426 U.S. Army and Navy soldiers, which included 5,300 from the Thirteenth Canadian Infantry Brigade, began landing on the shores. The tide was low, exposing hazardous rocks, while the men were taken ashore one boat at a time through the icy water.

The first to go in were Castner’s Cutthroats, led by Major Verbeck. They landed on Gertrude Cove, with the hope of tricking the enemy into thinking they were the main landing force. From Gertrude Cove, the Cutthroats were to kill the enemy as they hiked across to Quisling Cove, where the actual landing was taking place.

U.S. and Canadian soldiers landing on Kiska

On the northwest side of Kiska, the mountain soldiers were to follow a small scouting party. The mountain soldiers had to not only scale the side of the steep cliff, but also cut stairs into it for the combat soldiers who would follow.

Waiting nervously to board a boat that would take him ashore in the second wave of landings was Private George F. Earle, a soldier with the Tenth Mountain Division. George was a Yale graduate who had worked as an art teacher before he joined the army after Pearl Harbor was attacked. He was recruited for the division because he was a fantastic skier.

George wasn’t the only artist in the Tenth. His good friend, Lieutenant Wilfred J. Funk, was a sculptor. Wilfred was an expert mountain climber, and he combined his love for art and climbing when he helped Gutzon Borglum sculpt Mt. Rushmore. Wilfred enjoyed telling the story about how he dangled from a rope off Teddy Roosevelt’s mustache and Abraham Lincoln’s lower lip.

The night before the landing on Kiska, George and Wilfred weren’t the only soldiers thinking about death. And no one’s mind was eased when they were each given a white mattress cover to carry in their packs. At first, they didn’t know what it was for, and they were shocked to learn it would be used as a shroud to cover their dead bodies.

Some sat down and wrote their final farewell letter to their families. Everyone was served a steak dinner with french fries and cake, but most soldiers couldn’t eat because they were worried sick. Afterward, the chaplain read a prayer. The Tenth went to bed at eleven P.M., and those who managed to catch a few winks of sleep were awakened at five A.M. to the blaring sound of loudspeakers. It was time for the first wave of soldiers to land on Kiska.

Landing on the shore at around noon that day was Corporal Leo J. “Oley” Kohlman of the Tenth. He was in charge of keeping everyone supplied — from the underwear and socks the soldiers wore to the machine guns they slung over their shoulders. He was also an expert on both American and Japanese weapons, and he instructed the soldiers how to fire everything from machine guns to rocket launchers.

As Leo slogged his way through the sandy beach toward the steep cliff he would have to climb, he suddenly stopped in his tracks. Four soldiers were returning from the battle high up on the ridge. They were carrying a stretcher. As they passed by, Leo saw a bloody, dead soldier. Leo, who was never at a loss for words, was speechless after witnessing their group’s first casualty of war.

Later in the afternoon, up on the craggy ridge, the men tried to dig foxholes, but shoveling the rocky terrain proved tough and the foxholes were shallow. They would have to make do with these and crouch down to take cover from flying bullets and grenades.

As the hurricane-force winds blew, the thick fog made things shimmer like a reflection in a pool of wavy water, tricking the eye into seeing the form of a person in what was, in fact, just a pile of rocks. Plodding through this tricky layer of fog was George Earle. He was trekking down a slope with an operations officer, trying to gather information on their positions on the front line, when they came upon a soldier lying on the ground. The soldier’s pants were drenched in blood. He’d been shot in the thigh, and he couldn’t climb up the ridge.

“He assured us that he had killed the Jap[anese] who had shot him,” said George. “He had seen him clearly and close up and watched him fall.”

But no one could find the Japanese soldier’s body.

That night there was fog, rain, and wind as the men huddled in their muddy foxholes, hoping that the Japanese weren’t coming to slay them with their bayonets. The sounds of tracer bullets whistling and the ack-ack-ack of machine-gun fire were heard throughout the seemingly endless night. By morning there were a total of fifteen dead soldiers on Kiska. One of them was Wilfred Funk, the once-promising sculptor. He’d been shot several times.

“He died leading a heroic charge to save that command post that was out of position…. He was a friend from the inside out,” said George.

As the wounded and the dead were carried down the steep and slippery ridge, a troubling observation was made. There weren’t any dead Japanese soldiers — anywhere.

Soon after, Technician Fifth Class Robert W. Parker, whose job in the Tenth was intelligence and reconnaissance, was sent out with his unit to find the Japanese. Their mission was to determine if the Japanese troops had moved to the southern side of the island.

“We thought we were going into the jaws of death,” said Robert. “None of us was sure whether we’d ever climb back up those hills.”

Before long they came upon a Japanese artillery installation, and what they found was more disturbing than they would have ever guessed. It was deserted, revealing the awful truth.

“There weren’t any Japanese at all on Kiska Island,” said Robert.

The Allied soldiers had been shooting at one another. In all, seventeen Americans and four Canadians were killed and fifty were wounded. The causes were friendly fire or booby traps rigged by the Japanese.

Disarmed Japanese booby trap

“We were exhausted, disgusted, and ashamed,” said Roger Eddy. “And we knew we’d done all the killing ourselves.”

The Japanese escape from Kiska began after midnight on July 26, 1943, three weeks before the American and Canadian troops landed on Kiska. When the Japanese guards saw the flashing lights that were illuminating the midnight sky like fireworks, they did not know they were coming from American ships. And they did not know that these ships had been ordered to withdraw from the naval blockade to find a Japanese fleet that had been spotted on their radar screen as a series of seven blips, or pips as they were called back then.

Although they had been alerted about the order by Karl Kasukabe, who was listening in on the American radio transmissions, the Japanese didn’t know which fleet the Americans were chasing because they knew that Rear Admiral Masatomi Kimura and his rescue fleet were waiting five hundred miles south of Kiska. The American ships firing their guns on the horizon thought they were engaged in a battle with a Japanese fleet. It turned out the Americans were firing at a “phantom fleet.”

To this day, no one knows for sure what the Americans saw on the radar screen that made them think Japanese ships were in the area. It is suspected that the radar pips leading to the Battle of the Pips were a flock of birds.

Karl also learned from the radio transmission that after the phantom battle the American fleet planned to refuel. This gave the Japanese ten to twelve hours to put their escape plan into action.

The Japanese knew that in order for their plan to work, they would need a thick blanket of fog to hide them, so they monitored Russian and American radio weather reports. Using these and Japanese weather forecasts, the Kiska weatherman determined that, despite the unusually clear weather they’d been experiencing, the fog would roll back in on July 29. Although fog is never easy to predict, this time he was right.

Japanese weather station on Kiska

Admiral Kimura and his fleet of destroyers and cruisers stealthily approached Kiska Island by taking the most dangerous route, strategizing that it was the least likely route to encounter American submarines and ships. A radio beacon guided him into Kiska Bay, where Karl and the rest of the Japanese unit were waiting on the beach.

Within fifty-five minutes, five thousand Japanese were evacuated from Kiska, successfully escaping under cover of fog without a single casualty.

A month later, on August 21, President Roosevelt and Canadian prime minister W. L. Mackenzie King issued a joint statement announcing the end of the Aleutian War. The navy also issued a statement, which revealed to the American public for the first time that on August 15, U.S. and Canadian troops had landed on Kiska.

“No Japanese have been found,” the U.S. Navy stated. “There were indications of [a] recent hasty evacuation of the Japanese garrison…. It is not known how the Japanese got away, but it is possible that enemy surface ships were able to reach Kiska under cover of heavy fogs that have been prevalent.”

On the same day, the Japanese government announced that the Japanese army and naval forces had been transferred from Kiska to a new post over two and a half weeks before and that the operation was met “without enemy interference.”

Radio Tokyo also broadcasted the news that the Japanese forces had not been on Kiska since the end of July.

The U.S. Navy issued a second statement contradicting the Japanese reports that the Japanese hadn’t been on Kiska for over two weeks, stating “light antiaircraft fire was encountered” in an air raid on Kiska on August 13.

Three days later the Japanese government announced that the ghosts of the dead Japanese soldiers on Attu must have caused the American ships to fire at one another, and had fought the American soldiers on Kiska. An Australian newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, picked up the story and published it as “Ghosts Fight Allies.”

Even though the Aleutian War was over, the Tenth Mountain Division remained on Kiska until December 1943 to sweep the island for land mines and booby traps that the Japanese had rigged before they left. One day, deep inside an underground tunnel, mountain soldier Private Sherman L. Smith found a Japanese flag. He quickly discovered that it was attached to a bomb. Wasting no time, he fearlessly cut the wires leading to the explosives and successfully defused it.

When Sherman looked the flag over, he noticed Japanese writing all over it. He folded the flag up and put it in his pack. He wanted to keep it as a souvenir.

What Sherman didn’t know, at the time, was that on top of the flag the Japanese writing said, LIVE LONG KASUKABE!