The Battle of the Komandorski Islands

On the morning of 26 March 1943 by American reckoning – 27 March by local date – in the North Pacific, some 180 nautical miles west of the island of Attu and about 100 miles south of the Soviet Komandorski Islands, Rear Admiral Charles McMorris’s American task group ran into the Japanese warships escorting a convoy carrying supplies for the garrisons in the Aleutians. The Japanese had twice as many cruisers. There followed a gunnery duel in daylight, lasting some three and a half hours, with no part played by aircraft or submarines – one of the last such engagements in the history of naval warfare. At one point the badly damaged cruiser USS Salt Lake City lay dead in the water, but the Japanese commander, Vice Admiral Boshirō Hosogaya, broke off the action and turned back together with the convoy.

The discrepancy in dates arises from the location of the battlefield. The engagement was fought west of the International Date Line, where it was already 27 March, but the American ships kept their logs according to the time and date in force on the eastern side of the line. That is why American literature, and many chronologies following it, give 26 March, while most Japanese and reference works give 27 March.

Islands that could not be supplied

In June 1942, in an operation prepared by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s staff in parallel with the strike on Midway, the Japanese occupied Attu and Kiska without a fight – the two westernmost islands of the Aleutian chain. After the defeat at Midway both conquests lost their value as part of an offensive plan, but the Japanese high command decided to hold them: they were to shield the Kuril Islands and northern Japan against a possible American thrust from Alaska and to tie down enemy forces far from the main fronts.

Holding the islands, however, became ever more difficult. From the autumn of 1942 American aircraft bombed Kiska from the airfield on the island of Adak, and in January 1943 the Americans landed on Amchitka, only a few dozen miles from Kiska, and began building another airfield there. In January Rear Admiral Thomas Kinkaid took command of the North Pacific forces and resolved to cut both garrisons off from supplies. Submarines and aircraft hunted Japanese transports, and cruiser groups patrolled the waters west of Attu. During the night of 19–20 February the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis and two destroyers sank the transport Akagane Maru there.

Vice Admiral Hosogaya, commander of the Japanese Fifth Fleet, which was responsible for the northern area of operations, decided to run the next convoy through under strong escort. Two fast ships, the Asaka Maru and the Sakito Maru, were carrying troops, equipment and materials needed above all to complete the airfield on Attu; a third, slower transport, the Sanko Maru, with the destroyer Usugumo, was to join later and took no part in the battle. It is often said that this was an attempt to reinforce the garrison on Kiska. In reality the convoy’s main cargo was destined for Attu, but both garrisons depended equally on supplies by sea.

The opposing forces

Kinkaid knew of the preparations for the run and sent McMorris’s force (Task Group 16.6) westwards. It consisted of the old Pensacola-class heavy cruiser USS Salt Lake City, the even older Omaha-class light cruiser USS Richmond, in which McMorris flew his flag, and four destroyers: Bailey, Coghlan, Dale and Monaghan. American intelligence estimated the convoy’s escort at one heavy cruiser, one light cruiser and four destroyers.

The Fifth Fleet, however, had received reinforcements. Hosogaya, flying his flag in the heavy cruiser Nachi, also had with him the heavy cruiser Maya, the light cruisers Tama and Abukuma and four destroyers: Wakaba, Hatsushimo, Ikazuchi and Inazuma. The Japanese thus had the advantage above all in heavy guns – twenty 203 mm guns against ten in Salt Lake City – and their cruisers were faster and more modern. The Americans, on the other hand, had radar, which the Japanese ships lacked.

The chase to the west

In the morning the American ships were steaming in a scouting line, spread out several miles apart. The Japanese, though without radar, sighted the enemy first: it grew light earlier to the south, and the Japanese navy took great care in choosing lookouts with exceptionally good eyesight. Shortly afterwards the radars of Richmond and Coghlan detected several ships, which McMorris took to be transports with a light escort, and he moved in to attack. Only when the masts of heavy cruisers appeared over the horizon did he realise that he was facing a stronger force. The transports made off to the north-west, and the Japanese cruisers, which lay between the Americans and their bases to the east, gave chase.

At around 8.40 a.m. Nachi opened fire on Richmond at a range of some 18 km, and the American cruisers replied almost at once. The first phase went the Americans’ way. Shells from Richmond and Salt Lake City hit Nachi’s signal bridge, her mainmast – which cut the flagship’s radio communications – and her torpedo spaces. For a time the cruiser lost power to her turrets and ammunition hoists and fell behind; a dozen or so men were killed aboard her. Throughout the battle, however, Nachi‘s floatplane spotted for the Japanese ships’ guns.

Unable to turn east, McMorris withdrew to the south-west and west, ever further from his own bases. The Japanese cruisers fired at long range, while Salt Lake City zigzagged, “chasing salvos” – steering for the spot where the last shells had fallen. From 9.10, however, she began taking hits from 203 mm shells, most of them from Maya. The heavy cruiser fired more than 800 armour-piercing shells in the battle, and when they ran out she fired high-explosive rounds; ammunition from the forward magazines was carried by hand to the after turrets, the only ones that could bear on the pursuing enemy. One of the groups of bombers McMorris had called up from Adak lost its way in the fog and never reached the battle.

The crisis came before noon. After another hit, sea water got into Salt Lake City’s fuel tanks and put out the fires under her boilers. At around 11.55 the cruiser came to a stop. Richmond and Dale laid a smokescreen, and McMorris sent three destroyers, Bailey, Coghlan and Monaghan, into a desperate torpedo attack on the Japanese cruisers. Bailey fired five torpedoes, none of which hit; she herself took two 203 mm hits and lost five men killed; Coghlan was hit as well. Meanwhile Salt Lake City’s engineers managed to relight the boilers and the ship got under way again.

At around 12.30 p.m. Hosogaya broke off the action and withdrew to the west. Behind the smokescreen he could not see that Salt Lake City was immobilised. The Japanese ships had used up most of their 203 mm ammunition and a good deal of fuel, and the admiral feared the arrival of American bombers from Adak and Amchitka. The transports turned back with the escort: the convoy never reached Attu.

Tactical draw, strategic victory

Losses were small in relation to the weight of fire. According to American figures, seven American sailors were killed and about twenty wounded; on the Japanese side, almost exclusively aboard Nachi, a dozen or so men were killed and several dozen wounded. No ship was sunk. Salt Lake City and Bailey had to go into dockyard for repairs, and Nachi also needed repair.

The battle is sometimes summed up as a kind of draw brought about by poor leadership on both sides, with the Japanese withdrawing without having achieved their aim. That verdict needs refining. Tactically the engagement was indeed indecisive, and both commanders can be faulted: McMorris attacked without having identified the enemy’s strength and then withdrew deeper into waters controlled by the Japanese; Hosogaya, over several hours, failed to destroy a weaker and slower opponent and gave up the fight at the decisive moment. In the judgement of the American command, however, and of most historians, McMorris handled the action skilfully and bravely, and his force accomplished its task: the convoy turned back. Strategically, therefore, it was a clear American victory, and it sealed the fate of the Japanese garrisons in the Aleutians.

Its place in the war

After the battle the Japanese navy gave up supplying Attu and Kiska by surface convoys. From then on supplies were brought in only by submarines, in insufficient quantities; the airfield on Attu was never completed. In Japan the retreat in the face of a weaker enemy was regarded as a lack of resolve. Hosogaya lost command of the Fifth Fleet, which passed to Vice Admiral Shirō Kawase, and was transferred to the reserve; until the end of the war he served as governor of the South Seas Mandate, based at Truk atoll. McMorris became chief of staff to Admiral Chester Nimitz in the Pacific Fleet later in 1943.

Cutting the islands off opened the way to their recapture. On 11 May 1943 American troops landed on Attu. In the Battle of Attu, which lasted until the end of May in the harsh conditions of an Arctic spring, the Japanese garrison of some 2,600 men was almost entirely wiped out; fewer than thirty soldiers were taken prisoner. At the end of July the Japanese navy, under cover of fog, evacuated more than 5,000 men from Kiska, and the American and Canadian troops who landed there in mid-August found the island deserted. The Aleutian campaign was over.

The Battle of the Komandorski Islands went down in history as one of the last engagements decided solely by the guns of surface ships, without the participation of aircraft or submarines. In this respect it resembled the Battle of the Barents Sea of 31 December 1942, in which a stronger force likewise broke off the fight for fear of an unknown risk. In the Pacific, where that same month aircraft had destroyed a Japanese convoy in the Bismarck Sea, naval warfare now belonged above all to aircraft and carriers.