The bombardment of the Kuril Islands

At the beginning of February 1944 the US Navy for the first time sent surface warships to the shores of the Kuril Islands. Rear Admiral Wilder D. Baker’s task force – light cruisers and destroyers that had sailed from Attu – shelled Japanese positions at the southern end of Paramushir during the night and early morning of 4 February. The next day, 5 February, bombers and fighters of the Eleventh Air Force appeared over the island, covering the ships’ withdrawal and attacking the airfields. War chronologies list the event under 5 February as the shelling of “the northernmost part of the Japanese home territory”. According to the ships’ war diaries and American records, however, the bombardment itself took place on 4 February (by American dates), and 5 February was the day of the air raid that concluded it. The description itself also needs refining: the Kurils had belonged to Japan for decades and came under the administration of Hokkaido, but they were not one of the four home islands.

The Kurils – Japan’s northern flank

The Kuril chain stretches for about 1,300 km from Hokkaido to the southern tip of Kamchatka, separating the Sea of Okhotsk from the open Pacific. Japan acquired the southern islands, including Iturup and Kunashir, under the Treaty of Shimoda in 1855; Russia ceded the rest of the chain, up to Shumshu, under the Treaty of Saint Petersburg in 1875 in exchange for Japan’s rights to Sakhalin. The climate is harsh: cold currents, fog for most of the summer, storms and ice in winter. The civilian population was small and lived mainly from fishing and fish processing.

Militarily, what mattered above all were the northern islands – Paramushir and, separated from it by a narrow strait, Shumshu, barely a dozen or so kilometres from Soviet Kamchatka. In 1942 and 1943 the Japanese Fifth Fleet directed the supply of the garrisons in the Aleutians from Paramushir; it was from here that the convoy sailed which clashed with the Americans in March 1943 at the Battle of the Komandorski Islands, and from here in July of that year that the expedition set out which slipped in unnoticed to take off the garrison of Kiska, completing the evacuation of the island that submarines had begun earlier. On both islands the army and navy built airfields, coastal batteries and shelters, and anchorages and storehouses in Kataoka Bay on Shumshu and around the settlement of Kashiwabara on Paramushir.

Raids from the Aleutians

After the landing on Attu in May 1943 and the occupation of Kiska, already abandoned, in August, the Americans had airfields at the western end of the Aleutians from which they could reach the northern Kurils. The Eleventh Air Force’s first raid on Paramushir and Shumshu took place on 10 July 1943: eight B-25 Mitchell bombers dropped their bombs through solid cloud. It was the Eleventh Air Force’s first attack on territory that had belonged to Japan before the war, and one of the first American raids on such territory since the Doolittle Raid of April 1942. Later missions, including heavy B-24 Liberators, attacked airfields and shipping in the strait between the islands.

The Japanese quickly strengthened their anti-aircraft and fighter defences. The raid of 11 September 1943, flown by eight B-24s and twelve B-25s, ended in disaster for the Americans: according to American records, ten aircraft failed to return with 74 airmen, of whom 22 were killed, one was captured and 51, after making emergency landings in Kamchatka, were interned by the Soviet Union, which was neutral towards Japan – the USSR was observing the neutrality pact concluded in 1941. After these losses the Eleventh Air Force suspended missions over the Kurils for several months, and in any case its strength was absorbed by the winter, which in the Aleutians meant almost continuous storms and fog.

The bombardment of Paramushir

It fell to the navy to resume operations. Rear Admiral Baker’s Task Force 94, in practice the main surface force in the North Pacific, consisted of two old Omaha-class light cruisers – the flagship USS Richmond and USS Raleigh – and modern Fletcher-class destroyers. According to the ships’ war diaries and records of their movements, Task Group 94.6 left Massacre Bay on Attu on 1 February 1944; besides the two cruisers, the destroyers Picking, Wickes and Young are named as taking part in the action. The approach across the stormy winter Pacific took three days.

In the early hours of 4 February, still in darkness, the ships took up positions off the southern tip of Paramushir, near Cape Kurabu and Musashi Bay. According to the Raleigh’s war diary, the cruiser shelled an area containing two batteries of dual-purpose guns and then the airfield, destroying a hangar and several barracks; her gunners also hit a small merchant ship lying at anchor off the shore. The destroyers shelled the buildings of the settlement by the cape. After the bombardment the force turned east to get out of range of Japanese aircraft from the islands as quickly as possible. On 5 February (by American dates) it returned to Attu, from where three destroyers were sent out to search for missing airmen.

The raid of 5 February

The ships did not act alone. On 5 February the Eleventh Air Force sent six B-24s and sixteen twin-engined P-38 Lightning fighters, which together with navy aircraft covered the withdrawal of the cruisers and destroyers in successive waves and then photographed and attacked installations on Paramushir and Shumshu. It was the first major raid on the northern Kurils since the September disaster; in the months that followed, such missions, flown by army bombers and by the navy’s Ventura patrol aircraft, became increasingly frequent, though they depended entirely on the weather.

The material results of the bombardment and the raid were slight and hard to assess – American reports speak of destroyed barracks, a hangar and a damaged ship, while Japanese losses that day are poorly documented. The significance of the action lay mainly elsewhere. Rear Admiral Baker received the Navy Cross for his command of Task Force 94, and in American literature the expedition figures as the first bombardment of Japanese territory by US Navy surface ships. Strictly geographically, the ships came nowhere near the home islands – Paramushir lies more than a thousand kilometres from Hokkaido – but they did shell land that Japan had regarded as its own for almost seventy years.

Place in the war

The bombardment of Paramushir was part of a wider design: to keep the Japanese convinced that the Americans might strike from the north. The North Pacific was a sub-area of Admiral Chester Nimitz’s Pacific Ocean Areas, and in 1944 a large-scale deception operation, Wedlock, was conducted there. It created a largely fictitious Ninth Fleet and an amphibious command with five non-existent divisions, simulating preparations for an invasion of the Kurils; it was meant to divert attention from the real objective, which in June 1944 turned out to be the Marianas. According to American accounts, the Japanese increased the garrison of the northern Kurils from about 8,000 troops in 1943 to about 41,000 in 1944, and kept several hundred aircraft in the Kurils and on Hokkaido. How much of this was due to Wedlock itself, and how much to ordinary Japanese caution after the loss of the Aleutians, is hard to say.

Task Force 94’s sorties were repeated: on 4 March 1944 Baker’s ships shelled Paramushir again, and in May and June, by then under a different commander, Paramushir and Matua; from April 1944 all forces in the North Pacific were commanded by Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher. By the end of the war, aircraft from the Aleutians had flown more than 1,500 combat sorties over the Kurils. The invasion from the north that Japan feared never came, however; the North Pacific remained a secondary theatre, and the outcome of the war was decided by the fighting in the Central and South-West Pacific.

In the end the Kurils were taken not by an American but by a Soviet landing. Stalin, who at the Tehran Conference had promised to enter the war against Japan once Germany was defeated, obtained the Allies’ consent at Yalta in February 1945 to take over the Kurils. After declaring war on Japan on 8 August 1945, Soviet troops landed on Shumshu on 18 August, where the Japanese garrison resisted in heavy fighting until 23 August, and by early September they had occupied the entire chain. The Japanese civilian population was expelled over the following years, and the dispute over the southern Kurils remains to this day the main unresolved problem in Russo-Japanese relations.