The end of the fighting on Attu

On 30 May 1943, after nineteen days of fighting, the island of Attu in the Aleutian archipelago was back in American hands. Organised Japanese resistance had ended the day before, when the remnants of Colonel Yasuyo Yamasaki’s garrison set off before dawn on a last, suicidal charge against the American positions above Massacre Bay. Almost all of them were killed. Of the roughly 2,600 Japanese soldiers who had defended the island since the American landing on 11 May, 28 or 29, depending on the source, were taken prisoner, and not one of them was an officer. That same day, 30 May, Imperial General Headquarters announced the loss of the island and, for the first time in an official communiqué, described the annihilation of an entire garrison with the word gyokusai – literally “shattered jewel”.

The pocket above Chichagof Harbor

After the two American forces linked up around 18 May, the Japanese held only the north-eastern tip of the island around Chichagof Harbor, where Yamasaki had his headquarters. They defended themselves on mountain ridges and passes which the Americans called Clevesy Pass, Sarana Nose and Fish Hook Ridge. Each of these heights took several days to capture, in snow and fog, often in fighting with grenades. Major General Eugene Landrum, who on 16 May had replaced the dismissed General Albert Brown, committed his reserves and tightened the ring step by step. The Japanese had lost most of their guns and were running short of ammunition and food, because since the Battle of the Komandorski Islands supplies had come only by submarine, and there was no way of evacuating the wounded.

In Tokyo it was quickly understood that the island could not be held. Imperial General Headquarters considered sending reinforcements by submarine, a parachute landing and even a fleet expedition, but ships were lacking, and the fleet with aircraft carriers assembled in Tokyo Bay never put to sea. On 20 May the decision was taken to abandon Attu and evacuate Kiska. For the Attu garrison evacuation was practically impossible: shallow Chichagof Harbor could not take a submarine, and the waters around the island were patrolled by American destroyers. On 23 May the commander of the Northern Army, Lieutenant General Kiichirō Higuchi, sent Yamasaki a signal in which the word gyokusai appeared for the first time – in practice an order to fight to the last man. That same day the first Japanese bombers of the battle appeared over the island, flying from the Kurils, but they did not change the defenders’ situation. On 24 May the command passed on to the garrison words of commendation from Emperor Hirohito.

On 25 and 26 May the Americans cut the road linking the headquarters with the rest of the Japanese positions. Lieutenant Colonel Hiroshi Yonekawa, who commanded the strongest battalion of the garrison, was killed in the fighting on the ridges above the harbour. By 28 May Yamasaki had only a few hundred men still able to fight, squeezed into a scrap of coastline, and he was certain that the Americans would launch their final assault the next day.

The last charge

On the evening of 28 May Yamasaki gathered the survivors at his headquarters above Chichagof Harbor. According to the accounts of the few survivors, he apologised to his men for the fate of the garrison and announced a joint attack. He sent a last signal to Tokyo, after which the radio station was destroyed. The badly wounded who could not walk were to take their own lives; those who were unable to do so were killed by the doctors with injections or pistols. This was how it was described in the diary of one of the garrison’s doctors, the US-educated Nobuo Tatsuguchi; his notes were found on his body and, once translated, were widely published in the American press. Sources differ on the strength of the force that went into the attack: from several hundred to about a thousand men, including wounded who could still walk.

Before dawn on 29 May (in Japanese sources, which reckoned time by Tokyo, it is already 30 May) the Japanese slipped through the American outposts under cover of fog. They struck a company of the 32nd Infantry Regiment that was just coming down from its positions for breakfast, and broke through the front line. It was the largest banzai charge of the Pacific War to date. Many of the attackers had only bayonets, some of them tied to poles. The Japanese overran two command posts and reached a dressing station, where they killed the wounded lying there and some of the medical staff. Starving soldiers tore open tents along the way and ate the tinned food they found.

The next Japanese objective was a hill, later named Engineer Hill by the Americans, behind the front, overlooking the road to Massacre Bay. Engineers were camped on its summit, and they hastily prepared a defence. The assistant division commander, Brigadier General Archibald Arnold, gathered there everyone who could fire a weapon: engineers, medics, cooks and headquarters clerks. They stopped the attack with rifle fire, grenades and anti-tank guns, and then with howitzer fire. According to American accounts, Yamasaki was killed leading the charge, sword in hand. When the attack collapsed, hundreds of surviving Japanese took their own lives by holding grenades to their chests or heads. Smaller groups broke through almost as far as Massacre Bay before they were wiped out.

On 30 May the Americans combed the ravines and caves above Chichagof Harbor and declared the fighting over. Individual Japanese soldiers nevertheless hid in the mountains for several more weeks, and according to some sources the last of them were tracked down only at the beginning of September.

The toll

American burial parties counted 2,351 bodies of Japanese soldiers; it was believed that several hundred others had already been buried by shell bursts and collapsed trenches. The garrison had thus been almost entirely wiped out. According to US Army tallies, the 7th Infantry Division lost 549 killed and about 1,150 wounded. Frost, damp and poor equipment put a further 1,200 or so men out of action, and to these were added 614 cases of disease and 318 casualties from other causes, including accidents and friendly fire; in total, according to these figures, losses reached 3,829 men. Relative to the size of the Japanese garrison, these were among the highest American losses of the entire Pacific War; they are often compared with the losses later suffered on Iwo Jima.

“Shattered jewel”

The word gyokusai comes from an ancient Chinese chronicle, according to which a noble man would rather be a shattered jewel than an intact roof tile. Japanese propaganda turned it into a term for the death of an entire unit that does not surrender in a hopeless situation. Behind this ideal stood the Field Service Code (Senjinkun), issued in January 1941 by the War Minister, Hideki Tōjō, which enjoined soldiers not to live in the shame of captivity. Japanese units had been wiped out before – on the islands of Tulagi and Gavutu in August 1942, for example – but the public had not been told, and the evacuation of Guadalcanal had been presented as tenshin, a “change in the direction of advance”. Attu was the first defeat that could not be concealed in this way.

The Imperial General Headquarters communiqué of 30 May presented the death of the garrison as a model of self-sacrifice. The radio announced that Yamasaki had never asked for reinforcements, which was untrue: around the middle of May the garrison had requested reinforcements and supplies, and his superiors had also pressed for help to be sent to him. The news came only nine days after the announcement of the death of Admiral Yamamoto and came as a shock to Japanese society. Yamasaki was posthumously promoted two ranks, to lieutenant general. In August the newspaper Asahi Shimbun published a list of the dead, and in September memorial ceremonies were held in Sapporo. That same year the painter Tsuguharu Foujita painted a large canvas, Gyokusai on Attu, shown at exhibitions of war art, before which, according to accounts, visitors prayed and threw coins. Once introduced into the language of official communiqués, the word was to return many times.

Place in the war

The Battle of Attu ended the Japanese presence in the Aleutians. Imperial General Headquarters decided not to repeat the tragedy on Kiska: on 28 July 1943 Japanese cruisers and destroyers, under cover of fog and at a time when the American blockading ships had withdrawn to refuel, took more than 5,000 soldiers off the island in less than an hour. On 15 August more than 34,000 American and Canadian troops landed on the abandoned Kiska; several dozen of them were killed by friendly fire and by mines left behind. From the airfield built on Attu, American bombers began attacking Japanese bases in the Kuril Islands as early as the summer of 1943, and Japan had to keep forces in the north that were needed elsewhere. An invasion of Japan from the north never came, however: the North Pacific remained a secondary theatre, and the main thrusts went through the Central and South-West Pacific.

The most lasting legacy of Attu proved to be a pattern that would be repeated in the years that followed. From Tarawa in November 1943, through Saipan in 1944, to Iwo Jima and Okinawa in 1945, Japanese garrisons with no line of retreat and no hope of relief died almost to the last man, often in a final banzai charge. For the Americans it was a sign that every island would cost a great deal of blood, which also influenced later calculations concerning the invasion of the Japanese home islands themselves. The Aleuts of Attu, deported by the Japanese to Hokkaido in 1942, never returned to the island: after the war the survivors were resettled on Atka, and Attu remained a military base.