The evacuation of Kiska

By the beginning of June 1943 a Japanese operation to bring the men out of Kiska – the last island in the Aleutian chain still in Japanese hands – was already under way. The island had been seized almost exactly a year earlier, on 6 and 7 June 1942, together with neighbouring Attu. Now, after the Americans had retaken Attu, the Kiska garrison of more than 5,600 men was trapped between American airfields to the east and the lost island to the west. The Japanese command called the undertaking Operation Ke (Ke-gō sakusen). In June it was carried out by submarines, which crept into Kiska Harbor in fog and darkness, unloaded ammunition and food, and on the return journey took off a few dozen people at a time – above all the sick and wounded and military labourers.

The statement, often found under 8 June, that the Japanese “began” the evacuation on that day needs qualifying. The first submarine, I-7, had taken about 60 men off Kiska as early as 27 May, two days before the last attack on Attu, and 8 June falls in the middle of this first, underwater phase. Nor did it mark the end of the Japanese presence on the island: the main body of the garrison left only at the end of July.

A garrison in a trap

Kiska, renamed Narukami-jima by the Japanese, was in 1943 the strongest Japanese position in the Aleutians. The command expected the Americans to strike it first, since it lay closer to Alaska, and had therefore sent far more troops there than to Attu. According to Japanese figures, on 10 June 1943 there were 2,429 army and 3,210 navy personnel on the island, 5,639 people in all, including some 1,170 civilian employees of the armed forces. The land forces were commanded by Major General Toichirō Mineki, the naval forces (51st Base Unit) by Rear Admiral Katsuzō Akiyama. The island had a base for seaplanes and midget submarines, and an airfield was under construction but was never finished.

From the beginning of 1943 the garrison’s situation steadily worsened. The Americans built an airfield on Amchitka, about a hundred kilometres east of Kiska, and the bombers of the Eleventh Air Force attacked the Japanese positions at every break in the weather. Rear Admiral Thomas Kinkaid’s North Pacific Force cut the islands off from supplies: after the Battle of the Komandorski Islands in March 1943 the Japanese sent no further surface convoys to the Aleutians. When the Americans landed on Attu on 11 May, it became clear that Kiska would be next.

The decision to abandon the Aleutians

While the fighting on Attu was still going on, on 21 May 1943 Tokyo time, the army and navy agreed at Imperial General Headquarters that the Aleutians would be abandoned. The Attu garrison was to be taken off by submarine as far as possible – which proved impracticable – and the Kiska garrison withdrawn “as quickly as possible, chiefly by submarine, step by step”; transports and destroyers were to be used only if favourable fog allowed. The navy was reluctant to send surface ships under the nose of the American fleet. In the Solomon Islands it had already lost many destroyers on night supply and evacuation runs, and in the Aleutians destroyers would have had to sail hundreds of kilometres through waters patrolled by radar-equipped American ships.

On 29 May the Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet, Admiral Mineichi Koga, ordered Operation Ke to begin, and the next day the commander of the Fifth Fleet, Vice Admiral Shirō Kawase, issued detailed orders. Fifteen submarines were assigned to the operation; in practice thirteen took part. They were directed by the commander of the 1st Submarine Squadron from the base at Paramushiro in the Kurils. Each boat took off a few dozen people and a dozen or so tonnes of cargo, so even if all went well, removing more than five thousand men would have taken many months. Those least needed for the defence were therefore taken first – the wounded, the sick and the labourers – while ammunition and food were delivered to the island against an American landing.

Submarines in the fog

The first weeks passed without loss, but in June the American blockading ships began to detect Japanese submarines by radar, even in the thick fog in which the Japanese felt safe. A boat running on the surface to recharge its batteries or to reach the harbour more quickly became an easy target. On 11 June, north-east of Shemya island, the American submarine chaser PC-487 detected I-24, attacked her with depth charges and, when the boat surfaced, rammed her twice. I-24 went down with all hands. On 13 June the destroyer USS Frazier sank I-9 near Kiska as she was on her way to collect the personnel of the midget submarine base; the Japanese declared her missing on 15 June. Some older works, including Samuel Eliot Morison’s official US naval history, credited Frazier on that day with sinking I-31, but that boat had already been lost in May, in the fighting around Attu.

On 17 June the submarine command suspended runs into Kiska for a time, then resumed the attempts. On the evening of 20 June (by American dates) I-7 – the same boat that had begun the evacuation in May – was approaching Gertrude Cove in the south of the island. In thick fog the destroyer USS Monaghan picked her up by radar and opened fire before the Japanese had even spotted her. Two shells pierced the conning tower, killing the boat’s commander and the division commander, Captain Tomejirō Tamaki. I-7 ran aground near the shore, and her crew, helped by men from the island, patched up the hull. When she tried to slip away on the night of 21–22 June, Monaghan intercepted her again. I-7 ran onto the rocks near Vega Bay and was abandoned; at the end of June the Japanese blew up the wreck. Eighty-seven of her crew were killed.

On 23 June Vice Admiral Kawase called off the submarine operation. According to Japanese accounts, in less than a month 872 people were taken off Kiska (another Japanese tally gives 820): 308 sailors, 58 army soldiers and more than 500 civilian employees. Some 125 tonnes of weapons and ammunition and more than 100 tonnes of food were delivered to the island. The price was three submarines (I-7, I-9 and I-24) with several hundred crewmen, and several others damaged. Japanese authors note that the loss of the boats troubled Emperor Hirohito himself. Some 5,000 men still remained on Kiska.

“The last foothold in the Western Hemisphere”

Kiska is sometimes called the last Japanese foothold in the Western Hemisphere. There is some truth in this and some exaggeration. The island belonged to the American Territory of Alaska and was the last piece of North America on which the Japanese stood; after losing it they no longer held any position on United States territory, or indeed anywhere on the American side of the Pacific. In strictly geographical terms, however, Kiska lies at about 177° east, and so in the Eastern Hemisphere, on the same side of the 180th meridian as Kamchatka and Japan. Attu and the neighbouring Near Islands also lie east of that meridian. The term “Western Hemisphere” should therefore be understood politically, as meaning the Americas, rather than literally.

The remark that the withdrawal came “almost exactly on the anniversary” of the landing is, on the other hand, accurate: Japanese troops went ashore on Kiska on 6 June 1942 (7 June Tokyo time), and June 1943 was taken up with the first, underwater attempts to leave it.

Place in the war

The failure of the June operation forced the Japanese to do what they had wanted to avoid: send surface ships. The task was given to Rear Admiral Masatomi Kimura, newly appointed commander of the 1st Destroyer Squadron, who in March, as escort commander, had survived, wounded, the destruction of the convoy to Lae. The plan was to enter Kiska Harbor under cover of fog, in which American aircraft could not operate, and take off the whole garrison in a lightning operation. Kimura demanded radar-equipped ships and was given the modern destroyer Shimakaze. The first sortie, which left Paramushiro on 7 July, turned back on 15 July because the fog had lifted; Kimura, criticised for this in the staffs, preferred to turn back rather than risk his ships. On the second attempt a force of the light cruisers Abukuma and Kiso and destroyers entered the harbour in thick fog on 29 July and in 55 minutes took off 5,183 men. Luck was on its side: a few days earlier American battleships and cruisers had fired at night on phantom radar echoes (the so-called Battle of the Pips), and on 28 July they had withdrawn to refuel, leaving the waters around Kiska unwatched. Not a single ship was even fired upon; the only damage came from collisions in the fog on the way to Kiska.

For almost three weeks the Americans failed to notice that the island was deserted and went on bombing it. On 15 August 1943, in Operation Cottage, more than 34,000 American and Canadian troops landed on Kiska, including some 5,300 Canadians, mainly from the 13th Infantry Brigade – the first time Canada had sent conscripts into a combat zone. They found no one, yet they still suffered losses. In the fog units mistook one another for Japanese; according to the figures most often given, 28 Americans and 4 Canadians were killed by friendly fire. The destroyer USS Abner Read struck a mine that killed 71 sailors, and booby traps and accidents claimed further victims. American tallies put the operation’s total losses at more than 300 killed and wounded, and some sources at more than 500.

The evacuation of Kiska brought the Aleutian Islands campaign to a close. For Japan it was a rare success in this war: more than 5,000 men were saved who would otherwise have shared the fate of the Attu garrison. Strategically, however, it changed nothing. The Aleutians, seized in 1942 as a diversion for the Midway operation, became an American air base for raids on the Kurils, and from then on Japan had to keep substantial forces in the Kuril Islands and on Hokkaido for fear of an invasion from the north that never came. The main weight of the Pacific war shifted to the south, where at the end of June 1943 the Americans were opening their offensive in New Georgia and New Guinea.