The Japanese on Attu and Kiska

During the night of 6–7 June 1942 Japanese naval infantry landed on Kiska island in the western part of the Aleutian chain, and on 7 June an army detachment occupied Attu, lying even further west. There were no American troops on either island. On Kiska the Japanese found ten sailors manning a weather station; on Attu, a small Aleut village and two white Americans, the Joneses, a married couple. The occupation of the two islands was to last more than a year.

The event is sometimes called the first invasion of American soil in 128 years. This phrase, repeated by the American press since 1942, needs qualifying. Six months earlier the Japanese had taken Guam and Wake Island, and in May 1942 they had completed the conquest of the Philippines, which were also a possession of the United States. What is meant, then, is American territory in North America: Alaska, organised since 1912 as the Territory of Alaska, was an incorporated territory, and therefore legally part of the United States, although not yet a state. The last time foreign troops had occupied such an area was during the War of 1812, when in 1814–1815 the British held part of the coast of Maine; hence the figure of 128 years (some authors write 130). Attu, incidentally, lies west of the 180th meridian, and thus in the Eastern Hemisphere.

Plan and preparations

The seizure of the western Aleutians was the objective of Operation AL, conducted in parallel with the strike on Midway. The navy wanted to push its patrol line in the northern Pacific far to the east, so as to detect earlier any American carriers heading for Japan, and to bar the Americans’ route from Alaska towards the Kuril Islands. The army long refused to take part and agreed to provide troops only after the Doolittle Raid, on 21 April. An order from Imperial General Headquarters of 5 May called for the seizure of Kiska and Attu and the destruction of military installations on Adak island, which lay closer to the American bases.

The whole operation was directed by the commander of the Fifth Fleet, or Northern Force, Vice Admiral Boshirō Hosogaya. Kiska was to be taken by the 3rd Special Naval Landing Force from Maizuru, according to Japanese figures some 550 men, together with about 700 construction workers who were to build a base there. To Attu went an army unit called the North Sea Detachment (Hokkai Shitai), numbering some 1,100–1,200 soldiers under Major Matsutoshi Hozumi. The landings were to be prepared by the attack on Dutch Harbor, carried out on 3 and 4 June by aircraft from Rear Admiral Kakuji Kakuta’s carriers.

When on 4 June the Japanese carriers were burning at Midway, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto summoned Kakuta’s force south and suspended the Aleutian operation. Soon, however, when it became clear that the battle in the central Pacific could not be saved, he agreed to the occupation of the two islands; the attack on Adak was abandoned. Some historians believe that another motive was to allow the navy to announce at least some success after the defeat. As with the raid on Dutch Harbor, Japanese documents, which kept Tokyo time, shift the dates of the landings by one day.

Kiska

On Kiska there was nothing but a naval weather station: wooden huts above the bay and ten sailors who sent weather reports to Dutch Harbor, essential for aviation across the whole northern Pacific. They also had a dog named Explosion. The Japanese came ashore at night, unopposed, and surrounded the station. Within a few days nine of the sailors had been taken prisoner. The tenth, Petty Officer William House, fled into the mountains and hid for about 50 days, living on plants and earthworms. When he finally gave himself up to the Japanese, he weighed about 36 kilograms. The prisoners from Kiska were taken to camps in Japan.

The Japanese renamed the island Narukami-tō and immediately began building a base: artillery positions, shelters, a seaplane base and a radar station, and later an airfield as well. Kiska harbour, the only good one at the western end of the archipelago, allowed ships to be kept there and the garrison to be supplied; in time it grew to several thousand men.

Attu

On Attu, the westernmost island of the Aleutians, more than 1,300 kilometres west of Dutch Harbor, there was a single settlement: the village of Chichagof on the bay of the same name. It was home to 42 Aleuts – according to some sources a few more – and two white Americans: 63-year-old Charles Foster Jones, a radio amateur and weather observer, and his wife Etta, a teacher and nurse. Both were employees of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and since the autumn of 1941 had been running the school on the island and sending weather reports. In May the navy had proposed evacuating the village, but its inhabitants refused.

7 June was a Sunday. Hozumi’s soldiers, who had landed in another part of the island and crossed the mountains, came down into the village as the inhabitants were leaving church. A few shots were fired, and one of the villagers was wounded. Charles Jones managed to send a last report and destroy the radio before he was seized. He died within a day. The Japanese told his wife that he had committed suicide; according to statements made by the Aleuts after the war, he was shot, probably for refusing to repair the radio. Two villagers buried him. Jones was the only civilian killed by the Japanese during the occupation of the Aleutians.

The island was given the Japanese name Atsuta-tō, and the soldiers began building fortifications and an airfield. Etta Jones was taken to Yokohama. She spent the war in internment together with a group of Australian army nurses captured at Rabaul, and lived to see liberation in 1945. The Japanese kept the Aleuts of Attu in their own village for three months. In September 1942, when the Attu garrison was transferred to Kiska, they were shipped to Otaru on Hokkaidō. There they were held until the end of the war in poor conditions, starved and ravaged by tuberculosis. According to the most commonly cited figures, 16 of them died, including the village chief, Mike Hodikoff, and his son; other tallies speak of nearly half. After the war the survivors were not allowed to return to Attu; they were resettled on another island of the archipelago, Atka.

The American response

The Americans learned of the landings belatedly. The station on Kiska had fallen silent, and fog and storms hampered reconnaissance. Only after several days – according to American studies on 10 June – did the crews of Catalina flying boats spot Japanese ships in Kiska harbour. For the following days Catalinas from an advanced base at Atka island bombed them without respite until they ran out of fuel and bombs, but they could not drive the Japanese out. The news that two islands had been seized caused alarm in the United States out of all proportion to their importance. It was feared that this was the prelude to an attack on mainland Alaska or even on the West Coast. The Army Chief of Staff, George Marshall, decided, however, that given the shortage of ships, aircraft and trained troops, the recapture of the islands would have to wait.

The consequences of the landings were felt most severely by the Aleuts of the other islands. Judging their villages to be under threat, the American authorities decided to evacuate the archipelago’s native inhabitants. From 12 June ships took away the inhabitants of Atka, and their village was burned so that it could not be used by the Japanese. In mid-June the entire population of the Pribilof Islands was removed, and at the end of the month the inhabitants of further villages on Unalaska, Akutan and the surrounding area. In all, more than 880 Aleuts were removed, often with a few hours’ notice and a single suitcase; the white inhabitants of the same islands mostly stayed where they were. The Aleuts were housed in abandoned canneries, a mine and camps in south-eastern Alaska, without heating, drinking water or medical care. According to estimates cited in the literature, about 75 people died there, roughly one in ten of those removed. Although this was an evacuation and not a punishment, the conditions resembled internment, and after the war many had nowhere to return to: their homes had been looted or taken over by the military. This happened at the same time as Japanese Americans from the West Coast were being sent to camps under Executive Order 9066. In 1988 Congress granted compensation to the surviving Aleuts, and in 2017 the federal government formally apologised to them.

Place in the war

The seizure of Kiska and Attu was the Japanese navy’s only lasting gain in June 1942, and on the same day the Battle of Midway ended, in which Japan had lost four carriers. Two remote, fog-bound islands could not make up for that loss. At first the Japanese intended to hold them only until winter; later they decided to stay, so as not to hand the Americans convenient airfields. Supplying the garrisons cost them many ships, sunk by American submarines and aircraft.

For a year the Americans built airfields ever closer to the islands and bombed them at every break in the bad weather. On 30 August 1942 they occupied Adak unopposed and within a few weeks built an airfield there, and in January 1943 they landed on Amchitka, less than a hundred miles from Kiska. At about that time the commander of the North Pacific forces, Rear Admiral Robert Theobald, criticised for passivity, was replaced by Rear Admiral Thomas Kinkaid. In March 1943 American cruisers turned back a Japanese supply convoy off the Komandorski Islands. On 11 May 1943 the 7th Infantry Division landed on Attu. The fighting lasted almost three weeks and ended on 29 May with a great suicidal charge by the remnants of the garrison; of some 2,350 Japanese soldiers 29 survived, while the Americans lost 549 killed and more than a thousand wounded, not counting thousands of cases of frostbite and sickness. At the end of July 1943 Japanese ships, under cover of fog, evacuated more than 5,000 men from Kiska in less than an hour. When on 15 August more than 30,000 American and Canadian troops landed there – among them Canadian conscripts under the mobilisation act, over whom the plebiscite dispute had been fought – the island was empty. Even so, several dozen soldiers were killed by friendly fire, mines and booby traps, and the destroyer Abner Read struck a mine.

Militarily, the occupation of Attu and Kiska was a sideshow, but on the map of the war it had a symbolic dimension: for more than a year the Japanese flag flew over American soil in North America. The highest price, however, was paid by people who did not count at all in either side’s strategy: the Aleuts of Attu, deported to Japan, and the Aleuts of the other islands, removed by their own government.