The landing on an empty Kiska

On the morning of 15 August 1943, off the western shores of Kiska in the Aleutian Islands, the largest landing yet carried out in the North Pacific began. The operation bore the code name Cottage. Almost a hundred warships and transports took part, together with 34,426 American and Canadian soldiers – about 5,500 Canadians according to the American official history, about 5,300 according to other tallies. These forces had been assembled against a garrison that intelligence estimated at up to 10,000 men. Yet there was nobody on the island to fight. The Japanese had evacuated Kiska on 29 July, in thick fog and in less than an hour, and for more than two weeks no one on the Allied side had noticed.

After Attu

Kiska was the second and larger of the two American islands that Japan had seized in June 1942. The Americans had attacked the smaller one, Attu, on 11 May 1943 and, after three weeks of hard fighting in mud and snow, retook it at the end of May. It had cost 549 dead and more than 1,100 wounded, plus about 2,100 men put out of action by sickness, frostbite and trench foot. The Attu garrison had died almost to a man.

The commander of forces in the North Pacific, Vice Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, drew his conclusions. For the attack on Kiska he assigned veterans of Attu and units trained in similar conditions on Adak, and the soldiers were issued parkas and Arctic footwear instead of field jackets and leather boots. The land forces were commanded by Major General Charles H. Corlett, and the amphibious force at sea by Rear Admiral Francis W. Rockwell. Its core consisted of regiments of the 7th Infantry Division, the 87th Mountain Infantry Regiment (later part of the 10th Mountain Division) and the Canadian 13th Infantry Brigade from the 6th Infantry Division. The 1st Special Service Force under Colonel Robert T. Frederick was to go into action for the first time – a commando formation of about 2,000 men, raised jointly from Americans and Canadians and trained for mountain and winter warfare.

Kiska had also been subjected to a far heavier preparatory bombardment than Attu. From the new airfields on Amchitka, Attu and Shemya, the Eleventh Air Force dropped 424 tons of bombs on the island in July alone, and warships fired some 330 tons of shells. The pounding continued in August, interrupted only by the weather.

Signs that went unread

From the end of July pilots reported that nothing was happening on the island. Aerial photographs showed no movement in the harbour, nobody was repairing the bomb damage, anti-aircraft fire had almost ceased, and on 28 July the Japanese radio stations fell silent. Some airmen, however, maintained that they could still hear occasional shots from anti-aircraft guns. Analysts considered two possibilities: that the Japanese had pulled out of the island, as they had from Guadalcanal half a year earlier, or that they had left the coast for the interior and were waiting in the mountains, as on Attu. They judged the second more likely.

Kinkaid decided to attack as planned. As recorded in the American official history, he said that if the Japanese were not on the island the landing would be a “super dress rehearsal, good for training purposes”, and that the only loss would be the disappointment of troops keyed up for battle. Some historians later reproached the command for not checking the island by first landing even a small reconnaissance patrol.

The landing

The fleet sailed from Adak and arrived off Kiska early on 15 August. Unlike the thick fog that had shrouded Attu in May, the sea was calm and the weather unusually clear. Warships and transports feinted a landing from the east, near Gertrude Cove, while the main units went ashore on the western side of the island, from where they were to cross the mountain ridge into the rear of the Japanese positions by the harbour. Frederick’s commandos had landed during the night to seize the hills on the flank. By 4 p.m. there were 6,500 soldiers ashore. The next day, 16 August, the Canadians landed further north.

No one offered any resistance. But as the units began to push inland, the usual Aleutian weather returned: fog, cold rain and wind. The Attu veterans were convinced that the Japanese were waiting above them on the ridges. In this atmosphere a tragedy occurred whose causes are still described in different ways. In fog and darkness patrols and outposts took one another for the enemy and opened fire. According to the most frequently cited figures, 28 Americans and 4 Canadians were killed by friendly fire and about 50 men from both nations were wounded; some sources give slightly lower numbers and include accident victims among them. The American official history puts it briefly: the only shots fired were fired by friend at friend; in the first four days of the operation on land 21 men were killed and 121 were sick or wounded.

The Japanese had left behind mines, booby traps and delayed-action charges, which killed and wounded soldiers searching camps, shelters and kilometres of tunnels. On top of that came accidents with ammunition and vehicles. The heaviest blow fell on the navy. On the night of 17–18 August the destroyer USS Abner Read, patrolling the waters off the island, struck a drifting Japanese naval mine. The explosion tore off her stern; 71 sailors were killed or missing (some sources say 70) and 47 were wounded. The ship was towed to port and returned to service after repairs.

On the island the soldiers found abandoned guns, supplies, depots and signs of a hasty departure – and a few dogs. The anecdote about a report stating that the only inhabitants of Kiska were dogs and freshly brewed coffee circulates in many versions, and its origin is hard to establish.

The cost of taking an empty island

The search of Kiska took more than a week. On 24 August General Corlett declared the island secure. The losses of the operation are given very differently, because different tallies count different categories. According to the US Army’s official history, American ground forces lost a total of 313 men – killed, wounded and sick. Other studies list about 200 casualties on land, including some 130 cases of trench foot, and, adding the crew of the Abner Read and all the accidents, more than 300 killed and wounded – according to some authors more than 500. Whatever the reckoning, it meant several dozen fatalities in an operation in which not a single enemy soldier was encountered.

For the Americans it was above all a failure of intelligence. The enemy had taken more than 5,000 men out from under the noses of the fleet and the air force, and then for two and a half weeks bombs and shells had rained down on an island where there was nobody. On the other hand, the operation made it possible to test in practice the cooperation of land, naval and air forces in a large landing, as well as winter equipment and medical evacuation – it really did become a costly dress rehearsal. Corlett took this experience to the Central Pacific, where at the beginning of 1944 his 7th Infantry Division captured Kwajalein Atoll.

Canadian conscripts under fire

Canadian participation had a political dimension. From 1940 the government of William Lyon Mackenzie King had been calling up conscripts under the National Resources Mobilization Act, but only for home defence; only volunteers went abroad to fight. In April 1942 Canadians released the government in a plebiscite from its promise not to send conscripts overseas, but King held to the formula “not necessarily conscription, but conscription if necessary”, and French-speaking Quebec was firmly opposed to such a step.

The Aleutians offered a way round the problem. The islands belonged to North America and to the defence of the continent, and a special government order allowed conscripts to serve in Alaska. Among the Canadians of the 13th Brigade, in the battalions of the Canadian Fusiliers, the Winnipeg Grenadiers and the Rocky Mountain Rangers, there were both volunteers and conscripts. Kiska was the first place in this war where Canadian conscripts found themselves in a theatre of operations. Since the enemy was absent, the test that had been feared or expected never came, but the precedent itself mattered: at the end of 1944, during the conscription crisis, the government decided to send some 16,000 conscripts to Europe. The Canadians left Kiska at the turn of 1943 and 1944.

Place in the war

The landing on Kiska closed the Aleutian Islands campaign, which had lasted since June 1942. It ended the first occupation of part of United States territory by a foreign army since the War of 1812 (1812–1815). The Aleutians did not, however, become a road to Japan, as some had hoped. From then on American bombers flying from the airfields on Attu and Shemya attacked the Kuril Islands, including Paramushir, which forced Japan to keep considerable forces in the Kurils and on Hokkaido for fear of an invasion from the north. That invasion never came. The number of American and Canadian troops in Alaska, which at its peak had reached about 144,000, began to fall quickly.

The units assembled for Operation Cottage were soon on other fronts. The 1st Special Service Force returned to the United States in September, and by the end of 1943 was already fighting in Italy, where it won fame as “the Devil’s Brigade”. The weight of the war against Japan shifted decisively to the South and Central Pacific – to the Solomon Islands, New Guinea and, from November 1943, the Gilbert Islands. Kiska, pounded with thousands of tons of bombs and taken without a single shot from the enemy, went down in history as one of the strangest amphibious operations of the war – and as a warning that even a landing without an enemy can cost many lives.