The landing on Attu

On 11 May 1943, after a week spent waiting at sea for the weather to improve, American troops landed in thick fog on Attu, the westernmost island of the Aleutian chain. The island, like neighbouring Kiska, had been occupied by the Japanese since June 1942. The operation, code-named Landcrab, opened the Battle of Attu, the only land battle of the Second World War fought on United States territory in North America. Because Attu lies west of the International Date Line, Japanese documents and studies give the date of the landing as 12 May.

Many chronologies speak of an invasion by American and Canadian troops. This is inaccurate: only Americans fought on Attu, above all the men of the 7th Infantry Division. Canadian ground units took part only in the landing on Kiska in August 1943; until then Canada had been represented in the Aleutian campaign mainly by RCAF squadrons operating alongside the US Eleventh Air Force.

Why Attu and not Kiska

For almost a year after the Japanese landings, the American high command in Washington treated the Aleutians as a secondary theatre. The Army Chief of Staff, George Marshall, believed that in a region of summer fogs and winter gales it was enough to keep the Japanese in check from the air. The commanders on the spot thought otherwise: General John DeWitt, commander of the Western Defense Command, and General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., who commanded the defence of Alaska, pressed for the islands to be retaken, not least because their occupation rankled with American public opinion. The Americans therefore advanced westwards step by step: in August 1942 they occupied Adak, and in January 1943 Amchitka, from which fighters and bombers could attack Kiska regularly.

The first landing was to have been on Kiska, which had the stronger garrison and a harbour with a seaplane base. In the spring of 1943, however, the commander of the North Pacific forces, Rear Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, proposed striking first at the more weakly defended Attu. He was short of ships, transports in particular, because the best vessels were being swallowed up by the fighting in the South Pacific. Taking Attu would cut Kiska off from its supply route from the Kuril Islands and provide ground for a new airfield. Reconnaissance put the Japanese garrison of Attu at about 500 men; in reality it numbered, depending on the source, between about 2,400 and 2,650 soldiers. The plan was approved by the Commander-in-Chief in the Pacific, Admiral Chester Nimitz, and the American chiefs of staff agreed to the change of objective.

Japanese supply was already in a poor state. At the end of March 1943, off the Komandorski Islands, American cruisers and destroyers had forced a large convoy carrying reinforcements for both islands to turn back. From then on the garrisons were supplied mainly by submarines, which could carry little. It was aboard one of them that the new commander of the defences, Colonel Yasuyo Yamasaki, arrived on Attu in April.

Soldiers trained for the desert

The landing was entrusted to Major General Albert E. Brown’s 7th Infantry Division. It was a surprising choice. In 1942 the division, then a motorised formation, had trained in California’s Mojave Desert with a view to fighting in North Africa. Only at the beginning of 1943 was it stripped of its vehicles, and its soldiers went through a few weeks of amphibious training under Marine Corps instructors. They were not prepared for conditions in the Aleutians. They lacked proper winter clothing and footwear: their leather boots let in water from the mud and snow on the very first day. The planners assumed the fighting would last a few days at most, so no large stocks of warm kit were provided.

The landing force, some 11,000 men in all, was carried by Rear Admiral Francis Rockwell’s Task Force 51. Fire support came from three old battleships, USS Nevada, USS Pennsylvania and USS Idaho – the first two damaged in the attack on Pearl Harbor and since repaired – together with cruisers, destroyers and the escort carrier USS Nassau, whose aircraft were to support the infantry. Kinkaid was in overall command. The force sailed from Cold Bay in Alaska on 4 May. The landing, originally set for 7 May, was postponed twice because of storms and heavy seas.

The Japanese defences were unevenly distributed. Yamasaki expected the main blow at Holtz Bay in the north of the island, where his anti-aircraft batteries stood and an airfield was being built, and he concentrated most of his forces there. His headquarters was at Chichagof Harbor on the north-east coast. Massacre Bay in the south was defended by only a single infantry company with a few mountain guns. The Japanese did not intend to hold the beaches. They dug in on the hills and passes above the valleys leading inland, from where they could fire on infantry advancing across open, boggy tundra.

Landing in the fog

On the morning of 11 May the island was shrouded in fog so thick that the covering warships were for a long time unable to fire accurately and the landing craft lost their bearings. The landing was put back hour after hour. The first ashore, on the north coast, were scouts: men of a reconnaissance company brought in by submarine, and Alaskan volunteers – hunters and trappers known as Castner’s Cutthroats. Their task was to cross the mountains and come out behind the Japanese defending Holtz Bay.

In the afternoon a battalion of the 17th Infantry Regiment with an artillery battery landed on the beach at Holtz Bay. Later the main force – two battalions of the 17th Infantry and a battalion of the 32nd Infantry with three howitzer batteries – began coming ashore at Massacre Bay in the south. By evening, according to American accounts, about 2,000 men were ashore in the south and more than 1,000 in the north. The beaches were undefended, and on the first day there were only isolated clashes. The plan envisaged both groups pushing quickly inland, linking up at Jarmin Pass between the two bays and driving the Japanese back towards Chichagof Harbor, where their resistance was expected to collapse within a few days.

The absence of resistance on the beaches was deceptive. Yamasaki, surprised by the choice of landing sites, used the fog to regroup his units and waited in the hills. The Japanese high command in Tokyo learned of the landing the same day and initially decided to hold the island and send reinforcements.

Fog, mud and frost

From 12 May the advance from Massacre Bay stalled in the valley leading up to Jarmin Pass. The soldiers moved across sodden tundra without cover, while the Japanese fired machine guns and mortars from both sides of the valley, hidden in the fog that kept drifting across the slopes. They could usually see their enemy, while the Americans saw only muzzle flashes. In the first days of fighting the commander of the 17th Infantry, Colonel Edward Earle, was killed. In the north the battalion from Holtz Bay took, after heavy fighting, a hill overlooking the Japanese positions, but its progress beyond it was slow. The Japanese night counter-attacks on the hills above Holtz Bay, however, cost them very dearly.

The weather proved the most dangerous enemy. At night the temperature fell below freezing; there was sleet and a biting wind. The soldiers had nowhere dry to sleep, and their sodden boots gave their feet no protection. Within a few days hundreds of men were being withdrawn from the line with frostbite and trench foot. Lorries and tractors sank into the tundra, so ammunition, food and the wounded had to be carried on men’s backs. With too few landing craft, supplies and reinforcements came ashore slowly. Aircraft from Nassau and from the airfields on Amchitka were often unable to take off at all.

General Brown asked for reinforcements and more time, convinced that taking the island would be a long business. Kinkaid and Buckner concluded that a commander with several times the enemy’s numbers was acting too cautiously. On 16 May Brown was relieved, and Major General Eugene Landrum took command of the division. The decision remains controversial: some historians believe Brown had judged the difficulties correctly, and that his successor succeeded with the same troops and along much the same plan. After a massive bombardment by the battleships, on the night of 16–17 May the Japanese began abandoning their positions above Holtz Bay and falling back towards Chichagof Harbor. Around 18 May the northern and southern American forces made contact near Jarmin Pass. The first phase of the battle was over: the Japanese had lost the island except for its north-eastern tip, but they still held the mountains above Chichagof.

Place in the war

The landing on Attu was the first American land offensive in the North Pacific, directed at an island only about 1,000 kilometres from Japan’s Kuril Islands. Tokyo considered a relief expedition, and a strong fleet including aircraft carriers was assembled in Tokyo Bay, a few weeks after the death of Admiral Yamamoto, but given the risk and the lack of time the expedition was abandoned. On 20 May Imperial General Headquarters decided to give up Attu and evacuate Kiska. Yamasaki’s garrison, cut off and with no hope of relief, fought to the end. The battle ended on 29 May with a suicidal charge by the last of the Japanese; fewer than thirty men were taken prisoner. The Americans lost 549 killed and more than a thousand wounded, and their losses to cold, sickness and accidents were greater still. At the end of July Japanese warships evacuated the Kiska garrison undetected, and on 15 August 1943 more than 34,000 American and Canadian troops landed there – only then did Canadian infantry take part in the fighting in the Aleutians – and found the island empty.

Attu cost the Americans a disproportionate price for an island of secondary importance, but the lessons learned there proved useful later. The Army changed its winter equipment and its regulations on footwear, and experience with naval gunfire, air support and unloading on unprepared beaches was put to use in subsequent landings. The 7th Infantry Division, now trained for island fighting, landed on Kwajalein Atoll in 1944 and later in the Philippines and on Okinawa. An airfield was built on the island, from which American bombers were attacking the Kurils as early as July 1943. The battle also revealed what to expect from Japanese garrisons in the Pacific: defenders who could be neither evacuated nor supplied fought to the last man rather than surrender.