The Aleutians, the forgotten front of the Second World War

In June 1942, Japanese forces landed on Attu and Kiska, two islands at the
western end of the Aleutian chain. They were United States territory. The
occupation lasted more than a year, involved tens of thousands of troops on
both sides, and is almost entirely absent from popular memory of the war.

Why nobody remembers it

Partly censorship: news from the Aleutians was tightly controlled, and the
government had little appetite for reporting the loss of American ground.
Partly timing: the landings came within days of Midway, which was the decisive
battle and took the coverage. And partly the place itself — a chain of
treeless, volcanic islands reaching 1,900 kilometres into the North Pacific,
fogbound for most of the year, hundreds of kilometres from anywhere a
correspondent wanted to be.

The weather was the enemy

Veterans of the campaign consistently described the conditions as worse than
the fighting.

The Aleutians sit where cold air from the Bering Sea meets warmer North
Pacific water, which produces near-permanent fog and a local wind — the
williwaw — that falls off the high ground without warning at speeds that
could flip an aircraft on the ground. Aircraft were lost to weather in numbers
comparable to combat losses. Ships navigated by dead reckoning in fog for days.

On Attu, American troops landed in May 1943 in leather boots on frozen tundra.
Hundreds were incapacitated by trench foot and exposure — a casualty count
that rivalled the fighting.

Attu and Kiska

The battle for Attu in May 1943 ran for nineteen days and ended with one
of the war's few large banzai charges. Of roughly 2,600 Japanese defenders,
some 28 were taken prisoner. American losses were about 550 dead and more than
a thousand wounded. Measured by casualties against troops committed, it was
among the costliest actions of the Pacific war.

Kiska followed in August. Some 35,000 Allied troops landed under naval
bombardment and found the island empty: the garrison had been evacuated by sea
under cover of fog two weeks earlier, undetected. Around a hundred Allied
soldiers died on Kiska — to friendly fire, mines, and the conditions —
fighting nobody.

What was preserved, and why

The Aleutian Islands World War II National Historic Area protects what
remains: bunkers, gun emplacements, airfields, and the landscape that shaped
the whole campaign. It also carries a second history. The Unangax (Aleut)
people, who had lived in the chain for thousands of years, were removed from
their villages by the U.S. government and held in camps in southeast Alaska
for the duration. Many died there. Their villages were looted and, in some
cases, burned. Some communities never returned.

The site exists in large part so that both halves of the story stay attached
to the same place.