Attu: The Only Land Battle in North America in World War II

Seventh Infantry Division troops landing at Massacre Bay, Attu, May 1943. Japanese defenses were hidden above the fog line. Courtesy Elmendorf Air Force Base History Office, Alaska.

In early June 1942, Americans heard news that brought both jubilation and alarm. At the Battle of Midway, American planes sank four Japanese aircraft carriers and destroyed or damaged some 300 planes. But in the Aleutian Islands, Japanese bombing succeeded, and Japanese forces occupied Attu, Agattu and Kiska. Americans feared the enemy would use the islands to stage attacks on the North American mainland and disrupt U.S.–Siberian communications needed for the Lend-Lease program, which let the president sell, transfer, exchange or lend equipment to countries defending themselves against the Axis, including the Soviet Union. After a hard campaign made harder by the weather, Americans drove the Japanese from Attu and regained the Aleutians, then used the islands to launch attacks on Japanese territory.

This account is based on a National Park Service Teaching with Historic Places lesson by education consultant Fay Metcalf, drawn from the National Register of Historic Places file for the Attu Battlefield and U.S. Army and Navy Airfields on Attu.

The island

The Aleutians form a 1,000-mile chain arcing west from Alaska, acquired by the United States with Alaska from Russia in 1867. The chain continues another 300 miles west as the Komandorski (Commander) Islands, near the Kamchatka Peninsula and part of the Soviet Union in 1942. Other Aleutian islands were bombed during the war, but Attu, the westernmost U.S. island, saw the only land battle fought on the North American continent in World War II.

Attu is about 40 miles long and 20 miles wide, a land of volcanic mountains and tundra valleys, with its highest peak over 3,000 feet. Lying between the frigid Bering Sea and the warm Japanese Current of the North Pacific, its waters stay ice-free, but it is battered year-round by violent windstorms called williwaws and wrapped in dense fog. Rain or snow falls about 200 days a year, and in spring, when the battle was fought, temperatures hover around freezing. Glaciers and snowdrifts cover the heights; below is only spongy tundra and low plants.

The Bering Sea and the Aleutian Islands. Image from the National Park Service's page.

Occupation

In May 1942, Japan's Imperial General Headquarters ordered an attack on Midway to occupy the islands and destroy what was left of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, with a simultaneous strike on the Aleutians meant to draw American ships away, protect the Japanese navy from the north and cut U.S.–Soviet links. Having broken Japanese codes, the United States knew the attacks were coming. Its westernmost Aleutian bases were then the Dutch Harbor Naval Station and the army's Fort Mears on Unalaska Island, plus a secret airfield on Umnak Island, and the navy had a 10-man weather station on Kiska. Kiska had no native residents, but Attu village had 45 Aleuts, a white schoolteacher and her husband, who radioed weather reports to Dutch Harbor.

Japanese carrier planes attacked Dutch Harbor and Fort Mears on June 3 and 4, during the Battle of Midway. After the scale of the Midway defeat became clear, Japan canceled a planned raid on Adak but went ahead with the occupation of Kiska and Attu on June 7. Japanese naval troops took Kiska, and a 1,140-man army force under Maj. Matsutoshi Hosumi landed on Attu. The Aleuts and their teacher were taken prisoner and later removed to Japan; her husband died in unclear circumstances. Japan first meant to hold the islands only until winter but decided to stay to deny them to the Americans. In mid-August it moved Attu's garrison to Kiska, then reoccupied Attu at the end of October with fresh troops, and in April 1943 Col. Yasuyo Yamasaki arrived by submarine to command its growing defenses and unfinished airfield.

The Battle of the Komandorski Islands

On March 26, 1943, an American task force led by the heavy cruiser Salt Lake City, sent to cut off Japanese convoys, met eight Japanese warships and two supply transports west of Attu. The two sides fought a long-range gun duel of almost four hours that ended inconclusively. But the transports turned back, and Japan never again tried to supply the Aleutians by surface ship; only submarines got a trickle of supplies through.

Recapture

American planners first aimed at Kiska and trained the army's 7th Infantry Division in amphibious warfare under Marine Maj. Gen. Holland M. "Howling Mad" Smith. With too few ships to take the more heavily defended Kiska, and the Japanese expecting an attack there, they chose Attu instead: taking it would isolate Kiska between American bases. The assault, under Rear Adm. Thomas C. Kinkaid, with Rear Adm. Francis W. Rockwell leading the landings and Maj. Gen. Albert E. Brown commanding ashore, was backed by the battleships Pennsylvania, Idaho and Nevada.

• May 11, 1943: after bad weather delayed the May 7 date, troops landed. On the north side, a battalion began a five-day climb from Austin Cove toward the passes west of Holtz Bay that left many with frostbite, while other units landed unopposed at Red Beach and pushed toward the Japanese at Holtz Bay. In the south, fog held the landing at Massacre Bay until late afternoon; it too was unopposed, because the Japanese were dug in on the ridges above, hidden by fog. By evening both forces were under fire.
• May 13: the southern advance had stalled against fierce resistance and the northern one was slow. More troops landed, and Kinkaid replaced Brown with Maj. Gen. Eugene M. Landrum.
• The following weeks: for a week the Japanese kept the two American forces from linking up at Jarmin Pass, then slowly withdrew toward Chichagof Harbor. Two more weeks of bitter fighting drove them from the snowy cliffs of Fishhook Ridge and Clevesy Pass.
• May 29: about 1,000 remaining able-bodied Japanese soldiers launched a banzai charge up Siddens Valley toward Clevesy Pass and Engineer Hill, where engineer troops formed a thin line and broke the attack. Japan announced the loss of Attu the next day, though mopping up went on for days.

The capture of Attu by the 7th Infantry Division, from May 11, 1943. Adapted from the U.S. Army's official history, Guarding the United States and Its Outposts.

Japanese snow trenches near the top of Fishhook Ridge, overlooking the pass from Holtz Bay to Chichagof Harbor, May 1943. American troops had to climb these snowfields against an unseen enemy. U.S. Army Signal Corps.

Casualties were heavy. Of about 2,500 Japanese, only 29 survived. Of 15,000 American troops, 550 died and 1,500 were wounded, and another 1,200 were casualties of the climate, with poor footwear causing frozen feet and trench foot.

American troops sending supplies to the front lines, May 1943. Even on flat ground, the soggy tundra could not carry heavy vehicles. Courtesy Elmendorf Air Force Base History Office, Alaska.

After the battle

Holtz Bay from the ridge between its east and west arms, June 1943, after the American occupation; the wreckage of a Japanese Zero lies on the beach. U.S. Army Signal Corps.

Army engineers and navy Seabees immediately began building airfields, a fighter field at West Holtz Bay and another at Alexai Point, later extended for bombers. On July 10, 1943, eight B-25 bombers flew from Attu to strike Paramushiro in the Kurile Islands, the first air attack on Japan's home islands since the Doolittle raid of April 18, 1942. On September 11, 1943, a raid of 12 B-25s and eight B-24s lost three bombers to Japanese fire, and seven heavily damaged planes landed in Siberia, where their crews were interned; raids resumed by spring 1944. The navy built runways and a seaplane base at Massacre Bay and Casco Cove, from which patrol planes flew lonely missions over the North Pacific for the rest of the war.

About half of the Attu Aleuts taken to Japan died there, mostly of tuberculosis. After Japan's surrender the survivors and their teacher, Mrs. Charles Foster Jones, returned to the United States. Too few to rebuild on their island, the Attuans settled on Atka Island with its residents. Neither they nor the Japanese and American veterans of the "Forgotten War" have forgotten Attu.

Visiting

Attu is extremely remote, and a visit requires military clearance; the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge has information. Aleutian World War II National Historic Area, on Amaknak Island 800 miles west of Anchorage, is open year-round and reachable by air or by the Alaska Marine Highway ferry; May through October is the best time to visit.

Sources

• National Park Service, Teaching with Historic Places, "Attu: North American Battleground of World War II," by Fay Metcalf. https://www.nps.gov/articles/attu-battleground_teaching-with-historic-places.htm
• Erwin N. Thompson, "Attu Battlefield and U.S. Army and Navy Airfields on Attu," National Register of Historic Places Registration Form (National Park Service, 1984): https://npgallery.nps.gov/pdfhost/docs/NHLS/Text/85002729.pdf
• The lesson also quotes Paul S. Dull, A Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy (1978), and Holland M. Smith and Percy Finch, Coral and Brass; those passages are paraphrased here. Smith called the landing in Attu's dense fog an amphibious operation without parallel in U.S. military history.
• Aleutian World War II National Historic Area: http://www.nps.gov/aleu/
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.