Aleutian War's victims weren't all in combat

This weekend starts the 75th anniversary of three linked episodes in the Aleutian War in Alaska during World War II. In the Battle of Dutch Harbor on June 3 and 4, 1942, Japanese carrier-borne aircraft bombed and strafed the isolated port near the end of the Alaska Peninsula. Forty-three Americans were killed in the two raids, 33 military personnel and 10 civilians. Three days later, Japanese forces invaded and captured Attu and Kiska islands at the far west end of the Aleutian chain. The Bureau of Indian Affairs officer on Attu was killed and 42 Attu Islanders were taken prisoner. Two U.S. Navy weather observers on Kiska also were taken prisoner.

These events combined to persuade American military officials to act with dispatch to evacuate most of the civilian population on the islands west of Dutch Harbor/Unalaska to get them out of harm's way, out of what had become a combat zone. Beginning on June 12, U.S. Navy transports took 881 villagers from the Andreanof, Fox and Pribilof islands to hastily chosen, abandoned cannery sites in Southeast Alaska. The villagers languished there under substandard, unsafe and unhealthy conditions until allowed by officials to return home near the end of the war.

In accounts of the war in the Pacific written in the first decades afterward, notice of these events often went missing. Chroniclers focused on Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal, the Philippines and the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and other such dramatic chapters in the conflict, and the Aleutian War was often treated as minor and even inconsequential.

It was neither, not least for the combatants and the victims.

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Both the Army and Navy fortified Dutch Harbor before Pearl Harbor; the port was ringed with anti-aircraft guns, and fighter aircraft were stationed not far away at disguised airfields on Umnak Island and at Cold Bay. By the spring of 1942 the Americans had deciphered some of the Japanese communications codes, and knew something was afoot, but they didn't know exactly what, or when or where. So even though defense units were on alert, the attack on Dutch Harbor on June 3 was unexpected, and caught the defenders by surprise. The raid killed 25 Americans, most when bombs hit the military barracks. More died in the second attack on June 4. The raiders destroyed a number of U.S planes, a hangar, oil storage tanks, anti-aircraft guns and merchant ships in the harbor. In addition, a U.S. Army Air Service patrol encountered the Japanese planes returning to their carriers. The Japanese pilots shot down four of the six P-40s in the patrol, losing only one fighter of their own. The Americans did get two of the Japanese bombers.

Had the Japanese carriers not been ordered by Tokyo to break off their attack, the toll on the Americans would have been much higher. Some accounts of the attack have downplayed its impact, but it was in fact quite devastating, seriously degrading the capability of the Americans to defend the port and the region.

For the Japanese, the attack on Dutch Harbor and the invasion and occupation of Attu and Kiska had two objectives: to divert American forces from the impending battle of Midway Island, and to prevent American forces from attacking Japanese bases in the Kuril Islands. They achieved neither goal.

[Agony of the Aleutians: The forgotten internment]

The story of the removal of Aleut villagers from their homes in June 1942 is a tragic one that only in the last decade has become well known in popular culture. Restricted to the facilities to which they were taken in Southeast, in what can only be described as internment camps, 10 percent of them died, despite repeated protests from U.S. Public Health Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs officials.

Some scholars have disputed that their poor treatment stemmed from racist attitudes on the part of military and civilian officialdom. There was a war on, some have argued, and there were no other facilities available to house so many people. Besides, some insist erroneously, conditions in the camps weren't that different from the Aleutian villages. But it's difficult not to label the villagers' treatment racist when one reflects that no group of white civilians taken out of harm's way would have been treated similarly.

Steve Haycox is professor emeritus of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

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