In 1935, US Army General Billy Mitchell said that Alaska was the "most important strategic place
in the world." And yet, the battles which took place there during the Second World War
tend to go under the radar. Between June 1942 and August 1943,
US forces fought the Japanese in Aleutian Islands, with the Japanese occupying Kiska and Attu.
In this video, we're going to shed some light on the Battle of Attu,
in which Allied forces faced one of the biggest Japanese banzai attacks of the entire war.
By May 1942, US Naval intelligence had broken Japanese naval codes and learnt that a Japanese
naval fleet led by Vice-Admiral Boshiro Hosogaya was heading for Alaska. Within Hosogaya's fleet
were two aircraft carriers, five cruisers, 12 destroyers, six submarines, four troop transports,
and a number of supporting vessels. In response,
US forces in the area swelled. By June, 45,000 military personnel were stationed in Alaska,
covered by the USAAF's Eleventh Air Force in the air, and Task Force 8 in the sea
Hoping to eliminate Hosogaya before he reached the shore, the Eleventh sent out reconnaissance
planes. Once they spotted Hosogaya, they would direct Task Force 8 so it could meet the Japanese
vice-admiral in the sea. But due to poor weather, this naval confrontation never came to pass,
and on the 3rd of June, it was Hosogaya who landed the first punch.
And it was a flaccid first punch indeed, as only half of Hosogaya's bombers reached
their objective: the naval base at Dutch Harbor, on Amaknak Island. The rest became
lost in the fog obscuring their approach, and either returned to their carriers or crashed.
Those bombers that did make it through the fog faced heavy anti-aircraft fire and ultimately did
little damage to the harbour. A second attack the next day saw more success, with Hosogaya's bombers
hitting the base's barracks, oil storage tanks, and hospital. The vice-admiral had intended to
follow these raids with an invasion of the island of Adak, but once again, the weather stood against
him, forcing him to look elsewhere in the Aleutian Islands for a place to deposit his troops.
On the 6th, 500 personnel of the Japanese Special Naval Landing Forces
landed on the island of Kiska. Just 10 US Navy personnel were there to defend it. Storming
the weather station, the Japanese killed two of these men and captured seven. One man got away.
The following day, the Japanese landed on Attu, and 1,140 men under Major
Matsutoshi Hosumi took the island virtually unopposed, capturing 46 civilians and killing one.
Now that Hosogaya had secured two footholds in Alaska, fear spread
through the US. According to Lieutenant Bob Brocklehurst of the US 18th Fighter Squadron,
"[We] figured that the Japanese, if they wanted to, could have come up the Aleutians,
taken Anchorage, and come down past down Vancouver to Seattle, Washington."
In response, the US set up an airbase on Adak and started bombing the Japanese on Kiska, softening
Hosogaya's defences in preparation for an eventual American invasion. Hosogaya answered by relocating
his forces from Attu to Kiska in August, leaving Attu unoccupied until October, when
some 2,900 men under one Colonel Yasuyo Yamasaki rocked up to once again secure the island.
Yamasaki immediately got to work fortifying Attu and building an airfield in anticipation of an
American invasion. Codenamed Operation Landcrab, said invasion began on the 11th of May 1943.
Brought to bear against Yamasaki were some 15,000 men of US Major-General Albert Brown's
7th Infantry Division, to which the 1st Alaskan Combat Intelligence Platoon,
nicknamed "Castner's Cutthroats," was attached.
Despite a numerical advantage, the Battle of Attu was no walk in the park for the Americans.
They weren't just facing the Japanese but the island itself. In the introduction
of The Capture of Attu, author Gregory J.W. Urwin described the island as such:
"A jumble of sheer snowcapped peaks, barren valleys of brown tundra, and narrow beaches,
Attu hardly seems the kind of place for which sensible men would give their lives."
Urwin also went on to quote the New York Times military editor and analyst
Hanson W. Baldwin, who had the following to say about Attu:
"Sudden fierce squalls rage around [the island]; fog is always prevalent, and the clinging white
mist is so thick that soldiers advancing across the rocky hills lose sight of each other;
the supporting fire of naval vessels cannot be observed; planes cannot bomb."
To truly understand the conditions the men faced, however, we have to join them in their foxholes,
just as United Press correspondent Russell Annabel did. In Annabel’s words, "Under cover
of fog and darkness, you would dig a foxhole and put up a breastwork of cut sod and rocks.
You were already wet from fording streams and falling into sinkholes,
and now you were standing in a foot or more of bitterly cold water. You couldn't search for a
drier place, because by this time the Jap snipers and mortar crews had spotted you."
Of course, the Japanese had had more time to adapt to the hell that was Attu than the Americans,
digging a network of underground tunnels and chambers in which they could keep themselves dry,
and setting up camouflaged machine-gun and sniper positions in the mountains,
turning the mountain passes they knew the Americans would need to use into kill zones.
The Japanese were better dressed for the occasion, too, donning fur-lined clothes and woven mittens.
From the 11th to the 16th of May, Major-General Brown's morale plummeted. He simply could not
break Yamasaki's defence in the aptly named Massacre Valley, just inland from the US
Southern Landing Force's landing place at Massacre Bay. On the 14th, Brown reported the following:
"[The Japanese] positions are difficult to locate and almost impossible to shoot out with
artillery. They produce casualties in excess of casualties which can be returned. Progress
through [mountain] passes will requite troops in excess to those now available to my command."
On the 16th, Brown was cut loose. General Eugene M. Landrum replaced him,
and he must have been a far more competent commander because he quickly broke the stalemate.
From that point forward—despite the frostbite blackening the American soldiers' toes—Yamasaki
was out of his depth. The US Northing Landing Force marched inland and,
joining the Southern Landing Force, drove the Japanese northeast towards Chichagof Harbor.
Now, Yamasak's situation was looking desperate. Naval reinforcements promised to him were no
longer coming. Mainland Japan had abandoned the poor man, and victory was all but impossible.
All that he could do now was keep his honour by fighting to the death or ending his own life.
On the 29th of May, Yamasaki gathered as many as 1,000
survivors and launched a massive banzai attack against the Americans.
In the lead-up to the attack, Nebsi Tatsuquchi,
who served in the Japanese North Sea Defense Field Hospital penned the following in his diary:
"Today we assembled in front of HQS. The field hospital took part too. The last assault is to
be carried out all the patients in the hospital were to commit suicide. Only 33 years of living
and I am to die here. I have no regrets. Banz[a]i to the Emperor."
During the attack, the Japanese overran two US command posts and a US medical station,
engaging the Americans in ferocious close-quarters combat.
But they were always destined to fail, and most of those who didn't fall to American bullets
fell on their own blades or committed suicide by other means.
The US correspondent Robert Sherrod described the carnage like this:
[T]["The results of the Jap fanaticism stagger the imagination. [It] is incomprehensible to
the Western Mind. I saw one Jap sitting impaled on a bayonet which was stuck through his back,
evidently by a friend. Most of them had simply held grenades against their stomachs or chests.
Probably one in four held a grenade against his head. There were many
headless Jap bodies between Massacre [Bay] and Chichagof."
From the 11th to the 30th of May, 2,872 Japanese either committed suicide or were
killed by American forces, including Yamasaki. The remaining 28—remember,
their starting strength was 2,900—were taken as POWs. On the American side, 549 men were killed,
while 1,148 were wounded and 1,814 became sick, with some of the latter dying as a result.
Author Samuel Eliot Morison wrote that both the Japanese and Americans
"would have done well to have left the Aleutians to the Aleuts for the course of the war."
Do you agree with Morison? It definitely wasn't worth it for the Japanese, but what about the
Americans? Was victory in the Battle of Attu worth all that American blood? What about the Aleutian
Islands campaign overall? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.