LIFE Magazine: The Aleutian Campaign

I saw this today. and its worth seeing:

"Maybe it’s because the casualties, in relative terms, were light compared to those suffered in other theaters of conflict during World War II. Or perhaps the isolated front was destined to a gradual, ever-deepening obscurity because no storied battles with stirring names (Iwo Jima, Bastogne, Normandy, Saipan) were fought there. Or maybe it’s simply that, like countless other narratives in countless other wars, the story of the Aleutian Islands Campaign was gradually forgotten by those who did not fight or serve there, or by those families that did not lose a loved one there.


But in the early 1940s the Aleutian Campaign was news throughout the U.S. , as some of the islands in the North Pacific, in what was then the American territory of Alaska, had been invaded and occupied by Japanese troops. Was it a diversion ahead of another, critical attack elsewhere? Was it the vanguard of a far larger assault on America’s enormous, and perhaps fatally vulnerable, west coast?
Here, 70 years after Japanese forces seized control of Attu and Kiska islands early in the war, LIFE.com presents a gallery of photos — most of which never ran in LIFE magazine — by Dmitri Kessel chronicling the day-to-day existence of Allied troops serving in the dramatic and forbidding landscape of the Aleutians."


Aleutian Islands World War II, 1943 | World War II: Rare Photos From the Aleutian Islands Campaign | LIFE.com

 

One has to ask, exactly what, (apart from news headlines and prestige over reconquest of territory), did the Aluetians Campaign contribute to the defeat of Japan?

Wars are not won by sideshows, and this sideshow had all the makings of Coney Island and then some.

Tactically, Aleutian commanders were hardly prominent. The fighting here devolved into slugfests from an American point of view. There never was, seriously, any doubt as to the outcome.

Having said that, the Japanese got nothing in the way of military benefits from their occupation. Could they have been left to whither on the vine, as other island conquests where? Why, exactly, was it at all necessary to replant Old Glory on a group of islands far from decisive battlefronts, containing no strategic position or resources, and whose enemy garrison was in no way able to mountan attack of any size or significance on the American mainland?

Or, maybe I have it wrong, and the Aleutians Campaign represented a "Stunning blow to the offensive capabilities of the Empire of Japan", and the people engaged in this campaign were "Vital to the destruction of the Japanese War Machine".

I think I got it right the first time.

 

Attu is within bomber range of mainland Japan. That is why they took it and that is why we fought to get it back.

The bomber raids from Attu didn't get any press because the press doesn't like to go to unpleasant places. They'd rather file stories from London, Paris or Honolulu.

 

The bomber raids from Attu didn't have much of an impact. They could only hit northern Japanese targets, and (as Barrett Tillman states in "Whirlwind", which I just finished reading last night) the harsh weather was a bigger threat than Japanese fighters. For a several month period the USAAF even went so far as to cancel all raids. The raids were typically very small, numbering less than 10 aircraft.

What the bomber raids did accomplish was threefold:
-Further infuriate the Japanese by bombing the their territory
-Forced the Japanese to relocate fighter groups from the south (eventually totaling some 500 aircraft). They were desperately needed elsewhere at this time.
-The Japanese also relocated over 40,000 ground troops to the northern islands to protect their northern flank. These could have been of great use elsewhere in the Pacific.

Having lost control of the Aleutians, the 'door to Japan' was open. The Americans even considered invading Japan from here, but these plans were quickly sidelined. Much like the German late-war situation in Norway, a large number of troops and equipment were tied down here to defend against an attack that would never come. These assets could have been better used elsewhere.

 

The Aleutian campaign was a bigger battle than most people realize. There were sea and air battles. The Japanese bombed Dutch Harbor and even tried to bomb my little town of Kodiak, which contained a naval air station back in those days (they got lost in the fog...).

I lived on Attu for a year in the 90's and spent many, many days picking over the battlefield. It's never been cleaned up and the ground is littered with spent (and live) shells, rusty mess tins, helmets, tripods, mortar base plates - anything you can think of. I found a 1911 magazine, rusty and fused together, but you could still see that the cap of every slug had been neatly trimmed away to make them into soft points.

Attu has a terrible history that goes back well before the invasion. Massacre Bay carries that name because in the 1700's the Russians wiped out a native village in that place. One Cossack was particularly proud of his big bore musket and bets were made on how many Aleuts it would shoot through. A dozen men were shoved together in a queue and his shot killed seven of them. Above Massacre Bay is Mount Terrible, but I never found out how it got that name.

The Attu battle itself was awful. None of the guns or armor could get off the beach because they immediately sank in the mud. When they could shoot, most of the shells sank in that same mud without detonating. It is only on the hills that the ground is firm enough to set them off. The terrain on the floor of the valley is a skin of grasses with quaky mud underneath - for most of the year it's like walking on a waterbed. And, for most of the year there is a weird phenomena of a solid cloud cap hanging right at the 400 foot level. When it's clear(er) you can still see the dozens of Japanese gun emplacements built into the hills just above the 400 foot level. They'd been there long enough to figure that out and site their machine guns and light guns above that cap. They could see the floor of the valley, but couldn't be seen themselves. Each one of those emplacements had to be cleared by men climbing up the treeless slopes with rifles and grenades.

 

No doubt, most American participants in this place deserved a medal for just being there!

Was there a seperate campaign medal awarded? If not, Why not?

Those islands would be a military pickers paradise, but a dangerous pastime for all the unexploded ammo.

I know that Attu and Kiska are a little 'close to home' for Alaskans. But do you really think that Japanese forces would have been incompetant enough to attempt an invasion of the 49th state? There is very little to gain in the way of strategic territory, and you must admit that tapping Alaska's abundant natural resources would have taken much time, material, and manpower, and then the long supply line, and further, getting the booty back to Japan?

The Dutch East Indies were said to have more than enough oil to meet the needs of the Japanese war machine, but the Achilles heel was GETTING IT BACK TO JAPAN, something U.S. submarines took full advantage of, in the most successful underwater campaign ever. I'll go so far as to say that precisely this would have been the case for any move toward Alaska.

Alaskan's, themselves, could have made any occupation of the city of Anchorage untenable, with swift moving units of guerillas, operating much as Finnish soldiers did, and with just as much success. The advantages that native Alaskans would have had would have made all the difference. With secure supply lines running up the West Coast, it's hard to see the Japanese doing much more than occupation of Anchorage, and stopping right there, able to go no further......

 

When you play Avalon hill's boardgame, "Victory in the Pacific", any attempt by either side to turn the Northern area into a decisive move falls flat, simply because you have to strip other areas, and send them to a flanking position, far away from where the decisions are effected for the campaign itself. This redeployment hurts you everywhere else, so, it's either the North and nothing else, or it's everything else at the expense of the north.

The Northern 'doorway' is left to sit in obscurity, while your resources are better used. And once you commit to a Northern strategy, it'svery difficult to switch this to somewhere else, without losing more time you don't have redeploying. It also puts the majority of your force on a flank, useless, if you need at the other end of the Pacific. The 'Central position' is best on any map of any conflict, simply for furnishing your ability to shift forces on interior lines, and get to an operational 'zone' first and with the most. It can be "the" decisive element in any conflict, but particularly the Pac War.


BTW....Richard Hamblen, an Avalon Hill Staffer, designed this game, and it won a Charles roberts Award for the "Best Design of the Year".

It was a great game, with a simple system. Ideal for teaching people the 'basics' of exactly why and how the Pacific War was fought, without gumming their heads up with a fifty page rules booklet. simple and elegant, I still have a copy, (somewhere), and have played this game probably far more than most. I even bought a copy of it for friend, the only time i've ever given a game as a present.

 

In 1942, the shortest route to Japan led through the Aleutions. A great place to potentially place B29's. In 1943 after Attu and Kiska were retaken, it was obvious that the climate was horrible and those grandiose plans about attacking Japan from there were consigned to the circular folder.

 

It's deceptive on a flat map, but the southern Aleutians are on the same latitude as Vancouver Island and not nearly as far away from the west coast as you'd think. The distance from Adak to Seattle is 2400 miles, to Honolulu 2300 miles, to Vancouver 2300 miles, to San Francisco 2700 miles.

The range of a Nakajima G8N heavy bomber is 4500 miles which I suspect means round-trip, but still nearly within range if based in the southern Aleutians. I'm not sure what the longest range bomber they had was, but that's close enough to make anybody nervous.