The Storm on Our Shores

by Mark Obmascik

  He was grateful to have Rose and the girls to think about. Without them, he would think only about the enemy. The few things he did know about the Japanese were memorable and bad. While training in California, a fellow soldier had given him a photograph of a Japanese soldier decapitating a kneeling man in China. Laird kept the gruesome photo in his pack. No one would ever need to remind him about the ruthlessness of the Japanese soldier.

  For the prior six months, Laird and other Americans had been stunned to watch an outmanned and outgunned Japanese force sustain a ferocious defense and counterattack on Guadalcanal in the South Pacific. United States Navy losses were so severe that admirals had refused to release casualty figures. Americans were alarmed by the fighting spirit of the Japanese, who fought to the death and considered surrender to be the ultimate shame. When one Guadalcanal firefight resulted in the death of nearly 800 of 900 Japanese, the Imperial Army commander was so shamed that he committed suicide on the battlefield with a ritual disembowelment. The ancient samurai code of bushido, which led Japanese soldiers to value their honor over their own lives, was an alien concept to the West. Though the United States eventually won the battle, Guadalcanal led many Americans to conclude that Japanese soldiers were fanatical killing machines.

  In Alaska, however, the United States commanders expected an easy fight. From his warm and comfortable headquarters at the Presidio in San Francisco, General John DeWitt predicted troops would retake Attu in just three days. Yes, the weather and the terrain might present a few extra challenges, but Attu was guarded by a garrison of just 3,000 Japanese. How difficult could it be? The Army was so confident of a quick victory that it didn’t bother issuing troops the proper clothes or supplies for fighting in the Aleutians.

  This arrogance was just the latest in a series of colossal military blunders in the Aleutians.

  One of the biggest problems was the leaders themselves. They did not like each other.

  Son of a Confederate Army general, Major General Simon Buckner, the commander of Alaska, was a swaggering swath of testosterone who killed bears, conducted small meetings in a parade voice, and ordered a subordinate to blowtorch the ice from his outdoor bath each morning. “I don’t believe in passive warfare,” Buckner said. “There are two ways of dealing with a rattlesnake. One is to sit still and wait for the snake to strike. The other way is to bash in the snake’s head and put it out of commission. That’s what I favor.”

  His Navy counterpart was Rear Admiral Robert “Fuzzy” Theobald, a pudgy man who insisted on neat uniforms even as his counterparts opted in the Alaskan cold for heavily insulated clothes. Theobald had graduated near the top of his Naval Academy class, but his smarts often turned caustic. He was renowned for mocking and insulting his inferiors. He also had a weakness for conspiracy theories, later writing a book alleging that Franklin Roosevelt secretly forced the United States into World War II by suppressing intelligence about the forthcoming Pearl Harbor attack.

  The rivalry between the Army and Navy was not new, but Buckner and Theobald pushed it to new depths. Buckner complained that the rear admiral was “as tender as the bottom of a teenage girl.” Theobald made no secret of his desire to work elsewhere. Just four months before the Attu invasion, Theobald was replaced by Rear Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, who had gained a reputation as a fighting admiral during the triumphs at Midway and Guadalcanal. In turn, yet another rear admiral, Francis Rockwell, was assigned to command the landing of the Army’s amphibious assault force in the Aleutians.

  While the Navy kept replacing and adding leaders, the Army settled on Major General Albert Brown to direct the 7th Infantry Division invasion force. He was wanted by neither DeWitt, the Western Defense commander in San Francisco, nor Buckner, the Alaska commander. Brown’s division was trained for trucks and tanks against Nazis in the African desert, not amphibious landings against Japanese on subarctic islands. But troops were in short supply—Roosevelt wanted manpower for a fall European offensive now that the Soviets were pushing Hitler out of Stalingrad—and the Alaska team had to take whatever it could get. Another major sticking point was DeWitt’s vow of a quick and easy triumph in the Aleutians. Brown protested that a three-day victory would be impossible at Attu. Brown thought troops would need at least a week just to navigate across the black muck of the mountainous island, which was seventeen miles wide.

  In other words, the United States was going to war in one of the world’s most unforgiving places with a revolving door of leadership that disagreed on basic battle strategy.

  Yet by the spring of 1943, the unruly United States leadership team had won some notable successes. Nearly fifty Japanese ships had been sunk in the Aleutians. Regular Air Force bombing runs cratered Japanese attempts to build a 3,500-foot runway at Attu. The main Japanese garrison at Kiska felt so under siege by air assaults that it dispatched a warning message to commanders: “Bombing is getting more violent month after month. The bomb technique used is mediocre, but when enough bombs are dropped there is bound to be damage. We are losing personnel, installations, air defense arms, fuel and firearms. Even the antiaircraft gun gradually loses its aiming efficiency.”

  On Attu, the last Japanese ships slipped through the fog and American blockade to deliver supplies on March 9 and 10. After that, every other transport was either turned back or sunk.

  By the time Laird and the 7th Division had arrived in the Aleutians on April 30, Tatsuguchi and the Japanese on Attu had gone a month and a half without a resupply of food or ammunition. They were hungry and desperate, but still alert. Japanese code breakers had intercepted United States messages about a forthcoming invasion. They redoubled their efforts to dig foxholes and trenches.

  Dug into a cave on an Attu mountainside hundreds of miles from his family, Nobuo Tatsuguchi confronted his worst fear: The country he loved was preparing to attack him. The consequences were already becoming clear. Around the clock he was in surgery performing amputations and stitching gouges to save the lives of Japanese maimed by American bombs. Crucial medical equipment was in short supply. He had vowed to his God and his wife to stay true to his Seventh-day Adventist faith and remain a noncombatant. All around him, though, his suffering and dying patients moaned a different reality: This is war, they said. Kill or be killed.

  Could Tatsuguchi stay true to both his faith and his country? Was it even possible to try? He had two daughters now, including one he had not even met. How could he be a father during war? What kind of example would he set? Would his daughters be proud?

  The violence, the patients, the choices—it all felt overwhelming. Tatsuguchi could become frozen by fear, by the vast questions, or he could find solace in a small task that was familiar and comfortable. Over the years he had written about his travels and his wildflowers, his studies and his family. On Attu, he might not be able to fully understand his situation, but he could describe it. He felt compelled to take notes. Numerous psychological studies over the years have confirmed that writing about personal experience seems to help the brain regulate emotion. Describing a fear makes it more familiar, and, often, less frightening. No soldier in war wants to talk about emotional distress, but logging it on paper can be done privately, without judgment, as a therapeutic release.

  Nobuo Tatsuguchi decided to write a war diary.

  By this time, Laird felt ready for war, but he was more practiced at waiting. After six nauseous days at sea, Laird finally had arrived on the southwestern Alaska peninsula at Cold Bay. The base was accurately named. An unrelenting 20 mph wind cut through his clothes. Snow encrusted the mountains just 200 feet above the anchorage. The deep-water harbor was so small and sparsely developed that there wasn’t room on shore to accommodate all the men, so they again slept in shifts on their ships. Commanders were offered the chance to bring ashore troops to introduce them to tundra, but only sixty Army officers accepted. Confined to their ships, soldiers were issued new leather boots without any way to break them in. Laird, who knew something about boots from his time in t
he coal mines, feared that painful blisters were in his future.

  Laird was told to prepare for a May 7 invasion of Attu, but seas were so high that the battleships raised their guns to prevent swamping by monster waves. The invasion was delayed. Then dangerously high surf led the commanders to push back the assault to May 9. Another storm forced a reschedule to May 10. On May 11, four days after the original plan, a convoy of three battleships, seven cruisers, fourteen destroyers, five submarines, and an aircraft carrier finally assembled with General Brown’s 7th Infantry Division on six transports in the seas off Attu. At last the order went out: Attu’s beachhead would commence at 7:40 a.m.

  In the fog offshore, however, two destroyers collided, punching a hole in one. The invasion was moved to 10:40 a.m. After a U.S. submarine came close to firing torpedoes at an American ship that had been misidentified as Japanese, the invasion was pushed back to 3:30 p.m. Fog was so thick on one destroyer that the captain could not see his bow from the bridge.

  The element of surprise was long gone. The Japanese knew what was coming.

  The Americans did not. Most of Attu remained unmapped more than a thousand yards from the shore—Air Force pilots had relied on Rand McNally road maps to fly the Aleutians, and ground troops relied on maps based on a Russian survey completed in 1864—and uncharted reefs made for dangerous beach landings. In fact, the main Geodetic Survey map had warned that ships should not approach closer than two miles. On the rare times the fog lifted on Attu, the soldiers on the transport ships could see that about 95 percent of the island’s shore ended in cliffs, some of which rose 200 feet.

  On board their ships, soldiers were shown a 1/5000 scale model of Attu that had been based on aerial photographs. The Japanese were entrenched on the east end of the island, which was divided into five rocky fingers and bays. Because the beaches at the ends of the bays were treacherous, General Brown knew a complication in one spot could bottleneck the whole operation. He decided to hedge his bets by splitting the overall invasion into northern and southern waves.

  First to land would be a small force of 400 scouts and reconnaissance troops on the northern shore along Scarlet Beach. Their goal was to draw out the Japanese and divert attention from the main north shore landing of US troops a few miles east, at Red Beach near the head of Holtz Bay. Meanwhile, on the island’s south shore, the main US fighting force would pour onto the rocky beach at Massacre Bay, the same place the Japanese had landed during their invasion of Attu. (The ominous name of Massacre Bay came 200 years earlier from a slaughter of fifteen Aleuts by Russian fur hunters.)

  The idea was to pinch the Japanese from opposite sides, north and south, and then pin them against the eastern shore at Attu Village in Chichagof Harbor. There, they would be shelled by Navy battleships and Air Force bombers. Including supply lines and reserve forces, 16,000 Americans would be assigned to retake Attu by land, air, and sea.

  At least that was the plan. Much had gone wrong in unexpected ways. Fog limited visibility to a quarter-mile. Already that morning, after the destroyers collided and a friendly fire submarine sinking was narrowly averted, a northern attack force had become so lost that commanders mistakenly prepared to land on the same beach as the southern force. At Massacre Bay, a hundred landing craft converged just a hundred yards offshore. Slamming into rocks and each other, eleven boats capsized, dumping soldiers and crucial equipment into the frigid seas.

  “Assault wave, man your boats!” commanders shouted through bullhorns. Laird was in the southern strike at Massacre Bay. For the past five hours offshore, the final pre-combat meal of steak and eggs had been churning in his stomach. Now the mix of rolling waves, diesel engine fumes, and raw nerves combined to finish the job. Rope ladders were pitched from tall transport ships to lower landing craft. One soldier lost balance on the ladder and plunged neck-first onto the side of his landing craft. Another slipped into the Bering Sea. Before a shot was fired, Laird saw two men die.

  The first United States soldiers from the southern force touched land on Attu at 4:50 p.m., nearly ten hours behind the day’s original plan. In the chaos and the fog, the second attack wave of Americans landed first, followed by the simultaneous landings of the first and third waves of men. They all were met by silence. No shots, no bombs, nothing. They stormed the shore and braced for gunfire. What confronted them instead was muck—black, sticky, volcanic muck. One step and they sank to their ankles. The next step put them to their boot tops. A third step required a mighty pull, and the fourth could strip off the boot. Before they could fight the enemy, they would be forced to fight Attu itself.

  Thick clouds hovered at 1,500 feet. On Laird’s right, the top of Henderson Ridge reached the base of the clouds. On his left, the heights of Gilbert Ridge were obscured. The map said that highland rose 2,000 feet.

  In the valley below, Laird knew the muck turned his men into easy targets. Why weren’t the Japanese shooting? Surely they must be in the fog on the ridges above, but the Americans could see no sign of the enemy. As Laird pressed up the shore, the muck turned to muskeg. That made his boots stick less, but the elastic soil made every step uncertain. Already his feet were wet and cold. The Army’s 12-inch Blucher boots were leather but not waterproof, more suited to dryland logging than crossing swampland just a few degrees from frozen. His heels were already raw with blisters. Because the boots reached halfway up his calves, chafing climbed higher up his leg with every step. He had other equipment problems. His rain pants were flimsy. Seams ripped apart with each stride. As he struggled uphill, his pants turned into chaps. The main thing keeping him warm was adrenaline. Where were the Japanese?

  Behind him hundreds of men continued to land on the beach. Ahead were even more. From the model of the island on the ship he knew the terrain climbed in front of him, but fog shrouded most views of the mountains. Sometimes the fog shrouded the soldier just a few feet beside him.

  At the waterline, troops struggled to lug a 105mm howitzer off the barges and up steep banks. About seventy-five yards off the water, Attu gave way, swallowing the wheels of the heavy gun, as well as the treaded truck pulling it, deep into the sticky black ooze. This was as far as the gun was going for now. Crews spun around the howitzer by hand, pointed it up the valley, and fired. “This is it, boy,” Sergeant Allen Robbins proclaimed. “We’re gunnin’.”

  They weren’t hittin’. The Japanese were still nowhere to be found.

  Colonel Yasuyo Yamasaki was desperate for an emergency evacuation by the Imperial Navy, but the United States naval and air blockade had proven too strong. Just three weeks earlier, the Japanese mastermind of Pearl Harbor, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, had been shot out of the sky and killed by an American pilot. The Imperial Navy struggled to fill his void. There would be no daring naval raid to rescue Japanese troops stranded on Attu.

  In the Aleutians, Yamasaki calculated correctly that his troops would be vastly outnumbered by any attack, which he had been expecting since May 4. Rather than confronting the enemy on the beach, where the Japanese would be in firing range of American troops and warships, Yamasaki had decided to retreat and dig in. He was trapped and he knew it. He had only 2,650 men and twelve antiaircraft guns. He had lived on Attu a month. He had enough experience in the Aleutians to realize that the weather could become his ally. When the fog and clouds cleared from the beaches, it often continued to mask the mountains. By fortifying the heights of Attu, his men could hide in the mist and shoot down at the invaders. If his men could hold out long enough, they might be rescued or at least resupplied by the Navy. Yamasaki concluded the highlands were his last best chance.

  Coves on the north side of Attu were too rocky and steep to support many invading troops—Red Beach ended in a 250-foot wall so steep and crumbly that it could be climbed only by a man who had dropped to his hands and knees—so Yamasaki left it unguarded. He opted instead to fall back onto the buttresses and ridges far above the south beach at Massacre Bay.

  As the Americans crawled up the Massacre
Valley, sometimes literally, the Japanese watched from above in silence and waited.

  Finally the northern force spotted four Japanese soldiers on patrol about 300 yards away. They held back until the soldiers cut the distance in half, then opened fire. Two Japanese soldiers dropped. Two escaped. It was 7 p.m., and the United States had killed its first enemies during the invasion of Attu.

  From overhead, American bomber squadrons led by Colonel William Eareckson pounded likely Japanese positions. He was an Air Force swashbuckler—lanky, with a thin mustache and a wild streak that led one general to complain that Eareckson couldn’t even spell the word discipline. Fed up with the permanent cloud cover of the Aleutians, Eareckson’s pilots terrified the Japanese by dive-bombing through the mist to gain low-altitude sightings of targets.

  On the southern push, Laird and other troops finally had gained their first mile up Massacre Valley without incident. The quiet stopped at the second mile. From the ridges Japanese snipers and machine gunners cut down several American troops. The job of Laird’s platoon was to provide mortar support for riflemen leading the drive up the valley. He fired shells. Japanese returned fire. He fired more. They returned more. The Japanese hid themselves in the fog. When the fog line dropped, the Japanese followed the clouds to lower elevations. When the fog line went up, Japanese did, too. They turned the weather into their ally.

  Laird was frustrated. The Japanese could see him but he could not see them. They fired smokeless gunpowder that could not be traced. They spread out in groups that were small and nimble and difficult to find. And worst of all, they were patient. They didn’t seem to fire from anger or panic. They were deliberate and strategic. In the valley with no trees, little brush, and few boulders, Laird was an unprotected target.