And then came nightfall. He couldn’t say he had seen the sun set because he had never seen the sun. Maybe the sun really had dipped below the horizon. Or maybe the fog just grew dense enough to block out all the light. Either way, it had turned dark. The temperature dipped into the 20s. Wind howled. He was exhausted and wet. His heels were raw from blisters and his legs and arms were spent from lugging his body and his gear up the steep, mushy soils. He fought to stay awake. Occasional bullets and shells reminded him to stay alert. He hunkered down, and he shivered. He had seen darkness in the depths of a coal mine, but he had never felt anything like the blackness of war on Attu at night.
12
* * *
Quagmire
On the day the general said the war on Attu would end, it didn’t. Instead, it turned worse.
For the Americans, none of the original military goals had been met. All three invading forces were either pinned down or far from merging. The commander of the southern push, Colonel Edward Earle, was killed by a sniper, and the commander of the northern push, Colonel Frank Culin, battled frostbite and temporarily retreated to a warm ship. Trucks and bulldozers could not move through Attu’s taffy soils; several squads had been forced to withdraw when supply lines failed to keep up. There were repeated cases of soldiers on supply lines walking into the hills, dumping their loads, falling asleep, and then lollygagging their way back to the beach. Many men on the front lines went at least a full day without food and collapsed from exhaustion. Others suffered from “Aleutian malaria”—a head cold and hacking cough that would not go away. One company wasted hours of climbing when inaccurate maps led them up a canyon that dead-ended at a cliff. A battalion of reinforcements was lost in the mountains. Forty-four men had been killed and hundreds were wounded. No breakthrough was anywhere in sight. General DeWitt had predicted a victory in three days, but his men had descended into a quagmire.
The Japanese had even less hope. For eight weeks only a handful of Japanese submarines had evaded the American blockade, and Tatsuguchi and others on Attu were forced to cut back on food rations. The rigors of battle only accelerated the depletion of their reserves. Ammunition had to be conserved, too. Fighting from the ridgelines had won them a tactical advantage, but the elevation also exposed troops to stiffer winds and more dangerous cold. Air bombing against them was relentless. The number of dead and wounded soared, and the inventory of medical supplies crashed.
From a cave in a moment of downtime, Nobuo Tatsuguchi began writing his terse diary in his native Japanese. He used dates according to the Japanese calendar, which, as at Pearl Harbor, was one day ahead of the American timetable.
MAY 12—0155
Carrier-based plane flew over—fired at it. There is a low fog, and the summit is clear. Evacuated to the summit. Air raids carried out frequently until 1000. Heard loud noise. It is naval gun firing. Prepared battle equipment. Information—American transports begin landing at Hokkai Misaki (Red Beach). Twenty boats landed at Massacre Bay. It seems that they are going to unload heavy equipment. Day’s activities—Air raid, naval gun firing, and landing of American troops.
MAY 13—BATTLE
The United States forces landed at Shiba Dai (Hill X) and Massacre Bay. The enemy has advanced to the bottom of Missumi Yama (Buchanan Ridge) from Shiba Dai. Have engaged them. On the other hand, Massacre Bay is defended by only one platoon, but upon the unexpected attack, the antiaircraft cannon was destroyed and we have withdrawn. In night attack we have captured twenty enemy rifles. There is tremendous mountain artillery gun firing. Approximately fifteen patients came into the field hospital, which is attached to the Arai Engineers Unit.
MAY 14—BATTLE
Our two submarines from Kiska assisting us have greatly damaged two enemy ships. The enemy has advanced to the bottom of Missumi Yama. First Lieutenant Suzuki died by shots from rifle. There is a continuous flow of wounded into the field hospital. In the evening the United States forces used gas, but no damage was done on account of strong wind. Took refuge in the trenches dug during the daytime and took care of the patients during bombardment. The enemy strength must be a division. Our desperate defense is holding up well.
On the third day, Tatsuguchi’s diary was wrong on at least two accounts. No Japanese submarines had done any damage to American ships; the only damage to American ships had been done either by American ships colliding into one another, or by the shoals and rocks of Attu’s harbors, which had punched holes into a number of landing craft. The stranded Japanese regiment on Attu had been praying for an Imperial Navy rescue, and Army commanders likely passed around the false story of a successful submarine attack to boost morale.
Tatsuguchi was also mistaken about the use of poison gas on Attu. Though artillery had lobbed phosphorous shells as a way to mark Japanese positions, the smoke was not toxic. Sherman Montrose, an independent cameraman for Acme Newspictures, reported that Americans in a supply line had seen the gas and panicked, believing that it had been fired by the Japanese. When troops began fleeing to save themselves, the journalist reassured them that the gas was safe, and only a way to highlight enemy targets for Americans. The men returned to battle, and the civilian journalist was later awarded a citation from the secretary of war.
Behind Japanese lines, however, rumors of American use of poison gas only heightened the siege mentality. For Tatsuguchi and his fellow stranded troops, the stakes could not be higher. This was a fight without mercy.
Laird felt no sympathy. Fighting in Massacre Valley had ground to a standoff. He blasted mortars for the riflemen ahead, but the Japanese in the heights fired mortars right back. He often wasn’t sure where to aim. The fog was the enemy’s best friend. Laird may as well have been trying to blast birds from a cloud. With the Japanese hunkered down in trenches, foxholes, and caves, American commanders began to concede the difficulty of the task ahead. “The infantry will have to go in there with corkscrews to dig out the Japs,” warned the Alaska commander, General Buckner.
Like many infantrymen, Laird had come ashore with just two cold meals in his pack. They were long gone. He ached with hunger. There were repeated rumors of resupply, but the Army struggled to move inland the required tons of ammunition and food without machinery. Laird and the 7th Division had trained on level ground in the desert. Their legs weren’t used to climbing, and they’d weakened further during the weeks-long sea journey from San Francisco. Most men simply weren’t in the physical shape necessary to hump heavy loads of supplies up valleys of mush and mountains of snow. Both the fighters, and the men who reinforced them, were spent.
They also were dangerously cold. The same leather boots that caused so many blisters on the first two days were now creating hundreds of debilitating injuries. The leader of the scouts, Captain William Willoughby, was a macho man who had prided himself on his men’s preparation. “You come to this outfit, you train your asses off, or you go back to the Women’s Corps,” he warned. But on their first night on Attu, many of his troops had catnapped in wet boots and woken up with frostbite. Now many soldiers struggled to stand, much less walk. The mountains of Alaska didn’t care how many push-ups a soldier could do while training in the desert.
Even more widespread than frostbite was a painful malady called trench foot. First described by Napoleon’s troops during their 1812 retreat from Russia, trench foot had claimed more than 70,000 Allied troops during World War I. Trench foot was a fungal infection that resulted from long immersion in cold water or mud, two of the fundamental ingredients of Attu. The first sign was a numb and swollen foot that turned white as blood vessels constricted. As numbness gave way to constant pins-and-needles prickling, the foot exuded a rotten smell and turned red, blue, and black. Skin died. Gangrene festered. In severe cases, amputation was required, but even the milder cases could take weeks to heal. On Attu, trench foot spread with the speed of an epidemic. By the second day of battle, a few men with black feet were being ushered back from the front lines. By the third day, a few case
s had turned to dozens. By the fifth day, only forty of the 320 survivors of one provisional scout battalion were able to walk. Several soldiers lost both feet to amputation.
War correspondent Russell Annabel described the miserable conditions for The Saturday Evening Post: “Your outfit would move into a position under cover of fog and darkness, and 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 in the dark, and now seepage begins trickling into the foxhole, so that presently 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. So you crouched there, returning their fire, and after a while, strangely, your feet and legs no longer ached.”
The three-day promise of victory was broken. Little ground had been won. Every hour brought more casualties by either the Japanese or the weather. In many places the slopes were so steep and slippery that Americans required eight soldiers to evacuate a single injured comrade; officers were forced to assign a detail of four hundred men to stretcher duty. Nothing on Attu moved easily. Twenty men needed half a day to haul a single piece of artillery six hundred yards through the muck. Such wretched terrain was easier to defend than attack. From the ridges above Massacre Valley, two Japanese companies with less than a hundred men each had stymied the progress of 3,000 American infantrymen backed by artillery and battleship fire.
General Brown swallowed his pride and asked his superiors for help.
“Evidence of greater enemy strength than anticipated,” Brown wrote. “Indication of lack of sufficient force to accomplish mission.”
Admiral Rockwell was reluctant to give the general what he wanted. Landing beaches remained a serious bottleneck. With tractors and trailers mired in Attu’s muck, supply crates from ships piled up on shore. Some transports, such as the Chirikof and Perida, had managed to unload less than a third of their cargo. A flotilla of forty still bobbed offshore, and Rockwell feared the Imperial Navy could launch a surprise counterattack through the fog. Japanese torpedoes that narrowly missed the 600-foot battleship Pennsylvania and the 377-foot destroyer Bell only escalated the admiral’s worries.
The Army commander believed the Navy was holding back the manpower he needed to win the battle. The Navy commander believed the Army was turning the North Pacific fleet into sitting ducks. When the Army commander pushed the dispute up to the next level, General DeWitt, who had finally arrived in the Aleutians from San Francisco, wondered why his three-day victory promise wasn’t being kept. Admiral Kincaid questioned Brown’s “aggressiveness.” When the Army commander discussed further plans for Attu that might require six months, generals and admirals recoiled.
The result: The Army commander of the invasion of Attu was sacked.
Major General Brown was out, and Major General Eugene Landrum, a Florida native who had previously led troops in the Aleutians, was in. The revolving door of leadership at Attu spun again.
There was irony in the transition. In the hours while the sacked general was still in command—but before the new general arrived—United States troops won their first notable ground victory on Attu. Colonel Culin had recovered enough from his frostbite to push his men on a bold nighttime charge up a sniper-filled ridge that had tormented troops for days. The Japanese were caught unaware, and fled in a retreat to Chichagof Harbor so swift that they left behind stockpiles of food and ammunition.
Yet even triumph came with tragedy. The successful sneak attack had done more than startle the Japanese—it also surprised the Americans. As the sun rose on the first Americans to have won a heavily defended Japanese ridgeline, Culin’s troops were bombed and strafed by America’s own Wildcat fighter planes. Several soldiers were wounded before the friendly fire could be halted.
With their own supply lines struggling—ninety of the available ninety-three landing craft had been lost to shoals, reefs, and williwaws—Americans turned to their bounty of seized Japanese grenades. Several times in different firefights, American soldiers pulled the pin of a captured grenade, hurled it, and watched in dread as it landed unexploded. Japanese soldiers picked up the same grenade and threw it back, killing and wounding many American soldiers. The 7th Infantry had not been trained to properly operate an enemy grenade, which, unlike their own, required a separate fuse to be struck to activate detonation.
The new American general was under no illusions about the difficulty of the task ahead. “I know this country and my heart bled for the boys I had to send up there,” General Landrum said. “I knew how cold and bitter it was on the mountains. But I knew death was more bitter. I gave them a terrible task. I believed it kinder to send them into the mountains to whip the Japs than to hold them in the valley where Jap snipers could cut them down.”
MAY 15—BATTLE
Continuous flow of casualties to our field hospital caused by the fierce bombardment of enemy land and naval forces. The enemy has a great number of Negroes and Indians. The west arm units have withdrawn to near Shitigata Dai (Moore Ridge.) During a raid I was ordered to the west arm, but it was called off. Just lay down from fatigue in the barracks. Facial expressions of soldiers back from the west arm is tense. They all went back to the firing line soon.
MAY 16—BATTLE
If Shitigata Dai is occupied by the enemy, the fate of the east arm is decided. So burned documents and prepared to destroy the patients at the last moment. There was an order from Headquarters of Sector Unit. Proceeded to Chichagof Harbor by way of Umanose (Fishhook Ridge), 0100 in the morning. Patients from Second Infantry were lost, so accompanied the patients. There was an air raid, so took refuge in the former field hospital cave. The guns of a Lockheed [fighter plane] spitted fire as it flew past our cave.
MAY 17—BATTLE
At night about 1800, under cover of darkness, left the cave. The stretcher went over muddy roads and steep hills of no-man’s-land. No matter how far or how fast we went, we did not get to the pass. Was rather irritated in the fog by the thought of getting lost. Sat down every twenty or thirty steps. Would sleep, dream, and wake up again. Same thing over and over again. The frostbitten patient on the stretcher does not move. After all the effort, met Sector Commander Yamasaki. The pass is a straight line without any width and a steep incline toward Chichagof Harbor. Sitting on the butt and lifting the feet, I slid down very smoothly and changed direction with the sword. Slid down in about twenty minutes. After that, arrived in Chichagof Harbor after struggling. The time expended was nine hours for all this, without leaving any patients. Opened a new field hospital. Walking is now extremely difficult from left knee rheumatism which reoccurred on the pass. The results of our navy—the submarine and special underwater craft [midget submarines] in the vicinity of Chichagof Harbor since the fourteenth: sunk battleship, cruisers three, destroyers, transports of airborne troops, and six other transports. By the favorable turn since the battle of the east arm, reserves come back. Off shore of Shiba Dai, six destroyers are guarding one transport.
For Tatsuguchi, the toll of battle was setting in. Americans may have been hungry and cold, but they had reinforcements. The Japanese had only themselves.
Despite Tatsuguchi’s claim, the United States had lost no ships to the Japanese. Any talk of a sunken battleship was either a misunderstanding or a false claim by Imperial Army commanders to improve morale, which the Japanese needed. On the morning of May 15 (May 16 Japanese time), two United States battalions had captured the Imperial Army base at Holtz Bay. The Japanese fled so quickly that they left behind large stockpiles of food and ammunition, plus six light artillery guns, as well as several machine guns and mortars. The fleeing survivors would soon feel the loss of these supplies.
The May 16 diary entry saying Tatsuguchi “prepared to destroy the patients at the last moment” is chilling. Japanese military men had been indoctrinated for centuries in the samurai code of bushido—valuing honor more than one’s own life. Among the wor
se humiliations for a Japanese soldier was to be captured alive as a prisoner. Under the bushido code, a noble warrior always chose suicide over surrender. If capture by an enemy was inevitable, a Japanese patient in a military field hospital was expected to ask for a way to kill himself as a way to save his personal and family honor. His commander might even order it.
It’s hard to imagine Tatsuguchi obeying it. In the front of the personal Bible he had brought to Attu, Tatsuguchi had inscribed his favorite verse, Deuteronomy 30:19: “Choose life.” For Tatsuguchi, the tension between his Japanese and Christian identities could face few challenges greater than the idea of honorable suicide.
At the moment, Dick Laird’s main challenge was staying alive. His company had gained some ground up Massacre Valley, which helped the overall objective but hurt his chances for cover. At lower elevations, Laird’s standard olive trousers and field jacket had camouflaged him in the willows and mud. Now he was climbing higher. The snowline on Attu was as low as 300 feet. Against the white landscape, his military drabs may as well have been a flashing red light. It turned Laird and all other Americans into easy targets for the Japanese firing from above.
Snow also caused more boot-related problems. The soles were smooth, with little traction. Time and again Laird would try to scale a steep slope, only to slip and slide back down the same grade. The same snow that had allowed Tatsuguchi to glissade down a mountain slope with speed was now blocking Americans from chasing him.
The Storm on Our Shores Page 12
