War in the Fog: Historical Memory, the Fog of War, and Unforgetting the Aleutians War

Abstract

War in the Fog:Historical Memory, the Fog of War, and Unforgetting the Aleutians War Barry Scott Zellen (bio) This article was contributed to Forum-the edition's portfolio of thematic content-by GJIA's Culture and Society section. World War II in the Pacific ended just over seventy-five years ago with Japan's August 15, 1945, historic acceptance of surrender. Announced by the Emperor of Japan in his very first radio broadcast to his nation, it was a broadcast that would never be forgotten—and one which almost never happened, as militarists tried in vain to seize the recording. But far less often evoked than the war's dramatic finale is the beginning of the end of the Pacific War, with the liberation of the outer Aleutians, reversing Japan's breathtaking imperial expansion in the preceding years—a campaign described aptly by Ira Wintermute in August 1943 as "War in the Fog," as much for the impact of the region's infamous weather as for its many frictional consequences of the fog of war.1 From the restoration of U.S. sovereignty over the island of Kiska in Alaska's Aleutian Islands chain on August 15, 1943, to the Emperor's dramatic surrender announcement two years later, a determined, bloody and successful island-hopping campaign would transpire from the frigid subarctic waters of the Aleutians to the tropical waters of the South Pacific. The historic importance of the war in the Aleutians cannot be overstated; what remains puzzling to this day, however, is the widely held view that the war in the Aleutians has become one of America's "forgotten wars," a perception so oft-repeated that without a determined effort by historians and students of war to "unforget" this war, it may well become a self-fulfilling prophecy. With growing global geostrategic interest in the Arctic and subarctic regions, fueled in part by the accelerating polar thaw and its concomitant opening of new sea lanes running through the Aleutians gateway into the narrow Bering Strait, the lessons of the Aleutians War are evermore essential for remembrance. From infamy to ennui In early June of 1942, the imperial Japanese navy launched carrier raids on Dutch Harbor, Alaska, and in the days that followed, invaded and occupied the islands of Attu and Kiska in Alaska's outer Aleutians, 847 and 671 miles, respectively, to the west of Dutch (itself another 796 miles from Anchorage). The bombardment of Dutch was believed at the time to be Tokyo's opening move in a wider campaign to establish a foothold on the Alaska mainland from which to expand and project power deeper into the Pacific Northwest, one successfully thwarted by prescient U.S. efforts to fortify the region near Dutch in the months that followed the attack on Pearl Harbor.2 More recent scholarship suggests that Japan aimed less for a beachhead on North America than to distract war planners with a feint in the hope of dividing the U.S. fleet—with their ultimate goal being victory at [End Page 193] Midway. Whether Tokyo's grander ambitions for War in Alaska were thwarted by an unexpectedly vigorous defense at Dutch, or it intended from the get-go to clear and hold only the outer Aleutians, its year-long occupation of Attu and fourteen-month long occupation of Kiska became the first and only Japanese occupations of North American territory during the war. While our only loss of North American soil to imperial Japan, its invasion and occupation of the outer Aleutians that followed the bombing of Dutch was one of multiple assaults upon remote U.S. Pacific insular territories, and the second upon an incorporated U.S. territory on a trajectory that would ultimately lead to statehood. The Aleutians invasion was preceded by that previous December's near-simultaneous assaults by Japan on the unincorporated U.S. territories of the Philippines and Guam, and the incorporated territory of Hawaii. While each of these Pacific insular possessions were of strategic naval importance, and essential to maintenance of sea control in the Pacific, they are not all remembered equally today. Indeed, the assault on Pearl Harbor remains hallowed as a "day of infamy...