Posted on 05/28/2018 2:39:19 PM PDT by BBell
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — William Roy Dover's memory of the World War II battle is as sharp as it was 75 years ago, even though it's been long forgotten by most everyone else.
His first sergeant rousted him from his pup tent around 2 a.m. when word came the Japanese were attacking and had maybe even gotten behind the American front line, on a desolate, unforgiving slab of an occupied island in the North Pacific.
"He was shouting, 'Get up! Get out!'" Dover said.
Dover and most of the American soldiers rushed to an embankment on what became known as Engineer Hill, the last gasp of the Japanese during the Battle of Attu , fought 75 years ago this month on Attu Island in Alaska's Aleutian chain.
"I had two friends that were too slow to get out," the 95-year-old Alabama farmer recalled. "They both got bayonetted in their pup tents."
Joseph Sasser, then a skinny 20-year-old from Cartharge, Mississippi, also found himself perched against the berm on Engineer Hill when a captain with a rifle took up a position about 10 feet (3 meters) away.
"I noticed about after 30 minutes or so, he was awfully quiet," Sasser said. "We checked to see if he had a pulse and if he was alive, and he was not.
"We didn't even know he had been shot," said Sasser, also 95.
American forces reclaimed remote Attu Island on May 30, 1943, after a 19-day campaign that is known as World War II's forgotten battle. Much of the fighting was hand-to-hand, waged in dense fog and winds of up to 120 mph (193 kph).
The battle for the Aleutian island was one of the deadliest in the Pacific in terms of the percentage of troops killed.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnct.com ...
(Didn’t know) Thanks for posting. BUMP!
It’s not as simple as you portray. There was a lot more going on than most know. This book is full of the background, including tons of original documents.
Magic: The Untold Story of U.S. Intelligence and the Evacuation of Japanese Residents from the West Coast During WWII
https://www.amazon.com/Magic-Intelligence-Evacuation-Japanese-Residents/dp/0960273611
In a three year occupation, the Japanese killed almost 1/2 of the population of Guam.
There was a huge battle to retake the island starting July 21, 1944. There were over 10,000 killed and wounded in the battle on the US side which landed nearly 60,000 troops to retake the island.
Guamians are Americans too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Guam_(1944)
My wife’s grandfather was the Transport Commander for the landing.
No, I did not know about this battle. Thank you for posting this.
The Aleutian campaign was a Japanese “Faint” to draw the Americans away from Midway Attack!
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That’s right.
A lot of things can look “wrong-headed” after the fact...
One of those more aggressive commanders was Tanaka Raizō, who commanded destroyers. Known as "Tenacious Tanaka," he ran the "Tokyo Express," as the convoys that supplied the Japanese at Guadalcanal were called, and defeated the US Navy in the Battle of Tassafaronga in 1942. But he was less successful when it came to Japanese naval politics, and found himself assigned to shore duty shortly after the Guadalcanal campaign.
Tweed’s cave-been there-also japs came out of the jungles for years after the war was over
“History has demonstrated that America had little or nothing to fear from its ethnic minority citizens who happened to match the ethnicity of the Enemy—certainly not anywhere near enough to justify mass interments.”
The enemy in WWII was different - race/ethnicity was their over-riding ideology. The Nazi “Master Race” and eugenics are well know (and much more pronounced than most any other enemy ever), but the extreme Japanese racial ideology of that time is more overlooked.
In Shintoism, the Japanese Race is descended from the Sun Goddess Amaterasu (hence the sun symbol on the flag), and the Emperor was considered the embodiment of Amaterasu on Earth. The Imperial Japanese were explicit and emphatic in their messaging to Overseas Japanese to remain loyal to the divine Emperor unto death, as their inalienable inborn duty.
Much more of the Japanese-American population of that time were relatively recent immigrants, with a greater linguistic and cultural attachment back to Japan, than what we typically see today (even though large numbers were second or third generation Americans).
A clear distinction was made between such “off-the-boat” Japanese immigrants, born in Japan (Issei), and later generations, born in America - Nisei (2nd Gen), Sansei (3rd Gen). The Issei did include a number of Japanese Government agents, deliberately sent for spying, sabotage and agitation among the Japanese-American community. Although they never did achieve significant sabotage or fifth column effects, harsh policing tactics like internment may have contributed a lot toward that outcome - the Japanese Government did try.
Issei without citizenship were forcibly interred (as were thousands of Germans and Italians), their Nisei children went with them. Other Japanese Americans (Nisei, Sansei, etc. - along with some number of Germans and Italians) were forcibly displaced - excluded from areas of military concern, including many of the coastal cities and agricultural areas were they lived. This was especially the case in the West Coast, where there were more Japanese - did not effect the many Japanese in Hawaii.
Many Nisei (unlike Germans or Italians) who were not forcibly interred, were given free housing, food, education and medical care in the internment camps, and allowed to work off-base.
These non-forcibly interned people who had to leave their homes in short order, and spent the war in internment camps to be with their relatives and friends (and had few other options) are nearly universally regarded as forced internees today, and were later granted redress payments, the same as those legally forced into internment.
There was a higher concern about Japanese being attacked/lynched on the West Coast - they stuck out in a crowd, and Japanese military atrocities against Americans were much more common, and more atrocious, than at the hands of the Germans or Italians. There was more racial hatred on the street for the Japanese.
Americans in Japan at the start of the war, overwhelmingly died in Japanese detention - and military POW treatment and survival rates were dramatically worse under the Japanese (epic war crimes).
He never said much about it until after I enlisted. His stories were mostly about the assignment, not the fight. Once he opened up one night about the torture and atrocities the japanese inflicted on those captures at remote weather outposts. They used bayonets on the captives in every imaginable way. They were beasts.
My dad (RIP) fought in Guam during the war. It was brutal.
Read the book by Brian Garfield on the Thousand Mile War. I’m a WW2 buff with over 50 books on my shelf and it’s one of my favorites. It puts the Pacific Campaign in a different perspective and makes me wonder why we lost all those Marines island hopping.
That would be Henderson Field.
In the earliest stage of the Guadalcanal campaign the IJN sank 4 cruisers in the battle of Savo Island with no losses. The USN withdrew all shipping, combat and support and left the marines to forage abandoned japanese supplies for food for months.
Other major sea battles followed and the US lost more cruisers and 2 carries in addition to destroyers. The japanese did most of their attacking at night because they trained for it. We had the advantage of radar and totally misused it for most of the battles.
The japanese did retire out of range of Henderson during the day and most of their shipping losses were due to air attack. That sounds more tactical, not timid to me.
There is an excellent book, very rigorously researched (recommended to me by a Freeper) named "Shattered Sword" (written in 2005) and it gives a larger side of the Japanese story than has ever previously been told. (almost all accounts are from the Western side, and the Japanese side has not been researched as deeply...until this book.
The book has a lot of support from many well known authors who have previously written on the Battle of Midway and are considered authorities on the subject, so it has some cache there as well.
Their assertion in "Shattered Sword" is that it was NOT a feint, for the simple reason that the timing would not fulfill the purpose of a feint, to draw off American forces in Pearl Harbor. This is the Wikipedia entry on this theory, and it has become somewhat widely accepted: "...However, historians Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully (Shattered Sword)have argued against this interpretation, stating that the Japanese invaded the Aleutians to protect their northern flank, and did not intend it as a diversion..."
I agree with it, since the simple reason is that the Japanese began their assault on Midway on June 4th, on schedule...the day after the Japanese began their assault on Dutch Harbor...on schedule...June 3rd. Both attacks were intended to be surprise attacks, and largely succeeded in many respects. (The Japanese did not know we had broken their code, and assumed the American carrier forces would still be in or near Pearl Harbor.)
It is 2300 miles from Pearl Harbor to Dutch Harbor, a steaming distance at 20 knots of about four days. If it were intended to be a real diversion, they would not have attacked Dutch Harbor the day before they attacked Midway, because then we would have been able to make a choice (if we hadn't already cracked their code) which one was more important to us to defend, since both attacks occurred nearly simultaneously.
If it had been a real diversion, they would have attacked say, five days before the Midway attack to give the US fleet enough time to get up there from Pearl, and then it would have taken them about three days to make it back down to Midway, which would have been useless, as the Japanese would likely have aircraft operating from the island at that point, and we can all guess how the US fleet would have fared at that point in the war when they wandered into the radius of land based aircraft AND the radius of enemy carrier based planes at the same time...it likely wouldn't have gone well.
But as it was...the attacks were nearly simultaneous and on time, which indicates it wasn't a diversion.
It is humorous to see many western authors slapping their foreheads at such an obvious piece of information that, all these years, had been accepted as gospel truth, and had actually originated from western military analysis with zero input from the Japanese, who didn't have enough high ranking officers from that point in the war left to correct the western experts. So, for all these years, it was taken as gospel truth until these researchers who wrote the book "Shattered Sword" did the analysis from scratch with any available data, and came to quite a different conclusion.
From what I see, as radical a change in this look at history as it is, most experts have done a sheepish head slap, but to their credit, most who have taken the time give kudos to, and support the new theory.
It makes sense to me...I hope I didn't butcher it too badly in the telling. I had to rent the book, it was too expensive for me to buy...:(
If you can get your hands on the book, I highly recommend it. Having been in the Navy and been exposed to damage control procedures, I have found it somewhat puzzling that the Japanese fared so badly at keeping their ships afloat (in comparison to us). It didn't make sense to me until I read in detail about how damage control functions and processes were designed and built into their ships, and...they were just awful. One reasonably well placed bomb could take out one half of their water mains, and two could take out both. They Japanese were well trained in damage control, but when you go from hoses to buckets...well, you get the idea.
An excellent book on this subject is “Neptune’s Inferno” by James D. Hornfischer.
Our navy was fighting the Japanese navy on somewhat of a par or disadvantage, and we weren’t nearly as well trained as they were at that point, and we had many lessons to learn. We had to learn that you couldn’t have nice, overstuffed couches in your wardrooms and 15 layers of paint on the vessels, because that stuff would burn and the smoke would kill everyone, so we spent the next year throwing those couches over the side and chipping all the paint off the ships.
The other lessons we had to learn were tactical (regarding use of torpedoes by the enemy, the capability of those torpedoes, and the concept of night engagements.
We had radar, but had almost no idea what worked, what didn’t, and how to employ it. It was largely mistrusted by many commanders then in battle, and Admiral Willis ‘Ching’ Lee was one of the first commanders who had a full understanding of radar, what it was good for, and how to employ it. He nearly single-handedly brought radar guided gunfire into modern naval warfare and once we saw what it could do, we rapidly learned how to employ it.
A fascinating, yet bloody time. Most people don’t know that, for every marine or soldier killed in land fighting during the Solomons Campaign, three sailors were killed. A terrible time, indeed.
But we learned from it, and the Japanese didn’t.
He was killed during the Battle of Attu on Attu Island, Alaska on May 30, 1943.
I didn’t know much about this battle, but it makes sense, from a Japanese perspective, to try and control these islands.
Japan was in trouble once the USA took Saipan and US bombers could hit Tokyo. Attu doesn’t appear to be that much farther away.
I read the book about a year ago. You summarized the whole campaign at sea very well. Thank you.
The gentleman worked for Bell Labs, and had hundreds of other inventions - including the touch-tone phone pad. Pretty amazing. Of course it was disappointing to hear about his amazing accomplishments only at his memorial service.
My dad was friends with Dr. Robert Page in Minnesota, part of a small group that developed radar in the USA prior to WWII.
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