The Storm on Our Shores

by Mark Obmascik

  Attu surprised many Japanese troops. Though they had been prepared for the harsh climate and topography, they were advised that Aleutian culture, so removed from civilization, would be simple and primitive. Instead, soldiers marveled at the Attuans’ sturdy three-room houses with linoleum floors, two or three windows, and lace curtains. Most families had manual sewing machines and lamps fueled by gas or seal blubber. Racks outside barabaras sagged from the weight of so much drying salmon. Millions of gulls and seabirds nested in the Aleutians, and eggs made for an easy feast. Homes were so well-insulated that they heated in just fifteen minutes with stoves fueled by blubber or charcoal. “It looked more luxurious than the Japanese standard of living,” wrote the Japanese battle photographer Kira Sugiyama.

  Weeks passed. Villagers were allowed to take small boats to sea to harvest fish, but only if most of the catch was given to the guards. Japanese officers felt comfortable enough to bathe in 55-gallon drums in front of Attu children. The widow Etta Jones remained sullen and sick, but gradually her health improved. Some natives said they saw knife cuts on her wrist.

  By the end of summer, the daily rains on Attu were turning into sleet in the village and snow atop the mountains. Bracing for a counterattack, the Japanese had been digging foxholes and trenches all over the island, but the skies and seas were free of Americans. Winter was coming. The Japanese had no desire to continue operating a tiny prisoner of war camp on a remote mountainous island with some of the worst weather on earth.

  On September 14, 1942, the forty-one remaining prisoners of war of Attu were loaded onto a Japanese merchant ship, the Yoko Maru. They set sail for an Aleutian island to the east, Kiska, which had been conquered by the Japanese the day before they landed on Attu. In the ship’s two-hundred-mile journey across the Bering Sea, an Attuan mother of two, Anecia Prokopioff, died on board and was buried at sea. At Kiska the surviving prisoners were transferred to a bigger ship, the Nagata Maru, and herded into a cargo hold that formerly transported coal. The uncleaned berth was the prisoners’ home for the next two weeks and 1,600 miles across the North Pacific. On September 27, the prisoners, seasick and caked in coal dust, arrived at Otaru, Hokkaido, where the deprivations of war had already set in among the Japanese. There was little food for the guards in the prisoner of war camp and even less for the villagers, so the Attuans scavenged garbage for survival. They soon were beset with tuberculosis, beriberi, dysentery, and starvation. The Japanese transferred Etta Jones, the only Caucasian prisoner, to another POW facility in Yokohama and then to Totsuka, where she was housed with eighteen captured Australian nurses half her age. When she finally was freed at the end of the war, Etta Jones was one month short of her sixty-sixth birthday. She weighed eighty pounds, but at least she survived. Of the forty native Attu villagers shipped to the Otaru camp, only twenty-four got out alive. Twenty-one died, including four of the five babies born in Otaru. No villager, or Etta Jones, returned to live in Attu.

  As a military feint, Attu accomplished little. Unknown to the Japanese at the time, the United States had cracked their diplomatic codes. The June 1942 attack at Midway was no surprise. Alerted to the general timing and location of the coming battle in the Central Pacific, the United States fleet commander, Admiral Chester Nimitz, deftly positioned three aircraft carriers to ambush the Imperial Navy. The Battle of Midway became the largest naval firefight of the war up to that time. The result was a mortally wounded Japanese fleet—four sunken aircraft carriers and one heavy cruiser, more than 200 aircraft destroyed, and over 3,000 men killed, including some of the nation’s most experienced fighter pilots.

  It was Japan’s first major naval defeat in a century, and the country’s military strategists bore heavy responsibility. The two aircraft carriers Japan had sent to battle in the Aleutians might have tipped the balance if they instead had joined the far more important fight at Midway. Yet there was no public acknowledgment of error. Prime Minister Hideki Tojo ordered that the whole debacle at Midway be kept secret from the public. The families of the more than 3,000 dead were falsely led to believe that their loved ones were fighting elsewhere in the Pacific. In fact, most Japanese did not even learn of the crushing failure at Midway until after the war was over. Instead, Tojo diverted public attention with his celebration of “the great Aleutian victory.”

  As for the Americans at Midway, Admiral Nimitz lost a carrier, a destroyer, and 307 men, but his nation, unlike Japan, had the industrial capacity to quickly replace the sunken ships. The Battle of Midway marked the turning point in the Pacific. For the remainder of the war, it would be the United States, not Japan, that set the terms of battle.

  If Attu and the Aleutians had flopped as a decoy for Japanese battle plans, they fared even worse as a prize of war. Three days before the assault on Attu, a Japanese strike force launched an air and naval attack against the United States naval and army bases at Dutch Harbor. With two aircraft carriers, three cruisers, and five destroyers, the raid inflicted some minor damage on the radio station and barracks, but the Japanese were repelled after just two days of fighting. Some Japanese forces were redeployed a few hundred miles west to seize Kiska, which was guarded by only ten U.S. Navy weather technicians and their black-and-white shepherd dog named Explosion. Kiska was about one-third the size of Attu, with a taller volcano but a better harbor. Frustrated by the logistics of Attu, the Japanese decided to consolidate their Aleutian military operations at Kiska.

  After shipping out the prisoners, the Japanese found little reason to remain on Attu. The troops were cold, wet, and sick. With treacherous seas, the resupply from Japan was difficult. Engineers struggled to install any kind of roads or runways on the spongy tundra. Attu had become more trouble than it was worth. By the end of September 1942, the Japanese had pulled out. Foster Jones, John Artumonoff, and Anecia Prokopioff had died for a conquest that was no longer wanted.

  Attu remained empty, or populated with a mere skeletal force, for several weeks. Then Japanese commanders began to second-guess their decision to withdraw. A reconnaissance plane had found the United States building an air base on Adak, an island in the Aleutian chain about halfway between Attu and Dutch Harbor—and within striking distance of Japan. That threat could not be tolerated. Besides, back home in Tokyo, the seizure of U.S. soil in Alaska had been a potent propaganda prize to counterbalance the country’s naval disaster at Midway. Maybe there was something on Attu worth keeping. Maybe the weather would improve. Maybe better road builders could solve the puzzle of Attu’s shifting soil. Maybe the Americans would come to fight after all.

  As the ship with prisoners of war from Attu sailed west to Japan, it was soon replaced by another ship sailing east. On October 29, 1942, the Japanese Special Naval Landing Forces returned to Attu. At first the island was populated mainly by support personnel instructed to find some way to make Attu habitable. Soon after came the troops, hundreds and then thousands of them, trained and prepared for the cold—and ready for war.

  In this second wave of soldiers came a surgeon named Paul Nobuo Tatsuguchi.

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  Heartsick

  On an Imperial Navy ship far from anywhere, Nobuo Tatsuguchi felt queasy. Just a few weeks before, he had been performing surgeries on soldiers south of the equator in the tropical steam of Papua New Guinea. Now he was barreling across the North Pacific to work on an abandoned island with volcanoes encrusted in snow. At home his wife was pregnant and sick. At sea his ship was stalked by American submarines. His journey from Japan to Attu would require two more days, but upon arrival he would be expected to win a war against the nation he loved, perhaps fighting the very college classmates he treasured. More than just his stomach had turned upside down—his world had, too.

  He tried to stay optimistic. Even though he had deployed to Attu in winter, the most brutal season on the island, Tatsuguchi found beauty in his natural surroundings. In a letter to Taeko, he wrote, “Two weeks have passed since we arrived here. In spite of the bad we
ather I’m fine. It got colder today and it’s hailing. I am writing this by candlelight, listening to the raindrops tapping the roof of the tent in the cave. We caught twelve trout in the river here yesterday. Tasty. Reminds me of Lake Chuzenji in Nikko [National Park.] The seaweeds here are dark and taste good. What a thrill to catch a three-foot cod.”

  At least that’s what Taeko thought her husband wrote. Nobuo’s handwriting was notoriously bad. After struggling to read notes from her husband and his former classmates in California, Taeko used to joke that American medical schools must offer a special class in poor penmanship.

  In Tokyo, Taeko did her best to put up a brave front, but the truth was that she was heartsick. She missed him—his dry wit, his gentle teasing, his devotion to family and faith.

  His military pay was only a fraction of what he made before the war as a doctor at the tuberculosis sanitarium. Now Taeko would be expected to support a second child on the same reduced Army pay. Others in Japan were making similar sacrifices, but they hadn’t lived a good life overseas and seen what more was possible. Taeko and Nobuo were not political people. They wanted to raise a family and help their church and one day return to America. Taeko yearned for long walks again with Nobuo in Yosemite National Park, or Nikko National Park. Here or there, they belonged together. She wanted to be with him.

  Nobuo’s letters from Attu were infrequent and redacted by military censors. He was banned from writing about any dates or locations, though it appears from his letters home, as well as what is documented of Japanese troop movements, that Tatsuguchi had arrived on Attu sometime after November 1942. Knowing that all his writing was screened by strangers, Nobuo refrained from any emotional talk with his wife, though even in private times he wasn’t sentimentally effusive. Mostly, he wrote in the matter-of-fact style of an observant surgeon. He was one of five men living in a space that should accommodate only three. Many soldiers spoke in dialects unfamiliar to him. He celebrated the New Year by eating a rice cake and building a snowman from drifts that stretched six feet high. The cod, trout, and salmon he caught were far better than any military food. Attu was so far north that in the winter it received as little as eight hours of light a day, though the fog and clouds were so persistent that it could only rarely be called sunlight. Supply ships carrying mail to and from Japan were infrequent, so Nobuo never knew when or if his notes were reaching home. “I haven’t gotten any mail since I came here. I suspect this will reach you at the same time as the card previously written,” he wrote to Taeko. “Some days I’m busy excessively because of my job and on others I’m not. For the first time since I came here I saw a beautiful starry sky last night. Dark, angry ocean is foggy every day. It snows constantly and the temperature is zero or thereabouts. We live in the damp cave. Sun doesn’t come in and it’s gloomy.”

  Ever the doctor, he passed along medical advice to his pregnant wife: Take vitamins and cod liver oil daily. Try to improve the appetite of their daughter, Misako, by letting her play longer outside. He voiced concern for his wife’s pregnancy, but he could not hide his hope: “Waiting for good news from home,” he wrote.

  Finally it came. A military transport from Hokkaido carried a letter from Taeko to Attu with a joyful, life-changing paragraph: Their second daughter, Mutsuko Laura Tatsuguchi, had been born in February 1943.

  The news buoyed him. The whole thought of having a new daughter to hold, to cuddle—to meet!—turned his spirits. His letters turned noticeably warmer. At home he had a new baby girl, and on Attu spring was arriving. “Four days ago, we moved to a new place surrounded by the open mountains,” he wrote to Taeko one spring day. “Moving out of the damp cave feels good. Sometimes lying down in the sun to enjoy the warmth, then all of a sudden it starts to snow and gets cold. Washing my face with the cold water coming down from the waterfall, and exercise refreshes me. Rising sun reflecting on the ragged mountain covered in snow is such a beautiful sight.”

  He asked Taeko for more supplies—flashlight bulbs, batteries, a musical saw and bow, Ike-Jime fishing needles, and, especially books. Though he had brought along his Gray’s Anatomy from medical school in California—it was a secondhand copy with the name of its prior owner, classmate Ed Lee, scrawled on the inside cover—Tatsuguchi asked his wife to also send along another American medical classic, Lee McGregor’s Synopsis of Surgical Anatomy.

  Wartime Japan was not the easiest place to round up any extra supplies, but Taeko did her best, even adding a tin of cookies and a photo of herself with Misako. Nobuo wrote that he was struck by how much his girl had grown in his months away from home. He teased that the daughter might even grow to become more beautiful than the mother.

  Still, Taeko couldn’t help but notice an increasing change in her husband’s tone. The same months away from home that allowed his daughter to grow so much also seemed to sway Nobuo’s beliefs. He had months of military indoctrination. He was surrounded by hundreds of soldiers who did not tolerate differing opinions. He had little contact with the outside world. He was removed from his church and minister. He was living in an echo chamber of pro-war anti-Americanism. For the first time in his letters home, he had begun to describe the United States as “the enemy.” On shortwave radio, he heard a United States broadcast in Japanese from San Francisco, but he denounced it as “all propaganda.” He even concluded one postcard by proclaiming, “The brave warrior guarding the North Sea is well.” Taeko knew he was brave. She hoped he was joking about being a warrior.

  Their marriage was five years old, but most of the past two years had been spent apart. Instead of worshipping at their Seventh-day Adventist church every Saturday, he was being lectured daily about the glories of the Japanese Army, of the necessity to defend the emperor above all, of the soldier’s code of death before dishonor. Taeko knew that war changed most men. She worried about the impact on her husband, and searched for hints in every note he wrote home.

  Surviving a winter on Attu was character-building. Was it character-changing, too? The Japanese garrison on the island had gone from zero to more than 2,500 men, but these troops looked significantly different from the original invaders. Like Tatsuguchi, the latest Attu occupiers tended to be older and less seasoned. Many were farmers with little formal education beyond their military training. There were signs that they were considered expendable. If Attu were truly crucial to Japanese war goals, then the island wouldn’t have been abandoned in the fall. Besides, the main Japanese fighting force in the Aleutians, more than 6,000 men, was now stationed on Kiska, the smaller island 200 miles to the east. The men of Attu spent their days digging trenches and foxholes. That made sense for defense, but troops struggled and mostly failed to build the runway and roads that would be crucial if Attu were to truly function as a forward base for offensive action against the United States.

  The incessant wind, cold, fog, rain, and snow made life on Attu miserable, but increasingly Tatsuguchi and his fellow soldiers came to view the climate as their life insurance policy. “We call bad weather good here,” he wrote to Taeko. The more ferocious the williwaw, the less likely the Japanese would face an American attack. Still, Tatsuguchi knew it was foolhardy to entrust his life to a plunging barometer. He could hardly help but wonder not only why he was on Attu, but also why Japan was there.

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  Attu

  Laird shivered. After weeks of Army training in the desert of Southern California, he wanted the soldiers around him to think his shakes came from the chill of the San Francisco fog. The reality was more embarrassing. Laird was scared.

  With thousands of other soldiers from his 7th Infantry Division, Laird was boarding a transport ship for a destination unknown. Based on the clothes he had been issued, he suspected he was heading for someplace cool, or at least not the desert. This mission didn’t look like training. It didn’t feel like training. This time, Laird knew, it was the real thing—war.

  At 1 p.m., on April 24, 1943, Laird’s ship and four others set off fro
m San Francisco Bay and turned north. His transport was so crowded that there was barely room to sit. They would be at sea for six days. Men would be forced to sleep in shifts.

  Far off the coast, the soldiers finally learned the basic details of their mission: They were the muscle of what would become Operation Landcrab, the 15,000 men assigned to return Attu and the Aleutian Islands to American control.

  Laird knew little about Alaska and even less about the Aleutians. Attu Island—he had never even heard of that place. The unknown worried him, as it did everyone else, but there was no room for fear on this ship. Laird was now a leader of men, the first sergeant of Company H of the 32nd Infantry, 7th Division, and he knew that any sign of uncertainty in such tight quarters would fly like a spark underground in his old Powhatan Coal Mine.

  His heart already burned with one regret. He wished he had done a better job of saying goodbye to his wife, Rose. Because of his recent promotion, Laird was responsible for making sure his squad shipped out correctly. But the rail station the day before at Ford Ord bustled with thousands of men, and orders were being barked all over. It was controlled chaos. Laird became so preoccupied putting his men in the right order, and with the right gear, that he had time for only a brief kiss for his wife. He tried but failed to keep from choking up. As soon as Rose was out of sight, Laird thought of all the things, the more important things, he should have said. He wanted to say how much he loved her, how much he would miss her, and how much their family meant to him and their future. His wife, their daughter, and his stepdaughter were all counting on him, but the truth was that he was relying on them, too. He hoped Rose knew how much they meant to him, but as he stood in cramped quarters on a troop transport far at sea steaming toward war, he wished he had spelled it out for her exactly. They had helped him turn around his life.