The Storm on Our Shores

by Mark Obmascik

Lieutenant Donald Dwinell of the 32nd Infantry led a charge up Point Able, which towered 2,000 feet above Massacre Valley. The Japanese had fortified the point to rain shells on the invaders below. The point could be gained only by crossing a ridgeline four feet wide with sheer plunges of hundreds of feet on either side. On the exhausting climb upward, Dwinell passed the bodies of four Japanese killed by artillery fire four days prior. Fog swirled. The American soldiers inched along the ridgeline unseen and unheard until the wind shifted and the air cleared without warning. Exposed directly in front of them was a group of Japanese soldiers. Dwinell and his men fired but the Japanese fired back. He leaped with his sergeant and his radioman, William Rehfeld, down into the crater of an artillery shell for protection. Weighed down by his heavy communications equipment, Rehfeld was just a second slower. The Japanese cut him down with a spray of machine gun fire as he jumped into the hole. Bullets had bisected his body from left to right. While his lieutenant and sergeant frantically dug deeper for cover with their hands and a trench knife, Rehfeld lay on top of them, bleeding and asking where he was hit. A few minutes later Rehfeld died on top of his commanders. Enemy fire remained too heavy to permit escape, so the lieutenant and sergeant were forced to lie in the crater on their bellies with their dead comrade pressed across their backs, blood pouring onto their uniforms. They survived hours that way. With nightfall drawing near, the two men were able to roll the body aside and crawl and run from the trailing hail of bullets. The Japanese held Point Able that day.

  MAY 18—BATTLE

  The Yonekawa Detachment abandoned east and west arms and withdrew to Umanose [Fish Hook Ridge]. About sixty wounded came to the field hospital. I had to care for all of them by myself all through the night. Heard that the enemy carried out a landing in Chichagof Harbor. Everyone made combat preparations and waited. Had two grenades ready. Second Lieutenant Omura left for the line on Hokuchin Yama. Said farewell. At night a patient came in who had engaged a friendly unit by mistake and who had received a wound on the wrist. The countersign is “Isshi Hoke.”

  MAY 19—BATTLE

  At night there was a phone call from Sector Unit Headquarters. In some spots on the beach there are some friendly float-type planes waiting. Went into Attu Village church—felt like someone’s home—some blankets were scattered around. Was told to translate a field order presumed to have been dropped by an enemy officer in Massacre Bay. Was ordered to evaluate a detailed sketch map of Massacre and Holtz Bay which was in possession of Captain Robert Edward, adjutant of Colonel Smith. Got tired and went to sleep. First Lieutenant Ujile is now in charge of translation.

  MAY 20—BATTLE

  The hard fighting of our 303rd Battalion in Massacre Bay is fierce, and it is to our advantage. Have captured enemy weapons and have used for fighting. Mowed down ten enemy closing in under the fog. Five of our men and one medical noncommissioned officer died. Heard that enemy pilots’ faces can be seen around Umanose. The enemy naval gun fire near our hospital drops about twenty meters away.

  The Japanese northern force was prowling up the coast of Holtz Bay when Sergeant Arthur Benevich and Private First Class Walter Imbirowicz spotted it: a machine gun outpost, surrounded by snow. Imbirowicz sneaked to within thirty-five yards of the enemy when an unseen Japanese rifleman fired. The company dove for cover, but Imbirowicz was exposed on a snowbank. The air exploded with the blasts of machine guns, rifles, and grenades, and Imbirowicz collapsed into the snow. For the next fifteen hours, the Americans remained pinned down by relentless Japanese fire and were unable to retrieve the body.

  Finally the Japanese withdrew for the night. When American medics bent over to check on their comrade’s dog tags, they witnessed a miracle: Imbirowicz jumped up and ran down the hill to safety. The fallen soldier had only minor wounds on the hand and arm from a hand grenade. He had played dead throughout the fifteen-hour firefight, and lived to tell the tale.

  In the opening days of fighting, American surgeons reported treating an unusual number of belly wounds, mainly because troops were inexperienced and reluctant to dive hard for protection against the muck. As the battle progressed, however, surgeons found the common wound had shifted to the buttocks. Better wet and miserable than dead.

  That was for the Americans. The Japanese, however, seemed to know no injury. Time and again, Laird and other troops would approach a wounded Japanese soldier, only to hear the crack of a rifle or a blast of a grenade. The first two times he witnessed this, Laird thought the wounded enemy was setting off one final counterattack. A few steps closer and he learned otherwise. The Japanese would not surrender. If they could not flee, they would kill themselves. Despite many attempts, the Americans captured only a handful of prisoners. In the United States, editorialists expressed shock and respect at the devotion of the Japanese fighter on Attu. “Unlike their Nazi imitators, whose synthetic savagery merely produced a bully who cracks when the odds are against him, the Japanese are aboriginal savages who will fight to the death and to the last man, and in that respect are even tougher enemies than the Germans,” wrote The New York Times.

  MAY 21—BATTLE

  Was strafed while amputating a patient’s arm. It is the first time since moving over to Chichagof Harbor that I went into an air raid shelter. Enemy plane was a Martin. Nervousness of our commanding officer is severe, and he has said his last word to his officers and noncommissioned officers—that he will die tomorrow. Gave all his articles away. Hasty chap, this fellow. The officers on the front are doing a fine job. Everyone who heard about the actions of the commanding officer became desperate and things became disorderly.

  MAY 22—BATTLE

  At 0600—Air raid again. Strafing killed one medical man. Medical man Okasaki wounded in right thigh and fractured arm. During the night a mortar shell came awfully close.

  Laird had shot and been shot at more times than he could remember. Fighting was intense. He spent hours blasting mortars up the valley, and he spent hours with his belly pinned into the mud, making himself as small as possible. One of the four men in his foxhole had his penis blown off by shrapnel. Another had survived, barely, after being shot through his helmet by a machine gun. Laird himself felt lucky. His toenails had turned black, and the side of his feet had, too. It hurt to walk, but so far his trench foot had not been debilitating. For American troops, the biggest prize anyone could find in an abandoned enemy foxhole was dry socks. The cold had become so persistent, and so miserable, that some US soldiers risked mistaken identity on the battlefield by seizing the superior Japanese clothes and wearing them.

  At one point Laird had unfurled his sleeping bag for the night near a creek. Basic supplies were still scarce. He and his troops lived off occasional K rations eaten cold. He was usually on his own for drinking water, but the combination of rain and snowmelt on Attu kept the creeks brimming. After an exhausting day of fighting and climbing, Laird dipped his canteen into the cold mountain stream. He washed his face, and he drank. He didn’t know when he’d have access to mountain water again, so he drank some more.

  The next day, Laird woke and refilled his canteen. As he advanced a hundred yards up the creek, ready to fight, he found the body of a Japanese solider, dead, facedown, and bleeding into the current. This was the source of Laird’s drinking water. He emptied his canteen and retched.

  The battle toll on both Americans and Japanese was brutal. Time magazine correspondent Robert Sherrod found one Army company being led by its fourth commander. The company had started with 192 men. Twelve were killed and 28 wounded. Another 43 were lost to exposure, frostbite, and trench foot. Forty-eight more were sick, shell-shocked, missing, or otherwise unable to fight. That meant only 61 of the original 192 could still fight. The survivors were taken aback by the dedication of the Japanese. “I thought I was going to capture one of the sons of bitches the other day,” a private told Sherrod. “I was standing over his foxhole and he was badly wounded. But he reached for his gun and I had to shoot him. I don’t care whether you call it
fanaticism or just plain guts, they fight to the last man. They are tough bastards.” The next day the company mounted its second assault on a high Japanese machine gun and mortar nest known as Buffalo Nose. Of the 61 Americans who attacked Buffalo Nose, only 25 returned. They did not win Buffalo Nose. They could not fight again without reinforcements. The weather on Attu was a powerful foe. The Japanese were even tougher.

  MAY 23—BATTLE

  Seventeen friendly medium bombers destroyed a cruiser offshore. By naval gun firing, a hit was scored on the pillar pole of our tent for patients, and the tent gave in and two died instantly. From 0200 in the morning until 1600 stayed in foxholes. The day’s rations about 1 go, 5 hakies (a pound and a half), nothing more. Officers and men alike in frost. Everybody looked around for food and stole everything they could find.

  MAY 24—BATTLE

  It sleeted and was extremely cold. Stayed at Misumi barracks alone. A great number of shells were dropped by naval gunfire. Rocks and mud fell all over the roof. It fell down. In a foxhole about five yards away Hayasaka, a medical man, died instantly by a piece of shrapnel through his heart.

  13

  * * *

  Sunday

  A day of Laird’s fighting was chronicled at the time in an official War Department book, The Capture of Attu: Tales of World War II in Alaska, As Told by the Men Who Fought There. The book was reported and written as a group project by Alaska soldiers, led by Lieutenant Robert Mitchell and including Dashiell Hammett, the dean of the hard-boiled detective novel and author of bestsellers such as The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, and Red Harvest. During the war, Hammett was stationed for eighteen months in the Aleutians and edited the Army newspaper on Adak Island. Though the specific author of the section on Laird is unclear, the writing is much jauntier than typical Army fare. Laird was proud to be featured.

  Here is the account:

  AN ATTU SUNDAY

  1st Sgt. Charles W. Laird

  Company H, 32nd Infantry

  A little thing like a war wasn’t going to stop 1st Sgt. Charles W. Laird from spending a good old American Sunday, although he admits it took a few field expeditions to get it done. The battle had pushed through Clevesy Pass and down into Jim Fish Valley by Sunday, May 23. It was a very cold miserable morning: an icy drizzle of half rain, half snow was falling while Lt. Dean Galles and Sergeant Laird slopped around in the mud, digging in Company H’s CP. (Command Post.) They could keep their bodies warm but their hands and feet were freezing off. Sergeant Laird worked as long as he could, with mud sticking to his shovel, then he told Lieutenant Galles he was about to give up. He said he was going to take a walk and keep walking until he got warm. Lieutenant Galles told him to go ahead so Laird started off. He planned to visit all of his machine-gun squads, and during his tour he got farther off to the right than he planned. It was very foggy and unless you were careful you would suddenly look around and discover yourself lost. Laird did just that. He looked up into a draw and saw four well-hidden Jap tents. From the distance he couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw two men near one of the tents. The company had been firing into that area the evening before and Laird wasn’t sure how far the riflemen had advanced. Those men might be Japanese, was the cautioning thought he gave himself; but Jap tents always meant stores of dry socks, canned heat, and maybe matches and dry insoles. He decided to take a chance and go on to the tents.

  When he got close enough to see some detail through the fog he saw smoke coming from the top of the nearest tent. He hurried up to it and then he heard American voices. He pulled back the flap and looked in. In the center of the tent in a large tin box, some soldiers had built a small, very smoky fire. Sgt. R. L. (“Pinky”) Holman and Lt. William B. Frost from Company F were there and several others too, huddled around the little fire. Their faces were grimy and whiskered and haggard, but they were smiling and muttering over the meager warmth of the fire. Pinky even had his shoes off and was painfully wiggling his doughy looking toes over the can. Laird went in and stood by the fire a few minutes.

  Before long another character came in. He was just an ordinary looking soldier, beat-up, muddy, the weight of fatigue pulling hard at the edges of his face. He spoke to the men inside and added comments to the trickle of conversation about the fight, like any GI. Men were snooping through the litter in the tent, picking up a dry sock or a glove and then returning to the fire. For a small moment all the sound in the tent stopped and the newcomer was the only man standing.

  He said, “Well, it isn’t exactly an appropriate place to hold a service, I guess, but this is Sunday . . .” The circle of ragged roughnecks looked at him. No one spoke, and Sergeant Laird quickly thought, What is this? Some GI pulling a wise one. Pinky courteously lowered his bare feet and shoved them down into his boots. Chaplain Clarence J. Merriman, the muddy, tired soldier, pulled out his small book of scriptures and read. The circle of lined, gaunt faces watched the chaplain, and they listened. They didn’t hear the words, the words weren’t important then. But they heard what each of them needed to hear for himself. And then as the helmeted heads bowed over their rifles, the chaplain said The Lord’s Prayer.

  Lieutenant Frost coughed, and Pinky hung his feet over the fire again. The chaplain said, “If you find any written documents or things around here, give them to me and I’ll take them to G-2.” The men turned over several manuals and postcards and things to the chaplain as he left to look for some matches. Church was over. Sergeant Laird went in search of matches himself, and he and the chaplain and a fat soldier were in the tent across from the “chapel” when a Jap machine gun opened up. The tent popped as the bullets ripped into it and the paper on the floor hopped around like leaves in a whirlwind. The three men dived for the floor as another burst sang over their heads, tearing gashes in the fat boy’s parka. The doorway was blocked by the fire so the chaplain ripped a hole in the back of the tent and rushed through it, with the fat boy on his heels. Laird stayed low while the third burst struck, then he made a dash for the hole. Everyone else had miraculously disappeared. Laird jumped over a bank at the back of the tent and dashed to a creek bed in the flat below. He considered the possibility that his own guns were firing at him and thought he might even show himself and perhaps the firing would stop. He got up out of the creek and waved, then dived back into the creek bed as a burst of bullets ripped the tundra close to where he had been standing. For several long minutes he lay still, then slowly and carefully he began working his way down the creek and toward Engineer Hill.

  It was about 20 minutes after the first burst had hit the tent and Laird was on his belly moving across an exposed part of the creek bed, when he saw a flash in the creek. His eyes lit up and he whistled through his teeth. The biggest trout he had ever seen had ducked under the bank right below where he was lying. Laird pulled up the sleeves of his shirt and jacket as high as he could get them and carefully slipped his outspread fingers into the water. Slowly he worked his hands over the bank and back under the overhanging grass and tundra. Then he felt the big fish. He made a grab with his right hand and caught the trout around the gills. After a round of violent splashes and grabs and grunts he rolled back from the creek holding a fine, big, solid three-and-a-half pounder tight in both hands. He wanted to holler “Yippee!” and jump up but he remembered his little slant-eyed buddy with the machine gun. So, holding his fish tightly, he worked his way cautiously back along the creek until he was sure he was out of sight in the fog. Then he got up and quickly cut across to where Lieutenant Galles and the CP were located.

  Lieutenant Galles was tickled to see the fish and suggested they roll it in mud and bake it. They had a helluva time. The mud wasn’t the right kind and it kept crumbling off, and the fire wouldn’t burn, but finally they got the fish baked and even without salt it was the best fish dinner either one of them had ever had. “Just like Sunday back home,” Sergeant Laird was saying. “Go to church in the morning and then go fishing, come home and have a good supper, and then . . .” A Ja
p 70mm from somewhere up on the mountain had spotted them. A piece of shrapnel from the first shell ripped through a box of ammunition that Sergeant Laird had been sitting on. Lieutenant Galles looked up from his hole a few minutes later. “Laird, this may be like a Sunday back at your home,” he said, and Sergeant Laird replied from his hole, “Well I was going to add ‘with some slight variations,’ sir, but I was interrupted.”

  Laird was thrilled to be featured, but the story wasn’t entirely accurate. For starters, Laird was the one who cooked the fish, not Lieutenant Galles. The bigger issue, of course, was the depiction of Laird’s typical Sunday back home as something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. That certainly wasn’t the case while Laird grew up in Appalachia, where there was rarely enough food for a comfortable family dinner, the mother was hardly ever home, and the family did not regularly attend church. It also wasn’t true in California, where Laird lived on the Army base and only occasionally was able to see his wife and her daughter. Still, Laird enjoyed the story enough to send it to family and friends. He liked it better than ducking gunfire.

  14

  * * *

  “Come On! Let’s Go!”

  MAY 25—BATTLE

  Naval gun firing, aerial bombardment, trench warfare—the worst is yet to come. The enemy is constructing his posts and positions. Battalion commander died at Umanose. They cannot fully accommodate their patients. It has been said that at Massacre Bay district, the road coming to Sector Unit Headquarters is isolated. Am suffering from diarrhea and feeling dizzy.

  MAY 26—BATTLE

  By naval gun firing, it felt like the Misumi barracks blew up, and things shook tremendously. Consciousness becomes vague. One tent burned down by a hit from incendiary bombs. Strafing planes hit the next room. Two hits by a .50 caliber gun; one stopped in the ceiling and the other penetrated. My room looks like an awful mess from the sand and pebbles that have come from the roof. Hirose, first lieutenant from the medical corps, is wounded. There was a ceremony of granting the Imperial Edict. The last line of Umanose was broken through. No hope for reinforcements. Will die for cause of Imperial Edict.