For the United States, this meant steady leadership, a marked improvement in cold-weather gear for troops; longer and better training for the harsh Aleutians climate; much greater support via Air Force and Navy bombing; and a vast increase in troop numbers.
For the Japanese, it meant an audacious trick.
Dick Laird and the other survivors of Company H spent the weeks after the Battle of Attu trying to make the island livable. They built a camp. They hauled in supplies. They ate hot food and drank hot coffee. They nursed back their feet and hands and ears and everything else that had turned black and frostbitten. And they slept.
For the first few days it was hard to describe what Laird did at night as sleep. It was a surrendering to exhaustion, an unconsciousness, even a hibernation. He would awake with a jolt and not know where he was. He felt like he had crawled into an extremely deep and dark cave.
And then the nightmares started.
Always there was fog and foreboding. Sometimes he saw his runner approaching. Other times a pile of Japanese bodies was rocking and bursting with the slam of each incoming bullet. Too often it all ended with the faces of the men he had killed.
He began to wake nightly in a cold sweat. Laird knew he must try to fall back asleep, but he dreaded it. He had done his job. He had been courageous. He had won a top medal. Yet the nightmares would not go away.
In his waking hours Laird threw himself into his work. Attu was a vastly different place when people weren’t trying to kill you. In June and July, winter finally faded, and the Aleutians were reborn. It still rained daily, but now willows sprouted. Wildflowers bloomed. Cliffs and rocks bustled with the comings and goings of thousands of nesting seabirds. Salmon massed in bays and creeks in numbers so thick that Laird could catch a fish with his hands, a daily rerun of his story in The Capture of Attu. During hard times in Appalachia, Laird had learned to live off nature, but he had never imagined a bounty as vast as Alaska in the summer.
On a whim, the Army had brought in some garden seeds, and Laird volunteered to plant them. The results startled him. Seeds didn’t sprout—they exploded. In June and July the sun never set completely on Attu. The sky just dimmed gray about four hours a day. Even with clouds and fog, the near-constant sunlight, combined with daily rains, made plants grow rapidly. Laird was gorging on fresh radishes and turnips and carrots. Could this really be the same place where, just weeks before, men had launched a desperate suicide attack in part because they could find no food?
While Laird tended his garden, his superiors braced for an even more intensive war. They were assembling a force of 35,000 men—nearly triple the size of the Attu invaders—to overthrow the Japanese on Kiska. This time, the men would have clothes designed for the frigid and wet. They also would be trained to fight in Alaska, not the desert sands of Africa. They would be backed by formidable naval and air power. They would be aided by a lengthy naval blockade of Kiska that would isolate the Japanese. The commanders prepared for an August invasion.
Before they could bring the fire, however, they worried about a Japanese resupply—or a counterattack. Imperial Navy ships had been gathering in the Kurile Islands port of Paramushiro north of Japan. Though the United States Air Force and Navy had been pounding Kiska for months—the Japanese had withstood more than seven million pounds of bombs—the generals could not afford to have the enemy sneak up on them.
On July 21, an armada of fifteen Japanese ships cast off from Paramushiro toward the Aleutians. The next day, seventeen United States battleships, cruisers, and destroyers arrived at Kiska to bolster the existing blockade. The Americans spent the next hours pounding the island with hundreds of thousands of pounds of shells from 5-, 6-, and 14-inch guns. Just as their assault was concluding, however, the admirals received a disturbing report: An American plane had detected seven enemy ships in the seas between Paramushiro and the Aleutians.
Fearing an attack from behind, Admiral Kinkaid abruptly pulled his warships from Kiska and ordered them to find and destroy the approaching Japanese fleet. His decision left the harbor at Kiska unguarded.
In the predawn hours of July 26, U.S. warships detected seven radar blips just fifteen miles away from Kiska. Sailors girded for battle. The war at sea was on.
The U.S. fleet navigated west of the island to better intercept the moving targets. Guns roared at a range of eight to twelve miles. Each 14-inch gun weighed 180,000 pounds. It required a quarter ton of propellant to blast a 1,400-pound projectile up to thirteen miles. Even after firing 518 rounds from the big guns, and 487 shells from the 8-inch guns, the radars still showed seven pips. There were no explosions or any other evidence that the enemy had been hit. On radar, the targets still moved. More shots yielded no change. After a half hour of fury, the guns were silenced. The seven pips blinked on the radar, then disappeared.
At sunrise the American fleet and warplanes scoured the area for crippled and destroyed ships. They found nothing—no flotsam, no oil slicks, no lifeboats.
All seven pips had been detected repeatedly by radars on five separate U.S. ships. It was hard to believe all were faulty. Had the Imperial Navy outwitted them? Were the Americans firing on Japanese submarines? How could so much firepower be trained on seven different targets without any apparent damage?
The whole mystery became known as the Battle of the Pips. It wasn’t until years later that the admirals believed they had finally figured out what had happened.
Postwar investigations found that no Japanese ship was within a hundred miles of any of the American blasts. Instead, the world’s greatest navy was targeting rafts of seabirds, sooty shearwaters that migrated through the Aleutians every July in numbers so vast they could be detected by radar. (Years later, film director Alfred Hitchcock would see another mass of sooty shearwaters so large and so crazed in Monterey Bay, California, that he was inspired to make a horror film called The Birds.) During the war in the Aleutians, sea radar was still a relatively new invention, and the Navy did not have enough experience viewing pips on a screen to be able to distinguish feathered creatures from warships.
The Battle of the Pips had no known human casualties. It did, however, set up an even bigger embarrassment for the U.S. military.
Dick Laird was scared again. For the second time in three months, he was jammed into a troop transport and headed for a frigid landing beach. It was August 15. His destination was Kiska. The word was that the Japanese would be twice as strong here as on Attu.
He and his Company H had been assured that the job would be done right this time. Their invasion force was vast—29,000 Americans and 5,300 Canadians. In the four days before the assault, U.S. warplanes had dropped 400 tons of bombs on Kiska. The enemy should be softened, but that’s the same thing the commanders said last time.
Through the fog the transport motored, then abruptly halted. The Navy had miscalculated local tides, which were low, not high, and several boats ran aground on volcanic rock. Others, including Laird’s, bobbed in wait behind them. They were stuck in a traffic jam and were sitting ducks. A shot from the enemy in the highlands would kill or cripple them all. For the first time Laird was grateful for the Aleutian fog, which shrouded him and his men.
Slowly, painfully, and behind schedule, Laird and his men landed on the beach. They found an eerie calm. No snipers fired at them. He advanced forward. Still nothing. Was this Attu all over again? Were the Japanese conceding the beaches, only to remain hidden in the fog and strategic heights of the mountains? Laird shuddered. He heard gunshots in the distance, just as he had two months earlier. If they were going to repeat the Battle of Attu, he at least knew what to expect. He would dig in. He would do his best to stay dry. He carried enough food to last for days. At the same time, he hoped the much larger invasion force would make for a much shorter firefight.
With every step deeper into Kiska he expected to hear a blast from mortars or grenades or artillery. Instead, there was only sporadic gunfire. All they found moving by the end of the first day was
a half dozen dogs, including the one named Explosion, which had belonged to American troops captured during the original Japanese takeover of Kiska.
Laird’s second day on Kiska dawned with the rattle of machine gun fire and shelling from offshore American naval ships. Some soldiers swore they saw Japanese dug into bunkers, but Laird hadn’t seen any. In the fog it was easy to mistake rocks for men, or, worse, Americans for Japanese.
Soon Laird heard the whispers among his men: Where was the enemy? Had the Japanese evacuated?
It turned out they had. While the United States refueled after waging war against seabirds during the Battle of the Pips, a convoy of Japanese ships had sneaked into the unguarded harbor at Kiska and started whisking away troops. The Japanese had learned their lesson on Attu. Their position in the Aleutians was indefensible. They did not want to fight to the last man, again, in a place with no strategic value. In their rush to leave the island before being discovered, the Japanese troops did their best to quietly destroy anything of value. They also scrawled insults on the walls of their barracks, such as, “We shall come again and kill out separately, Yanki-joker,” and, “You are dancing by foolische order of Rousebelt.” Then the Japanese filed onto the beach with their rucksacks and rifles. Because their convoy was short of space—in the Aleutian fog, five of the rescuing Japanese ships had collided and rendered two unusable—troops were ordered to pitch their rifles into the sea before coming aboard. In just an hour, 5,183 soldiers crammed onto eight ships and set off from Kiska.
Four days later, the Japanese transport arrived peacefully with all troops in the Kurile Islands at Paramushiro. Kiska had been vacant for nearly three weeks before the Allies invaded.
In the fog, Americans saw none of this. The commanders could not believe so many soldiers could escape without detection. For nearly a week, Laird and the other troops were ordered to scour Kiska for hiding Japanese. In the dense fog, many shots were fired at unclear targets, though never by Laird.
At the end of the week, twenty-four American and four Canadian soldiers had been killed by friendly fire. Four more lost their lives to Japanese booby traps. Seventy-one died when their ship, the Abner Read, struck a floating mine. Another 168 were wounded, injured, or sick.
All told, the Allies suffered more than 300 casualties to claim a deserted island a thousand miles from the Alaska mainland. According to war correspondent Robert Sherrod, the ridiculous operation gave birth to a new word—JANFU, an acronym that Time magazine cleaned up for readers as a Joint Army Navy Foul Up.
Nevertheless, the United States had reclaimed Alaska. Six thousand men were dead—about 1,000 Americans and Canadians, and 5,000 Japanese—but the maps of North America did not have to be changed. In the coming months, the United States would try to build airstrips and harbors in the Aleutians to aid a projected northern attack against Japan, but ultimately the militarization of Alaska had little consequence on the overall war. Winds blew. Waves rolled. Snow drifted. In time the village and barracks on Attu were abandoned by the Army. No flag could survive the williwaws of the Bering Sea. On the landscape of Attu, the biggest lasting change caused by World War II was the cemetery.
Dick Laird knew there was a fine line separating him from that cemetery. He had done his best on two beachheads, and he had escaped without injury, but he had killed foe and friend. The harsh climate would reclaim most war scars on the landscape of Attu. Laird’s scars were not healing. His nightmares continued. His feet hurt. His hacking cough continued. Not long ago, while dropping deep into the blackness of the Powhatan Coal Mine in Ohio, Laird had dreamed of an escape to a new life. This was not the life he had envisioned. This life was filled with dread. He was committed to destroying the enemy, but he hoped he would not destroy himself in the process.
Shortly after Kiska had been secured, Laird and his men received their new orders. They were being shipped to Hawaii. Laird knew little about it. He hoped it was better than war in Alaska. He doubted it could be worse.
17
* * *
News
Taeko Tatsuguchi heard the news in the same way as the rest of Japan. There was a government announcement: Attu had been lost, and there were no survivors. She didn’t know what to make of it. It had been months since she had heard from her husband. She didn’t know where he was. For security reasons, military censors had banned Nobuo in his letters home from disclosing his field location. Based on his interest in books on Alaska, and his postcard joke that he might soon see classmates from medical school, Taeko guessed her husband might be headed to the Aleutians. However, the Japanese force was split between two islands, Attu and Kiska, with the main force deployed at Kiska. If her husband really was in Alaska, she could only hope that he was deployed 200 miles from Attu at Kiska.
“I still believed he would come back as I saw some people who had been reported as dead returned after several years,” Taeko told a reporter years later.
When the telegram finally arrived, Taeko didn’t have to read it to know what it said. Her weeks of praying and worrying and crying had come to this.
Nobuo Tatsuguchi had been dead nearly three months before anyone told Taeko. The Imperial Army waited until all soldiers had been evacuated from Kiska before revealing the fate of those on Attu. His body would remain on Attu, an island she had never heard of. She had no idea her husband had written a diary, which was in the hands of the Americans. Her last physical evidence of Nobuo was the lock of hair he had sent months earlier.
She wavered between despair and emptiness. He did not want to fight this war. He was pulled into it by duty and obligation. Both Nobuo and Taeko thought he could remain true to his faith by serving as a healer, not a warrior. She could not say whether his life had ended as a pacifist. She could say only that it had ended.
Every time she looked at her young daughters, she saw his face. She missed his quiet strength, his gentleness, his quirky insistence on discerning the correct name of every living creature in the wilderness. His side of the bed would never be warm again.
Taeko had no obvious path to survival. She had given up her college education to follow him. Now she had two girls to support, the youngest only six months old. In the depths of war, Japan’s economy was in a shambles. Food, clothes, electricity—everything had strict limits. She had no easy access to anything. But there was no time to feel sorry for herself. “I dried my eyes and finally started to move forward. I had to raise my two daughters.”
Worst of all, she would have to do it alone. Before Pearl Harbor, Taeko’s parents had moved from Japan to Hawaii as missionaries for the Seventh-day Adventists. Because of the war, she could not contact them in the American islands. She needed their love and advice. Her parents did not know Taeko had a second child. They also didn’t know she was a war widow.
As the weeks passed, Taeko’s longing increased. She needed emotional help and financial help. Without parents, she had few options. What she did have, however, was a dream. If she could get through this—raising two young children as a single mother during a war she didn’t believe in—then she would set out to rejoin her parents in Hawaii.
Dick Laird couldn’t believe it. He’d heard they existed, but all he’d ever seen were photographs. Now he was holding one in his hands, proof that even an Appalachian boy could bask in an exotic tropical locale.
He was in Hawaii with his first coconut.
More specifically, he was stationed at Schofield Barracks in Honolulu. After the agony of Attu and Kiska, the 7th Infantry Division had been redeployed to Laird’s version of paradise. He could think of no better symbol of his contentment than the coconut. Honolulu was so lush that he could find a coconut on the sidewalk, slash it with his knife, and drink the coconut water as refreshment. It sure beat shooting squirrels back home.
Enthralled with the whole idea of the coconut, Laird shared it with the people he loved. He taped an address tag on the hairy shell and mailed it, unboxed, to his daughter Peggy. The postman who delivered it to he
r at home in Ohio was thrilled. He, too, had never held a coconut.
Keeping in touch with his wife was trickier. Laird was intensely self-conscious about his eighth-grade education. He hated to write letters home that he knew would be filled with spelling and grammar mistakes. Rose had graduated from high school and, Laird believed, she was smart enough for college. Writing made him feel stupid. Plus, he wasn’t even sure what to say. He told his wife about his Silver Star, but would not describe how and why he had won it. He was afraid his wife might see him as an animal. Though he would write an occasional note to Rose, he felt better sending a package with a grass skirt or sea shells.
In Hawaii, Laird and his troops walked the streets with pride. They had seen the enemy and defeated him. Their generals and admirals may have issued some poor orders, but the fighting men on the ground overcame them. Laird felt a kinship with anyone else who fought in the Aleutians. If they could win in Alaska, they could win anywhere. No wise soldier ever felt invincible, but Laird did feel mighty.
Sometimes, though, pride boiled over into trouble. On a weekend pass, Laird started drinking and did not stop until he ran into a Marine. Neither needed a reason to insult the other; the Army vs. Marines service rivalry was that intense. Marines thought they were tougher. Army Joes thought the Marines were glory hounds. In fact, after Attu, some Army commanders grumbled that their heroics went largely unnoticed in the press back home partly because they weren’t as skilled at self-promotion as the Marines.
When the Marine called Laird a dogface, the alcohol and testosterone took over. Outside the bar, under a giant banyan tree, and surrounded by dozens of cheering soldiers, Laird and the Marine went at it. “Get him, Sarge!” the Army men cried. “Get him good, Sarge!”
Laird expected a fight but got a jumping. The Marine leveled him with a kick to the groin, then pounded his ears and face and demanded that Laird say quit. Laird wouldn’t. With the Marine still pummeling him, Laird managed to stand and rear back until he forced the man onto the hood of a parked car. Fortunes reversed, Laird was about to slam the man into the bumper when the crowd called out, “MPs! MPs coming!”
The Storm on Our Shores Page 16