50 Years Later, Battle of Attu Stirs Questions, Memories : Aleutians: Japanese occupation and their eventual ouster had little direct impact on the war. It marked the first time invaders had succeeded in taking U.S. territory since the War of 1812.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska —  In the three weeks it took U.S. forces to recapture the Aleutian island of Attu, more than 500 Americans were killed and 3,330 were wounded; nearly all 2,350 Japanese defenders died.

As things turned out, the May, 1943, battle had almost no direct impact on the war’s outcome.

“It was a campaign that shouldn’t have been fought,” said John Cloe, a historian with the 11th Air Force at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage. “We should have just isolated the Japanese and let them have it.”

So why didn’t the United States just blockade the remote island 50 years ago and let the brutal Aleutian weather deal with the Japanese garrison?

Perhaps, Cloe said, military planners were embarrassed because invaders had succeeded in taking U.S. territory for the first time since the War of 1812. The Japanese landed on Attu and Kiska, 175 miles to the east, in June, 1942.

“The reason, I guess, they took back the Aleutians was because it was a psychological blot,” he said.

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So instead of using the weather as an ally, the American forces fought two foes--the Japanese and the elements. The wind, freezing temperatures and rain took more Americans out of the fighting than did the Japanese.

More than 2,100 casualties were recorded from exposure, exhaustion and other weather-related causes in the three-week battle.

“There’s no trees, and the williwaws are something like 100 m.p.h. every day. It was tough terrain. We didn’t know what the hell anyone would want it for,” said Albert Trepanier, 71, of Rutland, Vt.

Trepanier was a lieutenant with the Army’s 7th Infantry Division when troops landed at Holtz Bay and Massacre Bay on May 11, 1943. Almost immediately, he realized the division’s equipment was ill-suited for fighting on Attu’s muskeg bogs and snowy mountains.

“We were equipped with beautiful looking parachute boots, but they were worthless,” he said. “We ended up with immersion foot and frostbite.”

Weather aside, this was a bloody brawl. For every 100 Japanese soldiers killed, 71 Americans were killed or injured in battle.

The Japanese, cut off from reinforcements and without hope of rescue, fought to the death. Only 29 Japanese soldiers were captured.

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Trepanier and the rest of the 7th Division weren’t supposed to fight on an island just 380 miles from Russia’s coast. Until late 1942, the division trained in California’s Mojave Desert in preparation for battle against Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps.

But when the Joint Chiefs of Staff decided to retake the Aleutians, the task fell to the 7th because they were the only battle-ready troops on the West Coast.

“We had just beaten the pants off Patton in the Mojave,” remembered Don Johnson of Topeka, Kan. “That made it a very strange place, after coming out of 120-degree weather and going to a place where there’s snow.”

Johnson was a clerk in a chemical warfare company when he landed on Attu. He recalls trying to dig a foxhole and having it fill with water. The volcanic beach sand was black. And the williwaws, violent winds that batter the Aleutians, are a permanent memory.

“I’d be in my cot, in my tent, and zoom, here comes a williwaw and there goes my tent. It just disappeared,” Johnson said. After repitching the tent several times, Johnson and his bunkmates dynamited a foot-deep hole into the lava and set the tent in it.

The wind was annoying, but the fog proved deadly for both sides.

John Duncan, now 75 and living in his native Great Falls, Mont., watched two Navy F4F Wildcats fly through the fog and into the side of a mountain near Holtz Bay, in Attu’s northeast corner.

Duncan commanded an infantry company. The Japanese, he said, were dressed in white and were shrouded by the fog.

“You couldn’t see where the fire was coming from,” he said.

The battle’s last shots were fired May 30, Memorial Day. It was two days after the last 700 Japanese staged a desperate attack on what came to be known as Engineer Hill. When the Japanese were driven back by a hastily arranged line of cooks, clerks and engineers, about 500 survivors held hand grenades to their chests and committed suicide.

A report in Life magazine at the time quoted one American officer, after viewing the corpses, as saying, “That just ain’t soldiering.”

The battle proved unimportant to the rest of the war. American bombers used the far Aleutian bases to bomb Japan’s northernmost home islands several times, but a planned invasion of Japan from the north wasn’t necessary.

Still, Cloe said, the Army learned much about amphibious landings and Japanese tactics from the effort. It was only the third such landing of the war, and the first for Army troops.

“The battle of Attu set the pattern for the rest of the Pacific campaign. We learned about the tenacity of the Japanese, their ability to fight to the death.”

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