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During World War II, the United States fought battles across Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific.
However, one of the war’s most unusual campaigns took place in a remote, frozen corner of North America.
It was a campaign fought in some of the worst weather imaginable, on islands so isolated that most Americans had never heard of them.
It also marked the only time during World War II that enemy forces occupied North American territory.
Learn more about the Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Pearl Harbor was a powerful wake-up call for American military planners. The great ocean barriers were not as impenetrable as initially hoped, and Americans woke up to the news of Pearl Harbor, realizing they had underestimated their vulnerability.
Pearl Harbor was a key target for Japanese military planners, who hoped a victory there could shift the balance of power in the Pacific. While Pearl Harbor was undeniably a tactical success, it failed in its ultimate strategic purpose. It did not break American resolve, nor did it inflict the devastating blow to the American navy they had hoped for, because their aircraft carriers were not in port at the time.
Unbeknownst to American military leaders, Pearl Harbor was not an isolated one-off event. Japanese ambitions involved controlling all of the Pacific. At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, Japan controlled vast territory in the Western Pacific. Before and immediately after the attack, military officials were more concerned about islands such as Guam and the Wake Island, which were US territories.
Following the surprise airstrike on Pearl Harbor, Japan sought to consolidate its dominance across the Pacific by seizing Midway Atoll in the central Pacific and establishing control over the Aleutian Islands.
The Aleutian Islands are a chain of more than 300 volcanic islands extending southwest from Alaska, forming an arc between the Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean. They are part of the then territory, and now state, of Alaska.
Ever since Russia transferred ownership in 1867 through Secretary of State William Seward’s Alaska Purchase, the United States has maintained control of the Aleutian archipelago. Seward considered these islands pivotal to advancing American influence throughout the Pacific region.
The islands had limited strategic value as a coal refueling station for American frigates and as a port on key commercial routes to East Asia. In fact, the furthest island on the chain, Attu Island, is closer to Tokyo than Seattle.
In June of 1942, Japan was ready to execute Operation AL and Operation MI. The Japanese military named its operations using a two-letter code based on location. Operation AL was the invasion of Alaska, and Operation MI was the invasion of Midway Island.
The two attacks were conducted in tandem, with Operation AL designed to divert attention from the larger Operation MI.
Japan’s second-in-command of the Pacific Fleet, Vice-Admiral Ch?ichi Nagumo, was placed in charge of the Aleutian campaign. Historian David Kennedy outlined his strategy and confidence: Nagumo…trusted the complicated battle plan for the Midway operation, which called for a diversionary raid on Alaska’s Aleutian Island chain to draw off American naval strength. And of course Yamamoto and Nagumo both took comfort from the reflection that they held again, as they had so triumphantly at Pearl Harbor, the hole card of secrecy.
While the initial assault on the Aleutians was a tactical surprise, the operation was not as secret as they thought it was. Most importantly, it did not divert the American forces as intended.
The Americans were ready for the attack on Midway Island, which I have covered in a previous episode. The US fleet won a decisive victory over Japan at Midway Island, thanks in large part to American codebreakers who knew the attack was imminent.
However, American commanders debated what Japan’s objectives were in the Aleutians. The Aleutian Islands stretch nearly 1,200 miles, making it virtually impossible to pinpoint an exact landing site.
Compounding this blindness was the territory’s vulnerability. The region had only a handful of functioning aircraft and a few thousand service members scattered across hundreds of miles of wilderness. The region’s isolation and lack of infrastructure made communication, reconnaissance, and troop movement agonizingly slow.
To American planners sitting in Washington, a frozen, fog-shrouded chain of volcanic rocks didn’t seem like a target worth fighting for, let alone one Japan would bother invading. They had little military or economic value.
Nonetheless, Japan was committed to the region for a northern push, and on June 3, 1942, a Japanese carrier aircraft bombed Dutch Harbor in the eastern Aleutian Islands.
At the time of the June 1942 bombings, U.S. strength at Dutch Harbor numbered about 2,000 to 2,500 Army and Navy personnel manning coastal defenses and anti-aircraft batteries, supported by a handful of auxiliary and naval vessels in port.
The harbor’s naval strength was limited to two aging destroyers, a single submarine, and a floating barracks ship, the SS Northwestern. Only one destroyer, the SS Gillis, was fully operational.
The harbor’s aircraft were also sparse, with a few P-40 fighters and a PBY seaplane.
American forces had radar defense systems at Dutch Harbor; unfortunately, difficult terrain, dense fog, and precipitation limited their effectiveness.
The Japanese assault on Dutch Harbor was a success, and it was costly for its defenders, as the Americans suffered forty casualties.
One interesting story from the Battle of Dutch Harbor was the Akutan Zero. It was a plane piloted by Tadayoshi Koga that was shot down in the fighting. While Koga was killed, his Mitsubishi Zero, one of the most famous aircraft of WWII, crashed with little damage in a peat bog on the island of Akutan in the Aleutian archipelago.
As I covered in a previous episode, American troops discovered the Akutan Zero and repaired it. Engineers then studied the resurrected plane, which gave them crucial information about its strengths and weaknesses which was passed on to American fighter pilots
Just three days later, on June 6, 1942, Japanese forces captured Kiska Island, seizing a 10-man U.S. Navy weather detachment who were subsequently sent to prison camps in Japan. However, not all of the weather detachment were captured.
One of the most harrowing stories of the invasion is that of William C. House, the Naval weatherman who escaped just moments before the Japanese arrived and evaded capture on the island for fifty days.
With their barracks under attack, House had the wherewithal to burn the communication logs so that the Japanese couldn’t access them. From there, he frantically escaped out of the back of the barracks and into the dense fog.
House survived for fifty days without rations, eating what he could scavenge. He reported his diet in his accounts: By experimenting with my environment, I was able to subsist at that location for another forty days. There was a plentiful supply of new tundra for food. By this time I discovered that I could eat the inside, tender part of the stem. It was tasty, something like fresh corn. I was able to eat enough tundra for a daily bowel movement. Angle worms from the nearby stream provided some protein even though they were a little bitter.
As he approached his fiftieth day on the run, he realized he was dying. He was emaciated and was left with no choice but to surrender. He made his way to the old barracks, waving pieces of his underwear as a white flag. When he surrendered to Japanese forces on the 50th day, he weighed only 80 lbs (36 kg).
The Japanese continued their advance to Attu Island on June 7th. After storming the island, they reached a weather radio station manned by Charles Jones. Jones quickly sent warnings of the invasion to Dutch Harbor, then broke the radio so the enemy couldn’t take it.
Jones was subsequently executed.
His wife, Etta, the island’s schoolteacher, was captured along with the entire native population of the island, consisting of 42 Aleut villagers, who were sent to a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Only 26 of them survived in the prison camp, including Etta Jones.
The battle to reclaim Attu was some of the fiercest fighting of the war. In May of 1943, more than 12,000 US soldiers landed on Attu and fought in small-group skirmishes with the Japanese entrenched on the island’s strategic high ground.
Attu’s rugged terrain made the fighting even more challenging. Lt. Donald Dwinnell described the conditions: It was rugged…the whole damned deal was rugged, like attacking a pillbox by way of a tightrope…in winter.
The weather was as fierce an adversary as the Japanese. The Army did not account for the weather when supplying troops at Attu. In fact, US soldiers reported taking better-quality clothing off of dead Japanese soldiers.
Military records corroborate the immense toll on both sides; reports show over 2,000 American casualties from severe weather and trench foot alone, alongside brutal losses in direct combat.
Survivors described the intensity of the hand-to-hand fighting on the island, as the Japanese preferred death before surrender. Their military code of Bushido, rooted in Japan’s samurai past, held that surrender was a grievous act of dishonor that would shame their surviving family.
This fanatical resolve was on full display in a last-ditch effort to retain control of the island during a suicidal banzai charge at the aptly named Massacre Bay. When the smoke cleared, only 28 of the original 2,500-strong Japanese force had been captured alive, with the rest fighting to the death.
American forces successfully reclaimed Attu in May 1943, but the battle for Kiska would take much longer.
In August of 1942, U.S. Naval forces began a air campaign to dislodge the Japanese from Kiska.
The incredible challenges pilots faced while flying near the Aleutians compounded efforts to defeat the Japanese. Towering, jagged peaks, brutal weather, and intense fog complicated the fight. As the campaign continued through the winter, severe icing and sub-Arctic storms routinely grounded air missions and severely restricted operations.
In the spring of 1943, during the Battle of the Komandorski Islands, a small U.S. flotilla intercepted a larger Japanese fleet carrying supplies and reinforcements for the exhausted troops on Kiska.
In one of the last true naval battles in World History, fought without airplanes, U.S. forces held the sea and forced the Japanese to turn back, abandoning the men on Kiska. The Japanese recognized that the campaign was lost.
Under the cover of thick, rolling fog on July 28 and 29, 1943, the Japanese secretly evacuated their entire 5,100-man garrison from Kiska via cruisers and destroyers, slipping away completely undetected by the blockading U.S. fleet.
On August 15, 1943, the United States launched Operation Cottage, an amphibious invasion force of nearly 35,000 American and Canadian troops. The soldiers were well prepared for what might lay ahead, having heard stories of the Japanese fierce resistance.
Yet as they stormed the island, there were no Japanese. After a nearly 9-day search, the Allies realized that the Japanese troops had abandoned the island. They had somehow slipped past the blockade.
Tragically, the invasion of Kiska was not without casualties, as the Japanese had left landmines and booby traps that killed or wounded hundreds of Allied troops. Dozens of American and Canadian troops were killed by friendly fire.
As the soldiers sought out entrenched enemy forces, the would often open fire on one another as they could only see silhouettes in the thick fog
The Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands was one of the most unusual and overlooked campaigns of World War II. Although the islands had limited strategic value, their occupation represented a symbolic challenge to the United States and forced American troops to fight in some of the most inhospitable conditions of the war.
In the end, the Americans reclaimed the islands, but the cost in lives was disproportionately high, with many casualties resulting from the weather, disease, and accidents rather than enemy action.
Today, the Aleutian campaign is largely forgotten, overshadowed by the great battles elsewhere in the Pacific. However, it remains an important reminder that World War II was fought not just on distant continents and tropical islands, but also on American soil.