![]() Here’s how one Aleut, John Tcheripanoff, 65, remembers those early days of the war and the fate that befell him. “The Japanese invasion was initially kept secret for morale and security reasons, and despite subsequent public information, heavy censorship served handily to cover embarrassment of military leaders, so that the Aleutian campaign is often entirely omitted from accounts of World War II.” military),” notes the Alaska Geographic Society in its history of the Aleutians. “The bloody Aleutian campaign was dogged by serious blunders (by the U.S. For the next 11 months the outer reaches of Alaska would remain under Japanese occupation. ![]() Attu, the westernmost island, just 650 miles from Japan, fell the next day, and the 42 Aleuts living there were taken prisoner and sent to Japan. ![]() On June 6, its soldiers invaded the island of Kiska, capturing 11 Americans manning a weather station. Navy’s attention away from Midway, its bombers attacked Dutch Harbor June 3 and 4, 1942, killing 77 American servicemen. Japan had coveted the Aleutians as a bridge to the U.S. servicemen here in World War II were quite literally driven mad by boredom, their climate so nasty that Bob Hope once joked that the Aleutians were the only place a man could “walk in mud up to his knees bucking a snowstorm that blew sand in his face, while being pelted (by hail) in the rear on a sunny day.” Their isolation is so uncompromising that some U.S. The story they have tried to tell-and the one Congress is now listening to-begins in 1942 in the Aleutians, 70 treeless islands of rugged, volcanic beauty and intolerable weather that curl out from the Alaska peninsula for 1,100 miles, separating the Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean. ![]() “For 45 years we’ve been trying to tell our story,” said Agafon Krukoff, an Aleut businessman in Anchorage, whose parents were interned in a Funter Bay cannery the government rented for $60 a month. Or perhaps it’s simply because this island chain, where the Wind Devil is fierce and the Creator manifests power through the sun and the water, is so remote, so distant from the rest of the United States, that no one much cared. Perhaps it is because the whole Aleutian military campaign in Alaska against Japan has been so overlooked that some histories of the war don’t even mention it. Perhaps it is because the Aleuts, hardy fishermen and hunters related to the Eskimos, were so few in numbers that they, unlike the Japanese-Americans, have remained among the unremembered civilian victims of the war. ![]()
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