The Aleutians.
The American and Canadian Governments’ fear, after Pearl Harbor, that the Japanese might assault North America through the Aleutians and Alaska inspired the emergency project to build the Alaska Highway. For the soldiers on the ground in Northern Canada and Alaska in 1942, May rolled seamlessly into June, but they had not forgotten the war that had brought them north.
The cataclysm engulfing the world had ripped them out of their lives; thrown them far away into an isolated country of cold, rain, mud and mosquitoes. Day by day they soldiered on, forcing their road through the wilderness. But they had left a rolling catastrophe behind them in March and April and they struggled to keep up with news of the war raging across the Pacific through the spring. In Alaska, Yukon Territory and British Columbia, soldiers shared scraps of information, gleaned from letters or an occasional out of date newspaper or magazine, and talked incessantly about the war. Hard news came slowly. Rumors circulated at the speed of light.
So far, the Japanese had succeeded beyond even their own expectations; and their planners grappled with the problem of regrouping and exploiting their advantages. In early June they targeted the island of Midway, two thousand miles south of the Aleutians. And their strategy for the conquest of Midway, involved the Aleutians and the American air and naval base at Dutch Harbor.
They planned, echoing their success at Pearl Harbor, to paralyze, if not completely destroy, the Dutch Harbor complex and to occupy the islands of Adak, Kiska and Attu at the western end of the island chain. The Americans, they hoped, would respond by sending their battle fleet north, leaving Admiral Yamamoto’s task force at Midway free to do its will.
The Japanese, in other words, planned to do exactly what the Canadian and American Governments had feared they might do.