Icy fog, on June 3, had defended Dutch Harbor more effectively than the American Navy’s pilots and sailors. Half of the Japanese pilots couldn’t find the base. And if icy fog helped the Americans, luck helped even more. Knowing little about the layout of the base, Japanese pilots engaged targets at random. Flames and billowing smoke obscured their view and their targets became more random.
Link to another story on Dutch Harbor “Marauding Japanese Forces”
They killed fifty Americans—most of them in a smashed barracks. They destroyed a tank farm and its fuel dump. But as the fires died down and the smoke cleared, vital facilities emerged largely unscathed.
To fight back the Americans had to find the carriers, and on June 4, Theobald dispatched lumbering seaplanes, PBY’s, to find them and then guide the warplanes of the Eleventh Air Force to the attack.
But most of the seaplane pilots guessed wrong; flew north over the Bering Sea. One who did fly west found Junyo’s combat air patrol instead of Junyo; the patrol planes blew him out of the sky. Another flew west and spotted the Japanese carriers. But atmospherics garbled his radio call to the pilots of the Eleventh. Alone in a lumbering PBY, he had no chance against darting Japanese fighters. His plane, too, plunged into the icy North Pacific.
Luckily their target, the Japanese carrier force, spent its day in icy fog and equal confusion while its commander, Admiral Kakuta, tried to decide what to do next. Intending to make a ‘softening up’ attack on the proposed landing site at Adak, he initially steamed west—directly away from Dutch Harbor. But icy fog intervened again.
Realizing that the weather would make an attack on the island impossible, at mid-morning Kakuta changed his mind; reversed course and headed back. And late on the afternoon of June 4, seventeen bombers and fifteen fighters pounded Dutch Harbor again.
The Americans had cleared the harbor except for the old ship Northwestern, deliberately beached and used as a civilian barracks. The bombers pounded the old ship. And the attacking planes found more targets on shore. Smoke rolled, and flames darted, a steel building collapsed, one wing of the base hospital came down. When four fuel storage tanks went up, personnel at Umnak, forty miles away, heard the explosion.
This time American fighters from Umnak shot down two Japanese dive bombers. But the bulk of the Japanese force escaped once again into the fog.