As inhospitable to human beings as any place on earth, Alaska’s Aleutian Islands offer roaring winds, bitter cold, active volcanoes… But the people known as “Aleuts”, perfectly adapted to their environment, have lived there continuously for 8,000 years. The Aleuts knew little of the rest of the world and the rest of the world returned the favor. When the outside world did discover the Aleuts, the Aleuts suffered.
In June 1942 Japan invaded Kiska and Attu, putting the Aleuts who lived on Attu at their mercy. For three months the Aleuts of Chichagof Village lived with fear and uncertainty. The Japanese interrogated then sequestered and confined them. At the end of August, the Japanese razed Chichagof village and carried the 41 Aleuts who lived there to Kiska, abandoning Attu to its fate.
Finally, in September they took the Aleuts to Japan, prisoners, but not prisoners of war.
Aleuts suffered and died in Japan. Only half of them survived their exile. They suffered, though, from illness, not Japanese cruelty. The rate of illness among them mystified the Japanese doctor who treated them. And it’s still a mystery. Their diet likely caused most of it. Wartime Japan couldn’t provide their traditional foods and they couldn’t adjust to Japan’s raw fruit, vegetables and rice.
When the war ended in August, the Aleuts wanted to go home. The United States Army took two months to fly them via Guam, the Philippines and Hawaii to San Francisco. Just before Christmas they got them to Adak, back in the Aleutians but still a thousand miles from Attu and home.
Attu remained strategically important to the Army, the landscape remained covered with unexploded ordinance… The United States Military never allowed them, or their descendants, to return to their ancestral home.