Kiska came next. Led by Castner’s Cutthroats the American 7th, in one of the bloodiest and most miserable battles of WWII, drove Japanese defenders on Attu to suicide and reclaimed the island for the United States. That left the Japanese enemy in possession of Kiska—or so American commanders thought.
In response to their disaster on Attu, the Japanese had abandoned Kiska. Americans had even intercepted the evacuation order, but one man on the ground didn’t believe it and that man, Admiral Kincaid, was the boss.
On August 15, 1943, thirty thousand Americans and five thousand Canadians piled through the pounding North Pacific surf and invaded Kiska.
Some of the Allied troops screwed up, fired on each other. And the departing Japanese had booby trapped everything in sight. Initial reports from the island, especially casualty reports, looked to Kincaid exactly like the tough battle he expected.
Mike Gay’s dad “served with the First Special Service Force (The Devil’s Brigade). He remembered that his dad and his comrades “invaded the island” at night in rubber boats. But “the Japs pulled out just ahead of their arrival.”
Mike explained that the First Special Service Force, a precursor to the Special Forces, had “trained in Montana at mountain climbing, snow skiing, hand to hand combat, tactics, parachute jumping and demolition. They trained outdoors all week long, no tents and temps as low as -54 degrees F.”
Half were American, the other half were Canadian.
Carrying over 100 pounds of gear and weapons, the soldiers rode pitching rubber boats through the surf onto Kiska. Miserable and spooked they thought they heard Japanese talking near the shore. They thought of bullets sinking the boats, leaving them to sink deep into the icy water.
At the shore they climbed short cliffs and moved inland over cold wet rocks through heavy fog. In the confusion they took fire that killed and wounded some of them. But that turned out to be friendly fire.
Eventually the Allied soldiers sorted things out and the firing stopped. But they remained on the empty, miserable island for several days, short of rations. They resorted to untwisted segments of rope, bent safety pins (from ammo bandoliers) as fishing gear; baited the hooks with the red strips from cigarette packs; and caught small trout from tiny streams.