Lieutenants

Lieutenants? Where would the army be without them?

In June 1942 Lt. Darrel M. Schumacher of the 340^th Engineering Regiment cooled his heels in Skagway. He and his men would walk to the Teslin River as soon as the 93^rd built them a trail. In the meantime, they waited.   Then the Japanese bombed the American Naval Base at Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians, bombed it twice. And, adding insult to injury, they occupied American Territory at Kiska and Attu.

Link to another story “What Next?”

Down in Skagway Lt. Schumacher felt the awful weight of responsibility. Clearly the Japanese had come for Alaska. He proposed to evacuate women, children and old men to safety, called a town meeting to organize the evacuation. The Lieutenant hadn’t reckoned with Alaska attitude. The citizens of Skagway came from stern stuff. The Lieutenant outlined his elaborate plan and the town reacted. They had, they informed him, but one old man, “and he could beat the (censored) out of me.”

If they wouldn’t evacuate, he had no choice. He would have to defend them in place. His soldiers had Springfield rifles and a few 37mm guns. Unfortunately, they had no ammunition. Hoping that soldiers at Chilkoot Barracks in Haynes, Alaska, a few miles away across the water might have some. Schumacher and his men quickly boarded a launch at the Skagway dock and headed for Haynes.

But soldiers at Chilkoot had their own Lieutenant who felt his own awful responsibility to defend the civilians of Haynes. And he shared Schumacher’s problem, he had guns but no ammo. Hoping to borrow some from the soldiers at Skagway they had set out in their own launch. The two launches met at the halfway point. And discovered that the two lieutenants had the same problem.

More on young officers

Returning to Skagway, Schumacher learned that ammo lay in the hold of a ship at the Skagway Dock. He and his men searched frantically, but never did find it.

Luckily, the Japanese juggernaut, busy 1,900 miles away at the very end of the Aleutian Island Chain, had no designs on Skagway. To one young Lieutenant’s eternal relief, it turned out that Skagway didn’t need defending.