Marauding Japanese Forces

Marauding Japanese hatched a plan that would do precisely what the men who ordered the Alaska Highway feared. They would attack North America through the Aleutians and Alaska.

The simultaneous battle at Midway

They dispatched two battle groups. Planes from the carrier group would assault the American naval base at Dutch Harbor.  Soldiers from the transports of the other group would invade and occupy the islands of Kiska and Attu.

The Americans knew the Japanese plan because they had broken their code. But they couldn’t spare much for the defense of the Aleutians.

Bull Halsey sent Admiral “Fuzzy” Theobald north with the ships he could spare and orders to stop the Japanese.  Theobald deployed his few ships in an arc across the water to face them, but the arc covered way too many miles of water. The Japanese would almost certainly slip through.

Link to another story “Few Americans Worried about the Aleutians”

He reached out for the pilots and planes of the Eleventh Air Force at Elmendorf Field in Anchorage. Half of them moved to the air field at Cold Bay, 180 miles east of Dutch Harbor. The other half moved to the island of Unmak 40 miles west.

At 2:43 on the morning of June 3, 1942 the Japanese carriers launched warplanes. Some had to turn back, lost in the icy Aleutian fog, but fifteen planes made it to Dutch Harbor.

At 5:40 the Americans spotted them. Air raid sirens howled.  The six ships in the harbor started their engines and went to battle stations. Telegraph wires to Umnak and Cold Bay hummed, urgently summoning Dutch Harbor’s air defense.

Unfortunately, the wires to nearby Umnak hummed in vain, the pilots there didn’t get the message. Pilots at Cold Bay scrambled their P-40’s, but they scrambled 180 miles from Dutch Harbor. The marauding Japanese would be long gone before they could get there.

At about 5:50, the eye of the storm passed over Dutch Harbor and cleared the rain and fog just as the Japanese pilots descended to attack. They had a clear view of the base and harbor that they hammered for the next twenty minutes.

American batteries launched puffs of flak into the sky.  Machine gun tracers arced up from the ground, seeking the range. Two lumbering PBY’s, seaplanes, moored in the harbor managed to get into the air. Japanese pilots shot the first PBY down immediately, but the second managed to down one of them, the only Japanese casualty of the attack.