Midway —screaming fighters, torpedo bombers, dying sailors and pilots, changed the course of WWII in the Pacific. But the great battle in the central Pacific had moving parts far to the north on the boundary between the North Pacific and the Bering Sea—Alaska’s Aleutian Island Chain.
Even as a Japanese fleet tried to trap the Americans at Midway, another Japanese fleet attacked the American Naval Base at Dutch Harbor and Japanese soldiers invaded and occupied the islands of Kiska and Attu.
Link to another story “The Japanese Bomb Dutch Harbor”
Through 1942 and into 1943 America fought back from the air, occupying islands ever closer to Kiska and Attu, building airstrips, and then dispatching pilots into the atrocious Aleutians weather to bomb the Japanese occupiers again and again. And the ships of the United States navy not only supplied the island airfields, but also lined up in the fog along frozen beaches and bombarded Japanese defenses.
Brian Garfield in his The Thousand Mile War quotes one American B-24 pilot. “…the weirdest war ever waged… a three-sided battle among the United States, the Japanese Empire, and a force that proved more powerful than either Washington or Tokyo: the weather.”
As the Americans occupied one island after another, getting closer to their targets, they located their most important base on the island of Adak. American bombers could easily reach Kiska and Attu from Adak—with fighter support.
And the harbor at Adak supported the ships and submarines of the Navy as they conducted their own assault on Attu and Kiska.
On May 11, 1943 the United States Army invaded and reclaimed Attu in one of the nastiest, most miserable battles of the war. Three months later, when they invaded Kiska, they found the Japanese had gone. On Kiska the climate and weather inflicted all the allied casualties as confused American and Canadian troops tried to coordinate along the foggy, rocky beaches and occasionally shot each other.