STORIES FROM NORTHERN CANADA AND ALASKA.

Japanese Occupation

At the end of June 1942, the Japanese occupied American Territory at Kiska and Attu.

Unacceptable.

The Japanese had assaulted the American Naval base at Dutch Harbor then occupied the two American Islands in the Aleutians. At the same time, they laid a trap for the United States Navy at Midway and the trap backfired. The United States won decisively at Midway, decimated the Japanese fleet, and changed the entire course of the war in the Pacific.

After Pearl Harbor the Empire of Japan raced through the Pacific, attacking and winning pretty much wherever they liked. The United States and her allies reeled in shock. But the American victory at Midway changed all of that. Japan now reeled in shock. The Empire’s days on offense ended forever in June 1942.

If Midway took some of the sting out of the Japanese threat to Alaska and the Aleutians, the threat remained real. More important, Japanese soldiers occupied Kiska and Attu. The United States Army and Navy would correct that unacceptable situation. It would take time. But it would happen.

According to Jerry Coker, in his book First Among Men, three thousand Japanese soldiers occupied Attu and 10,000 occupied Kiska in early 1943. Japan sent a fleet to replenish their supplies, but the American Blockade stopped it in the Battle of the Komandorski Islands on March 26. After that the only resupply would come on submarines.

Americans on Attu Carry a Wounded Comrade

Because fewer Japanese defended Attu, the Americans chose that island as their first target, loaded a regiment of the 7^th Infantry Division on transports in San Francisco in April. Intelligence, vastly underestimating the number of defenders, suggested that the conquest would take at most three days, so they loaded them without arctic cold weather gear. When intelligence revised its estimate sharply upward, they hurriedly loaded the rest of the Division—with tropical gear!

Meanwhile, Japanese commanders ordered defenders on Attu to defend it to the death.

Eleven thousand Americans assaulted Attu in 1943. The Japanese defenders took full advantage of the rugged terrain. They let the Americans land, but every path inland climbed into the mountains and dug in Japanese soldiers had every one of them covered. On half rations at the beginning, the Japanese ran completely out of food and supplies before the end, two and a half weeks later.

Americans in inadequate uniforms fought inland through wind and cold and snow under withering fire. They died in droves. When the fire finally slowed, as the Japanese began to run out of ammunition and began to commit suicide, the mushy thud of hand grenades exploding against human bellies replaced the sound of the guns.

Four thousand of the eleven thousand Americans who fought on Attu died or were injured, one thousand of them from the cold. From the estimated three thousand Japanese defenders, the Americans took twenty-eight prisoners.

Americans Reacted

Millions of frightened and angry Americans had known nothing of the Aleutians or a possible threat to America’s interests there—until an actual threat materialized, seemingly out of nowhere. The land route to Alaska vaulted onto front pages and into newsreels, and the spotlight of public attention suddenly came to focus on the Alcan Highway Project—except for the segregated regiments the Army had hidden in the woods.

Civil Defense Control Center in Ventura, California

The attack, followed by occupation, galvanized public opinion in the United States. On June 5^th The Salt Lake Tribune headlined, “Coast Cities Redouble Vigilance Against Jap ‘Sneak’ Attack”. The story reported dramatic responses up and down the west coast of the United States and Canada. The Canadian government had silenced radio stations and placed defense forces on high alert in British Columbia and Yukon Territory. American authorities had ordered radio silence along the entire Pacific coast from Canada to Mexico; placed all Pacific coast civilian defense agencies on high alert. Civilians should use blackout curtains or, at least, window shades after dark along the western coast.

The Army and Navy, the Tribune proposed, should expand martial rule in California’s vital coastal military zones.

In a Washington press conference, Secretary of War Henry Stimson declared, “I warn you this is not the only and last raid we many expect.” A reporter asked him whether his warning applied to the Continental United States as well as to outlying possession. He declined to place geographical boundaries on it.

On June 4, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported from Philadelphia,

An unidentified man, his face red with rage, stomped

six blocks down dignified Chestnut Street last night,

buying newspapers headlining the Japanese attack on

Dutch Harbor and tearing them into shreds. Police said he

was within his rights.

On June 20th, a Japanese submarine torpedoed a Canadian lumber ship off Cape Flattery and shelled a telegraph station on Vancouver Island. On the 21^st it bombarded the naval base at Astoria, Oregon and three days after that it shelled Ft. Stevens. If the fear and anger generated by Pearl Harbor six months earlier had abated, events in June brought it roaring back.

They Soldiered On

When the Japanese attacked, the men on the Alcan soldiered on.

The Japanese Bomb Dutch Harbor

In spring 1942 seven regiments of the Corps of Engineers had headed into the wilderness of British Columbia, Yukon and Alaska, trailed by mountains of equipment and swarms of support troops. They came to build a land route to Alaska, so the United States could defend that remote outpost. In June the Japanese assaulted the Aleutians and changed the context of the project profoundly.

First, their commanders in Washington had rushed the soldiers to the road to address the possibility that the Japanese might threaten the Aleutians. The actual Japanese assault turned a worrisome possibility into terrifying reality. The commanders’ strategic response dramatically increased the soldiers’ isolation.

Probably most important to the soldier engineers on the ground, the high command stopped mail service. At first blush, that may not seem a big deal. But, however tenuously, mail connected the isolated, frightened soldiers of the Corps to the outside world that gave their efforts meaning. When it stopped, morale plummeted.

When Chaplain Carroll described the importance of mail to his 95^th regiment, he described it for the other six regiments as well. “The men have a deep and abiding attachment for their homes.” He explained. “When the mail comes in, the soldiers would leave the most luscious repast on earth to get it. Some read the letters right away. Others carefully husband them, opening one a day to make them last as long as possible.”

Now, for several weeks in June, mail stopped, devastating the isolated soldiers.

And soldiers working on the road knew little of geography, strategy or the course of the war. News of Dutch Harbor and Kiska and Attu scared the hell out of them.

When news of the assault reached the First Battalion of the 340^th Engineers, still in Skagway, it occurred to most of them that the Japanese might target them next. It even occurred to some of them that they might have to protect or even evacuate civilians. They had rifles, but no ammunition. A young lieutenant remembered that the ammo was being unloaded at the docks of Skagway, but he and several others couldn’t find where it was stored. Luckily the Japanese had no designs on Skagway.

In the 18^th Regiment, working north of Whitehorse, frightened troops pictured the Japanese marching inland down the Yukon valleys and into the forests. The engineers had rifles, butt and muzzle protected by artic socks, wrapped in mattress covers. But they hadn’t unwrapped and fired the rifles in a very long time. Their training had been about road building, not combat, and they knew they couldn’t defend themselves.

Emerging, each morning, from a dank tent into cold rain, churned mud, splintered trees, and scattered equipment, each of them knew his job. They put their heads down and soldiered on.

Inhospitable to Human Beings

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.

Invasion of Kiska and Attu

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.

Another Task Force

Another task force still lurked off the Aleutians.

The Japanese carrier task force had bombed Dutch Harbor, not once, but twice, completed their mission. But another Japanese task force, the one carrying invasion troops still lurked.

The Japanese Bomb Dutch Harbor

The Japanese Came Back

As the opposing forces in the Aleutians struggled through the weather and their own confusion on June 4, events at Midway, far to the south, took a dramatic turn. The American Navy all but destroyed Yamamoto’s fleet that day. No one on either side knew it yet on June 4 and 5, but Midway ended Japan’s romp through the Pacific; put them permanently on the defensive.

In shock, his grand strategy in shambles, Yamamoto struggled. At first blush, the assault on the Aleutians looked like a waste of time. But Japan still needed to defend itself at the north. And an Aleutian victory might help counter the effects of the Midway disaster on the Japanese public.

The Aleutian operation would go on.

On the water in the North Pacific, Admiral Hosogaya, commander of the invasion fleet forces, knowing that the American Air Force had planes on Umnak, in range of Adak, cancelled his plans for a landing there and steamed west to Kiska and Attu. Two days later, June 7^th, the enemy occupied Kiska and the following day troops invaded Attu.

An estimated 2500 enemy troops had taken the western Aleutians. They would remain until a bloody US invasion dislodged them in May of 1943.

At Dutch Harbor, taking stock, on June 5, American commanders judged the battle of Dutch Harbor a draw—good enough. Four more days would pass before they learned that the Japanese had occupied Kiska and Attu—American soil. Clearly Dutch Harbor and the Aleutians remained at risk, and they needed to make changes.

On June 21^st the Navy made an official statement to the press, “The enemy has occupied the undefended islands of Attu and Kiska…”

The Japanese Came Back

The Japanese came back.

The Japanese had arrived at the Aleutians, attacked Dutch Harbor from the air on June 3, 1942. Luck had, for once, been with the Americans on the ground.

The Japanese Bomb Dutch Harbor–the First Time

Knowing little about the layout of the base, the Japanese pilots had engaged targets at random; and, as smoke and flame obscured their view, the targets became more random. They killed fifty Americans—most of them in a smashed barracks. They destroyed a tank farm and its fuel dump. But as the fires died down and the smoke cleared, vital facilities emerged largely unscathed.

Getting from their carriers to their target and back again, the Japanese had struggled with the God-awful Aleutian weather—even lost planes and taken casualties. But the American defenders had caused them no problems at all.

To fight them the Americans had to find them. Lumbering PBY’s couldn’t fight effectively, but they could search and see, guide warplanes to their targets. Unfortunately, most of the PBY’s dispatched to find the enemy initially went north over the Bering Sea. Only two searched in the right direction. The first found Junyo’s combat air patrol instead of Junyo; the Japanese fighters shot it down. The second spotted the Japanese carriers, but atmospherics garbled the message they sent; and Japanese fighters shot them down too.

American defenders spent June 4^th in a frustrating, uncoordinated effort to find and sink the Japanese carriers. They found them several times, but they couldn’t mount a coordinated attack.

Luckily their target, the carrier force, spent its day in equal confusion while its commander, Admiral Kakuta, tried to decide what to do next. Intending to make a ‘softening up’ attack on the proposed landing site at Adak, he initially steamed west—directly away from Dutch Harbor. Realizing that the weather would make an attack on the island impossible, at mid-morning he changed his mind; reversed course and headed back.

Back in range, just before 3 pm, Kakuta launched seventeen bombers and fifteen fighters for another assault on Dutch Harbor. An hour later the combined force descended on their target.

The Americans had cleared the harbor except for the old ship Northwestern, deliberately beached and used as a civilian barracks. The bombers pounded the old ship. And the attacking planes found more targets on shore. Smoke rolled, and flames darted, a steel building collapsed, one wing of the base hospital came down. When four fuel storage tanks went up, personnel at Umnak, forty miles away, heard the explosion.

This time the Japanese, too, suffered casualties. Fighters from Umnak shot down two dive bombers. The bulk of the Japanese force, though, once again escaped into the fog.

The Japanese Bomb Dutch Harbor

In late May two Japanese task forces had headed for the Aleutians and the United States Navy sent Admiral “Fuzzy” Theobald with a few ships to defend them.

Japanese Plans

Theobald deployed his ships in an arc facing south and west toward the oncoming Japanese force. He knew the futility of trying to cover so many miles with so few vessels, and he knew the Japanese would almost certainly slip through. In that case, the Japanese carriers and their warplanes posed the greatest threat and he knew they would target the American Naval base at Dutch Harbor. The assault would come from the air so he had to defend from the air, and he centered his defense on the largely untested pilots of Brigadier General William O. Butler’s Eleventh Air Force.

Butler resisted, but Theobald prevailed and on May 28 Butler moved his precious planes and pilots from Elmendorf Field in Anchorage to two unfinished airfields closer to the coming action. Fort Randall lay 180 miles east of Dutch Harbor at Cold Bay. Fort Glenn lay on the island of Umnak, forty miles west.

At 2:43 on the morning of June 3, the two Japanese carriers steamed out of the storm into the clear and launched thirty-five warplanes—bombers and fighters. The planes from the Junyo lost their bearings, couldn’t find Dutch Harbor and had to turn back. The fifteen planes from the Ryujo made it through.

At 5:40 the seaplane tender USS Gillis, moored at Dutch Harbor, picked up the attacking planes on radar; signaled the base. Air raid sirens howled. The six ships in the harbor started their engines and went to battle stations. The base telegraphed an alert to Cold Bay and Umnak. The pilots on Umnak didn’t receive the message, but P-40’s instantly scrambled from Cold Bay. Unfortunately, they scrambled 180 miles from Dutch Harbor, and they would take too long to get there.

At about 5:50, the fifteen planes from the Ryujo caught a break. The eye of the storm passed over Dutch Harbor, cleared the rain and fog, just as they descended into the attack. They had a clear view of the base and harbor that they hammered for the next twenty minutes.

American batteries saw them as well; 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. The first went down immediately, but the second managed to down the only Japanese casualty of the raid before escaping up a mountain draw where the zeros couldn’t follow.

In the end, the Japanese bombed and strafed with relative impunity.

The Navy Knew Japanese Plans

The Navy knew of the Japanese plans for the Aleutians.

The string of islands known as the Aleutians curves like a samurai sword, south and then west from Alaska 1,100 miles into the North Pacific—marking the boundary between the North Pacific and the Bering Sea. Adak, Kiska and Attu, the islands at the point of the sword lie perilously close to Japan. Peaks of a submerged mountain range, the Aleutian Islands traverse the coldest, most turbulent portion of the North Pacific. Thick fog shrouds the treeless islands all but constantly, and “williwaws”—gale force winds up to 80 miles an hour–come and go frequently and unpredictably.

Strategic Aleutians and Japanese Plans

Isolated, inhospitable in the extreme, the Aleutians don’t count for much. But they are, indisputably, American soil. And, if the tip of the sword lies close to Japan, its handle rests at Cook Inlet.

By 1942 the strategic importance of Alaska and its long Aleutian tail had caught the eyes of naval strategists in both Tokyo and Washington. Indeed, the soldiers of the Corps of Engineers found themselves in the North Country in the first place because the Army needed to defend Alaska and its tail.

Now the Japanese dispatched two naval forces to assault the Aleutians. First, a carrier group centered on the brand new carrier Junyo and the somewhat older Ryujo would attack Dutch Harbor. Two heavy cruisers, three destroyers and an oiler surrounding them, they steamed through the night of June 2^nd in cold rain and icy fog, hiding from American spotter planes at the edge of a storm–less than 170 miles from their target.

Second, three cruisers, nine destroyers, three transports, and a screen of submarines steamed somewhere west of the Carrier Group, carrying the 2,500 soldiers who proposed to occupy Adak, Kiska and Attu.

The success of the Japanese plans at Midway and in the Aleutians ultimately depended on surprising the Americans, but that wouldn’t happen. On May 15 a team of crypto analysts at Pearl Harbor had broken the Japanese naval code and American intelligence knew at least the outline of the Japanese plan. The American Navy wouldn’t fall blindly into Yamamoto’s ambush at Midway, and American commanders had a little bit of time to organize a defense in the Aleutians.

Admiral Nimitz, overall naval commander in the Pacific, convinced that the decisive action would be at Midway, committed most of his resources there. To defend the Aleutians, he dispatched Rear Admiral Robert Theobald north with a token force of nine ships and instructions that amounted to ‘do your best with what you can scare up’. American folklore offers a hoary bit of advice about the wisdom of bringing a knife to a gunfight that is applicable to Theobald’s mission. The Japanese were bringing carriers to the fight; Theobald was not.

Aleutians

The Aleutians.

The American and Canadian Governments’ fear, after Pearl Harbor, that the Japanese might assault North America through the Aleutians and Alaska inspired the emergency project to build the Alaska Highway. For the soldiers on the ground in Northern Canada and Alaska in 1942, May rolled seamlessly into June, but they had not forgotten the war that had brought them north.

WWII the Cataclysm

The cataclysm engulfing the world had ripped them out of their lives; thrown them far away into an isolated country of cold, rain, mud and mosquitoes. Day by day they soldiered on, forcing their road through the wilderness. But they had left a rolling catastrophe behind them in March and April and they struggled to keep up with news of the war raging across the Pacific through the spring. In Alaska, Yukon Territory and British Columbia, soldiers shared scraps of information, gleaned from letters or an occasional out of date newspaper or magazine, and talked incessantly about the war. Hard news came slowly. Rumors circulated at the speed of light.

So far, the Japanese had succeeded beyond even their own expectations; and their planners grappled with the problem of regrouping and exploiting their advantages. In early June they targeted the island of Midway, two thousand miles south of the Aleutians. And their strategy for the conquest of Midway, involved the Aleutians and the American air and naval base at Dutch Harbor.

They planned, echoing their success at Pearl Harbor, to paralyze, if not completely destroy, the Dutch Harbor complex and to occupy the islands of Adak, Kiska and Attu at the western end of the island chain. The Americans, they hoped, would respond by sending their battle fleet north, leaving Admiral Yamamoto’s task force at Midway free to do its will.

The Japanese, in other words, planned to do exactly what the Canadian and American Governments had feared they might do.

Rika Wallen

“Rika Wallen”, researcher/Team Leader pounced this morning. “You posted about Judy Ferguson and John Hajdukovich. When are you going to post about Rika Wallen?”

“Today”, I responded. Remember that she’s not just “Researcher”. She’s also “Team Leader”.

Judy Ferguson wrote about Rika as well as about John and her book, Parallel Destinies, is my source for the story of amazing Rika Wallen.

Erika (the name her parents gave her) followed her brother, Carl, to the United States from Sweden, lived for a time on his farm in Minnesota then moved on to San Francisco where she cooked for the fabulously wealthy Hills Brothers Coffee family. An affectionate estate staff shortened her name to Rika, and Rika she would remain.

In 1906 a monster earthquake levelled San Francisco. Rika tried, for eight more years, but the earthquake had destroyed her prospects along with the city. She heard that the Alaska gold camps offered plenty of work and she thought Alaska might be like the home in Sweden that she fondly remembered.

In 1916, 42-year-old Rika booked passage for Valdez.

From Valdez she made her way up to the Kennicott Copper mine; cooked there for the crew until the season ended in October when she headed up the Richardson Highway to Fairbanks. She didn’t make it that far. Alaska winter took cold to a whole new level, and after a miserable four days she vowed to winter at the next roadhouse. Yost’s Roadhouse needed a cook so there Rika stayed—for seven long, dark months.

Finally, spring…

In June she made her way on north to Fairbanks and there she met John Hajdukovich. John had just opened a roadhouse at Big Delta, but he wanted to go prospecting. He needed someone to tend the roadhouse for the winter. Rika had just endured an Alaska winter along the Richardson, so it took John a while to talk her into his proposition. He proved equal to the task. She finally agreed to try one winter.

John went prospecting and Rika took over the roadhouse.

News of her cooking ability quickly spread among the local prospectors and trappers—she shot rabbits and turned them into a thoroughly delectable stew. She hired Butch Stock to cut her winter’s wood and through the winter Butch and other local bachelors brought In Moose that she cooked and served to travelers passing through.

At the end of a year, Rika and John had a problem. John hadn’t found a way to pay her wages. But John had a solution. He didn’t really want to run a roadhouse. And Rika did. So John just gave her the place.

Rika, as much an institution in Big Delta as Mary Hanson, ran her roadhouse there for the rest of her life.

Alaska Lady, Mary Hanson

Rika’s roadhouse today is an Alaska State Park.