Retaking the Islands

Retaking Kiska and Attu presented a daunting challenge, but America couldn’t leave the islands to the Japanese. In May 1943 the US Army’s 17^th Infantry, sailed north from California, and on May 11, supported by Castner’s Cutthroats, Canadian recon units and the Canadian Air Force, they stormed ashore into a frigid hell. The Japanese had concentrated inland on high ground. The 17^th confronted them from the beach.

Link to Another Story “Castner’s Cutthroats”

After two days of bloody stalemate, the Cutthroats and Canadian recon units attacked up the mountain as a diversion so the soldiers of the 7^th could advance through the valley. The scouts crawled, under heavy machine gun and artillery fire, to the top of the ridge then rained death on the Japanese.

The soldiers of the 17^th stormed up the valley past them and by the end of May they had pushed the remaining Japanese defenders into a small hillside area. Dug deep in caves in the mountainside, cut off from supplies, low on ammunition, the starving Japanese had no chance,

The 17^th had won the battle. But they didn’t know it.  More important the Japanese didn’t know it.

On May 29 the cutthroats stood on the edge of a cliff overlooking the soldiers of the 17^th in the Chichagof Valley. Quite suddenly the 800 remaining Japanese soldiers launched a hopeless but deadly banzai attack. “Plunging their bayonets into sleeping American soldiers, the Japanese screamed. ‘We die—you die, too’”.

When the attack finally petered out, the surviving Japanese soldiers pulled pins on their grenades, held them under their chins, and gave their bloody last for the Emporer.

The Americans captured but 28 of them alive.

More on the war in the Aleutians