In 1943 the Americans took back Attu, drove the Japanese to suicide. They targeted Kiska next, totally unaware that in response to the Attu assault, the Japanese had abandoned the second island. According to Stan Cohen’s book, The Forgotten War Vol. 2, Americans had intercepted the evacuation order, but Admiral Kincaid didn’t believe it.
On August 15, 1943 thirty thousand Americans and 5,000 Canadians landed on Kiska. Allied troops screwed up, fired on each other, so initial reports from the island sounded like normal casualty reports. The missing Japanese had booby trapped everything in sight—more allied casualties.
When I first posted about the war in the Aleutians, back on November 7 Mike Gay commented on the post on Facebook. “My dad served with the First Special Service Force (The Devil’s Brigade). They invaded the island of Kiska in the Aleutians. The Japs pulled out just ahead of the Force landing at night in rubber boats.”
I replied that I would be posting about the invasion in a few days and invited him to comment with more information. Mike responded with the following:
Dad said that they were carrying over 100 pounds of gear and weapons. They were in rubber boats, that would rise up and down, they began to hear noise that sounded to them like Japanese talking. The thought of a few bullets hitting the boats, sinking rapidly, and drowning in the frigid water caused real fear. They climbed the short cliffs at the shore and moved inland. The island was cold, foggy, wet and occasionally rocky. There were men that were wounded, and I think some were killed by mistaking friendly forces for Japanese. After they found that there were no Japanese left on the island they stayed in the miserable conditions for days with very limited rations. They untwisted segments of rope, used ben safety pins (from ammo bandoliers) as fish hooks, strips of red strips around cigarette packs as lures and caught small trout from the tiny streams.
They trained in Montana at mountain climbing, snow skiing, hand to hand combat, tactics, parachute jumping and demolition. They trained outdoors all week long, no tents and temps as low as
-54 degrees F.
Dad said they had many men drop out of the outfit every day. Half of them were American and half were Canadians. They were the model for the Special Forces.