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.
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.