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 4th 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.