Theobald, Admiral “Fuzzy” Theobald, knew that two Japanese attack forces steamed north through the Pacific in late May, headed for Alaska. Bull Halsey had sent him north to stop them. He deployed his few ships in an arc across the water to face them, but the arc covered way too many miles of water. The Japanese would almost certainly slip through.
To defend the Dutch Harbor naval base Theobald needed the untested pilots and planes of Brigadier General William O. Butler’s Eleventh Air Force. Butler resisted, but Theobald prevailed, and Butler reluctantly moved his precious air force from Elmendorf Field in Anchorage.
Half went to Cold Bay and the airfield at Fort Randall, 180 miles east of Dutch Harbor. The other half went to the island of Umnak and the airfield at Fort Glenn, 40 miles west.
At 2:43 on the morning of June 3, 1942 the two Japanese carriers launched thirty-five warplanes. The pilots from the Junyo lost their bearings in the icy fog; got lost and turned back. But fifteen planes from the Ryujo made it to Dutch Harbor.
At 5:40 a radar operator on the seaplane tender USS Gillis saw them coming and signaled the base. Air raid sirens howled. The six ships in the harbor started their engines and went to battle stations.
Telegraph wires to Umnak and Cold Bay hummed, urgently summoning Dutch Harbor’s air defense. Unfortunately, the wires to nearby Umnak hummed in vain, the pilots there didn’t get the message. The message did reach Cold Bay and pilots there scrambled their P-40’s, but they scrambled 180 miles from Dutch Harbor. The Japanese would be long gone before they could get there.
At about 5:50, the eye of the storm passed over Dutch Harbor and cleared the rain and fog just as the Japanese pilots descended to attack. They had a clear view of the base and harbor that they hammered for the next twenty minutes.
American batteries 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. Japanese pilots shot the first PBY down immediately, but the second managed to down one of them, the only Japanese casualty of the attack.
The Japanese pilots bombed and strafed into the churning smoke and flame boiling up from the ground. American Flak and machine gun bullets found only empty sky.
