War in the Ice and Fog: The Invasion of Kiska

As more than 30,000 American and Canadian troops prepared to take on the Japanese garrison of approximately 9,500 on Kiska in the Aleutian Islands in a campaign codenamed Operation Cottage, Robert L. Sherrod, a correspondent for Time magazine, recalled that the greatest puzzle on the eve of the scheduled August 15, 1943, landing was: Where were the Japanese?

On a July 22 bombing raid against Kiska, American pilots had drawn heavy anti-aircraft fire from the enemy and photographs they took while flying at “deck level” showed several Japanese soldiers crouching at their gun positions. After that mission, there had been several bombing raids, but not “a living soul has been seen (new [air]crews have reported seeing some figures, have also reported light ack-ack, but new crews always see things where veterans do not),” Sherrod said.

The absence of the enemy from aerial photographs drew quite a bit of amused speculation throughout the Aleutians. One American staff officer, according to Sherrod, said that Japanese officers on Kiska had shot all of their enlisted men and had been taken off by submarines, while others joked about enemy submarines with the capability of evacuating a thousand men at one time. Not-quite-serious rumors circulated that the Japanese possessed a secret weapon that made troops and equipment disappear. 

Some U.S. military officials gave the enemy credit for being experts at camouflage, figuring they had withdrawn to the mountains with their weapons to make a determined stand against any invasion. They were quick to point out that before the operation to retake Attu Island from the Japanese a pilot had returned from a flight over the island and confidently reported: “Everything has disappeared from Attu except one Jap and one blue fox.” The pilot had been very wrong—there were plenty of the enemy left on the island to oppose the American landings on Attu.

Sherrod traveled to Kiska with the invasion fleet, which consisted of more than a hundred warships, on the USS Pennsylvania. Also onboard the battleship was a U.S. Marine Corps officer Sherrod came to know well during the Pacific War, Major General Holland “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, an expert on amphibious warfare who had helped train the Seventh Division for its landing on Attu. Described by Sherrod as sometimes talking “like [actor] Wallace Beery in the role of a Marine general,” Smith was the father of modern U.S. amphibious warfare and had earned his nickname by being “always demanding and often profane.”

After a diversionary landing on Kiska’s Gertrude Cove at the island’s southern edge, plans called for the main landings to be on a beach at the far western end. Smith, however, was convinced that there were no Japanese on Kiska, and had called for a patrol to be sent prior to the invasion to see if he was right. The marine general had also arranged with a P-38 fighter pilot to remove the radio from his aircraft so Smith could “fly piggy-back with him from Amchitka to Kiska, where I could make reconnaissance of the island and ascertain the situation for myself.”

Unfortunately, the pilot backed out of the arrangement, and Smith never made his flight. En route to the island, said Sherrod, the marine general had kept “grumbling that the whole operation would turn out to be a farce because the Japanese had escaped. Else why didn’t they shoot at our B-25s [bombers] and PBYs [Consolidated PBY Catalinas] when they went over to bomb the island?” Smith remembered being the “object of ridicule” while on the Pennsylvania because of his belief that the Japanese had skedaddled. The “skeptical strategists of the mess,” said Smith, laughed loudest when he pointed out that sixty-five low, wooden structures used by the Japanese as barracks had disappeared, and he believed the wood had been used by the enemy to build boats and rafts to ferry the garrison to ships awaiting offshore Kiska.

Despite persistent fog, some 7,000 Allied troops—supported by five battleships and 262 land-based aircraft—were established on Kiska by the end of the operation’s first day. The only thing missing was someone to fight; Smith had been right—the Japanese were gone, leaving behind a few dogs and a container of hot coffee. “The Canadian and American soldiers found no Japs,” Sherrod wrote, “but they did get a good look at the installations our planes and naval guns had been shooting at.

What they found: gun emplacements, ammunition, living quarters and other evidence which indicated that at one time nearly 10,000 Japs had been on Kiska. There was a submarine base (evidently abandoned weeks ago) and a long-neglected seaplane base and hanger. Telephone lines strung around the eastern edge of the island led to a fair-size power plant.” Soldiers also discovered numerous caches of food, including five-gallon, wood-encased tins of kelp and hard crackers; one-hundred-pound bags of rice; and a variety of canned fish. “The Japs did not leave Kiska because they were in danger of starving,” said Sherrod. The enemy also left behind a few mongrel dogs. “We dropped 100,000 propaganda leaflets on Kiska, but those dogs couldn’t read,” said an American pilot.

The Japanese had also left behind some crude messages on the walls of an underground bunker taunting the enemy, including: “You are dancing by foolische [foolish] order of Rousebelt [Roosevelt]” and “We shall come again and kill Yanki-joker.” What Sherrod and U.S. military officials learned only later was that Japanese destroyers and cruisers had evacuated the bulk of the Kiska garrison on July 28. How had such an operation been conducted so successfully and without any notice by American planes or ships? According to Morison, the Kiska evacuation had been achieved through a combination of “Japanese savvy, American bungling, Aleutian weather and good fortune.”

In his article on the Kiska campaign for Time, Sherrod was able to laugh off the embarrassment felt by Allied forces at not finding any Japanese on the island, acknowledging the victory with wry humor by noting that among “the echoing cliffs of Kiska a new word was born: JANFU (“Joint Army-Navy foul-up”).” He also reported that the Japanese had left behind land mines and booby-traps. Although most of the booby-traps were “crude, such as a floorboard obviously raised to accommodate a detonator, and not at all up to the fictional standard of Japanese cunning,” a few men had been killed by them, including a Canadian lieutenant who had been blown to smithereens after turning on a booby-trapped radio.

Military censors, however, refused to allow Sherrod to mention in his dispatches the far larger number of troops, about twenty-five, who were “slain by our own trigger-happy soldiers,” while another thirty-one were wounded by friendly fire. Among those killed had been Lieutenant Wilfred Funk Jr. whose father, Wilfred J. Funk, the publisher of Funk and Wagnalls, had written to Time demanding to know why, if there had been no enemy forces on Kiska, his son’s Purple Heart citation said he was “killed in combat against the enemy”?

Months after the Kiska landing, Sherrod, through conversations with surgeons on a transport that had taken care of some of those wounded by friendly fire (soldiers of the Eighty-Seventh Infantry Regiment), had patched together a report on what had happened, although he acknowledged what he heard was all second-hand information. The weather on Kiska had been the “foggiest I have ever seen,” he said, “and I had been through some honeys in the three months I had spent in the Aleutians. Actually, it was impossible to see ten feet.”

Expecting heavy enemy opposition, the troops who had landed on Kiska had fanned out in every direction, “dashing up mountains, down gulleys, through fog, and every man had his finger on the trigger, waiting for the first shot at the first Jap that wiggled,” Sherrod noted. A marine observer, who before the war had worked for the New York Times, told the correspondent that the soldiers were trigger happy and “didn’t give a damn what they hit. I had a half a dozen bullets fly right by my ears.”

An outfit Sherrod had known on Attu, the Third Battalion of the Seventeenth Infantry Regiment, had been in the middle of the firing, between two patrols of the Eighty-Seventh, but had miraculously escaped with no casualties. “Not one of my men fired a shot,” the Seventeenth’s battalion commander said to Sherrod. “They had been in action before.”

Sherrod wrote a paragraph about the Eighty-Seventh soldiers killed by their own men for his Time story about the invasion, but censors cut it out, and he believed they were right to do so at the time. (Sherrod noted that the censor for Kiska had been Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, commander of the North Pacific Force, who “insisted on reading every line of copy” and had been a “liberal censor,” pondering over, but passing for publication, the reporter’s JANFU comment.”) However, months later, Sherrod could not understand why military officials in Washington, D.C., were still refusing to release any information about the incident. “It’s part of the facts of battle,” said Sherrod, “and I think we might as well face these facts.”

With the Aleutians secured from the Japanese, the American military pondered what to do next in the North Pacific. With the Aleutians only 700 miles from Japan’s Kurile Islands, Sherrod noted that some “zealots” saw the Aleutians as a “short cut” to Tokyo and also envisioned powerful swarms of bombers being able to conduct missions against the enemy. “The plain truth is that even seven hundred miles is too far for effective bombardment missions with present day planes,” he said. “And seven hundred miles through North Pacific fog with no guarantee that these planes will be able to find landing fields when they return, are not the same as seven hundred miles through sunny skies.” 

Sherrod’s best advice for the Aleutians: “Put them away for a while, but don’t forget them.” Some bombing raids were conducted by the Eleventh Army Air Force against Paramushiro in the Kurile Islands, and the Japanese made a few halfhearted attacks on Kiska and Attu, but the Aleutians faded in importance as American operations instead concentrated on a new arena: the Central Pacific