Kiska: The Japanese Occupation of an Alaska Island
By Brendan Coyle (Snowy Owl Books/University of Alaska Press, 144 pages, 2014, $45)
Seven decades later, few Americans are aware that World War II engulfed the westernmost region of Alaska. It's a curious oversight, considering that the community of Dutch Harbor was bombed and two Aleutian Islands -- Attu and Kiska -- were occupied by Japan for more than a year. Even the fight to reclaim Attu, one of the bloodiest battles of the war and a pivotal victory in the Allied drive to end Japan's designs on the Pacific, gets scant mention. Kiska, which Japanese troops evacuated on the eve of the Allied invasion, rarely warrants a footnote.
While Kiska was restored to U.S. control without resistance, it still bears the scars of war. A remarkable new book by Canadian author Brendan Coyle brings this to light through an elegant mixture of narrative and photographs that document the island -- then and now.
"Kiska" opens with Coyle's arrival on the island in 2009 as part of a two-man biological survey (his compatriot asked to remain anonymous, and is referred to throughout as "the professor"). It was a 50-day stay in a place beset by high winds and heavy rains. Aside from electronic communications, the two had no human contacts other than each other.
Undisturbed relics
After a couple of brief chapters describing the island's geography, plant and animal life and limited human history, Coyle goes exploring. Since the duo was camped in Gertrude Cove, the location of the army base that Japan established during its occupation, he didn't have to wander far to find relics.
While some effort was made by U.S. and Canadian troops at cleaning up the mess after the island was retaken, much of what the Japanese left behind in their hasty evacuation remains strewn about, there to be found by occasional visitors. "Kiska," Coyle tells us, "is unique among surviving World War II battlefields in that it remains relatively undisturbed. Public trespass, time, and nature have only slowly consumed the apparatus of war."
Japanese forces arrived in Alaska on June 3, 1942, with a two-day aerial assault on Dutch Harbor, leaving 34 Americans dead. On June 6, they invaded Attu, taking its tiny population of Native Aleuts and two Caucasians prisoner. Next they moved on to Kiska, where only a 10-man Navy weather crew stood in their way. Bases were quickly established, but the American response was swift. U.S. bombing campaigns were soon underway, especially over Kiska. Owing to its lack of a civilian population, Kiska could be attacked mercilessly. Signs of the bombing remain, with many of the craters left by the explosions having become ponds where aquatic life now resides.
Equipment damaged by U.S. assaults is still littered about, and Coyle offers an abundance of photographs. Artillery and ammunition lie where they were abandoned, slowly rusting but largely intact. Coyle presents historic photographs of the types of guns and weaponry the Japanese used alongside pictures of the decaying remains of the same or similar implements he found as he traversed the island. Historic photographs of the occupation contrast with today's landscape.
Boots, ceramics, guns, cannons, carts and trucks remain where the Japanese left them. American airplanes shot down during bombing runs rest where they crashed. Telephone poles from abandoned communications links teeter sideways, awaiting their inevitable fall. Sluices disrupt streams where water was drawn for the occupying forces. Trenches, dugouts, bunkers and barracks are slowly being reclaimed by the soil. Old roadbeds cut across the landscape. Ships list and rust just offshore. It's a world of ghosts, bearing witness to all-but-forgotten events that both parties to the conflict -- long since reconciled and now close friends -- have fortunately put behind them.
Ghosts and emptiness
The text combines history and travelogue, sometimes contrasting, other times flowing into a single narrative. At one point, the two men stumbled across the wreckage of an old American P-38G with the number 43-2313 as its sole identifier. What seemed a simple task of naming the pilot for the sake of the book turned into a yearlong effort to trace the details of a plane that, according to military records, should not have been in the region. It took months of searching by a historian for the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command to discover that the plane had been part of a rejected batch of Lend-Lease aircraft and had subsequently been lost on a sortie over Kiska along with its pilot, Capt. Miles Allen Werner. Mysteries still await resolution on this island of ghosts.
Some current photos are truly haunting. A pair of pilot masks with their oxygen tubes still attached sit in a polluted puddle with empty eyes staring upward. The interior of a beached submarine seems a frightening place when slipping beneath the waves. Another submarine sits on the grass, "Rusting and gradually sinking into the muskeg, being slowly consumed by the island," Coyle writes. "It is an example of the doubtful reasoning of Japan's ill-fated venture into Alaska."
Even more symbolic is the wreckage of the Borneo Maru, a ship that was run aground under heavy fire in the last desperate days before the Japanese fled the island. Its bow angles upward from the harbor where Coyle and the professor camped, a silent witness to the futility of war.
Words from a Japanese soldier's journal quoted by Coyne perhaps describe the feeling this book evokes: "The dead would be left on this lonely tundra wilderness forever, the landscape of which is bleakness itself ..."
Ghosts and emptiness fill these pages.
David A. James is a Fairbanks-based writer and critic.