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A World War II veteran and expert on Alaskan history offers what is more a collection of essays than a connected narrative. The essays cover various aspects of Alaska during that conflict that are seldom mentioned in the more general histories. For example, Hays covers the Alaskan Japanese Americans, who were sent south to internment camps, and the Nisei from those same camps, who came north to act as interpreters for army intelligence. Other topics include the great banzai charge on Attu, in which a Japanese American doctor, eventually killed serving in the imperial army, participated, and weather reporting, which was vital and in which weathermen faced such unexpected hazards as volcanic eruptions. Hays also chronicles the effects on morale of being in a bad-weather backwater with no prospect of seeing action or going home by means of excerpts from intercepted and censored correspondence, and the air campaign against Japanese bases in the Kurile Islands from both American and Japanese perspectives. A by-no-means dull or negligible regional contribution to WWII history. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
On the eve of World War II, the national interests of Japan, the United States, and the Soviet Union collided in the North Pacific.
Alaska’s Hidden Wars tells the story of the war in the North Pacific—a story of savage weather, isolation, and sacrifice.
Two island chains—the Aleutians and the Kuriles—became the focus of a series of major campaigns that pitted the Americans against the Japanese. Alaska’s Hidden Wars chronicles the role of Japanese-American intelligence specialists and reveals a Japanese eyewitness account of the defense of Attu. Two virtually unknown aspects of the North Pacific war are also exposed: the brutal North Pacific weather and the imprisonment of American airmen in Kamchatka.
In 1942, the Japanese raided Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands and occupied the islands of Kiska and Attu. The Americans mounted a vigorous campaign, and the Japanese retreated to the Kuriles. For the next two years, the Americans launched air raids and fleet bombardments, while American soldiers maintained lonely outposts along Aleutian coasts. But in 1945, when Japan finally surrendered, the Kuriles were taken—not by the waiting Americans, but by the Soviets.
Alaska’s Hidden Wars is a fast-moving history that brings declassified archival sources to light and draws the reader into the lonely, bitter war fought in the North Pacific.
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