By May 1942, Parker had two old destroyers, [two] … Coast Guard cutters, a few more converted fishing boats [YPs], and ten Catalinas – one each at Dutch Harbor and Kodiak, the others farther south. Flagship Charleston was the only one of these vessels equipped with sonar or with guns larger than 3-inch; both she and the cutters and destroyers were in constant use escorting freighters bringing construction workers and materials to the new bases and airfields … and ships of the Royal Canadian Navy Pacific Command which could be called on if needed.
Meanwhile, administrative activity and rear-echelon construction were progressing as well. Plans were being considered for a Port of Entry (POE) at Excursion Inlet in the southeast. Auxillary airfields at Campbell Creek and Palmer were canceled (though eventually they were completed), and dispersion fields at Willow and Birchwood were ordered instead. Others would be built at Wasilla and Goose Bay. The AWS projects were still in the works and general construction and maintenance work continued. The ACOE opened a Real Estate Office in Anchorage to handle property transactions; before such transactions had to be referred to Seattle.
Another issue that occurred against this backdrop was the internment of Japanese Americans. In the hysteria which followed Pearl Harbor, the traditional prejudice against Asians on the West Coast reached a fever pitch, so in the spring, of 1942, the Secretary of War was given authority by executive order to exclude those of Japanese ancestry from military areas.
Altogether, perhaps 120.000 US citizens and resident aliens were rounded up and relocated to camps in California, Nevada, Utah, Idaho and Arkansas. Their property was left under the stewardship of the Federal Reserve Bank, and they were allowed to take very little with them; many ended up losing most of their property. About 230 Alaskans, including Aleuts with Japanese surnames, were moved to the War Relocation Center at Minidota, ID, where they were kept for the duration of the war.
The Japanese were also faced with a dilemma following their stunning successes since the Pearl Harbor attack. Since the opening of the China offensive in 1937, the Imperial Army and Navy had participated in an uneasy coalition requiring consensus for any decisions, military or political, and the Japanese Army and Navy had, if anything, an even more touchy relationship than their American counterparts. The strategy favored by the Army was one of confining advances essentially to the Asian mainland, consolidating limited gains and negotiating peace with the US and Britain while stopping short of actual engagement if possible. The Navy’s policy, as developed by Adm Isoroku Yamamoto, chief of the Combined Fleet and major strategist, was to strike rapidly, encompassing as much territory as possible, destroy the enemy will and ability to retaliate, and impose a feeling of peace from a position of strength and from a perimeter extended far enough from Japan to prevent a counter-offensive. Yamamoto realized that this was a gamble and that it had to succeed in the short-term before the massive industrial capacity of the US could be brought to bear on resource-poor and overextended Japan. At Yamamoto’s instigation, the Midway-Aleutians operation was reluctantly approved on April 14, 1942.
Though the operational end was complicated, the basic plan was simple: the Imperial fleet would launch a feint at the Aleutians, destroying any bases it could and seizing a temporary foothold in the western Aleutians. The US fleet would split its remaining forces to send reinforcements to the Aleutians. These reinforcements would be ambushed along the way, while the main Japanese force would concentrate on the remaining force at Midway and annihilate it in a classic set-piece engagement. Using the Aleutians as the northern anchor of a patrol line extending through Midway to Fiji, Samoa, and New Caledonia, Japan would establish a perimeter that would hold back US advances as well as cut off Allied contact with Australia and the Soviet Union. The Midway operation could also be seen as the first step in an invasion of Hawaii.
The psychological effect of the raid on Tokyo on April 18, 1942, by carrier-based bombers led by Col James Doolittle, a native son of Nome, only served to harden the Japanese resolve to carry out the operation which would theoretically prevent further attacks of this nature. On May 5, 1942, Naval Order No. 18 was issued, formally laying out the Midway-Aleutian campaign plan. Navy Directive No. 94, the Joint Central Agreement on the Aleutians, called for the Army to capture, demolish and withdraw from a supposed US base on Adak, then seize and hold Attu and Kiska until winter. The Navy would attack Dutch Harbor to destroy the facility and prevent reinforcements from reaching the outer islands. With the Battle of the Coral Sea in early May 1942, at which the Japanese lost two carriers and sustained heavy plane and pilot losses on a third, the plan began to fall apart. The advance to New Guinea and Australia and the interdiction of the southern anchor bases were halted, and combat vessels were removed from operations. Nevertheless, the main plan proceeded, with the order for the Aleutian part of the operation being issued on May 12, 1942.
On May 20, 1942, Naval Force Order No. 245 established the staffing and assignments for the Northern Task Forces. Altogether, there would be two small carriers, eight cruisers, 13 destroyers, three gunboats, six submarines, three means of transport, one oiler, and one seaplane tender available to the four northern fleet task force units, as well as about 2400 troops, including 700 engineers.
It was an impressive force compared to that which opposed it, and a force whose presence at the main event at Midway could possibly have swayed the outcome. The Japanese were woefully ill-informed about US dispositions in the Aleutians, despite the intelligence potential of their fishing fleets which had operated there for years (Alaskan King Crab was originally known as Japanese Crab). They expected to be met by cruisers and destroyers, major military installations at Dutch Harbor and Adak, and minor garrisons at Kiska and Attu. In reality, Dutch Harbor was a lightly defended forward base, with the only other naval installations being weather stations on Kanaga and Kiska. There were no fleet forces in Aleutian waters either. There were, however, unexpected airfields at Fort Glenn and Cold Bay.
One problem with the Japanese plan was that the US knew about it. Since 1940, naval intelligence had been able to read part of JN-25, or the Japanese Navy Purple Code, and by April 1942, largely because with the pace of the Japanese advance the Japanese fleet could not keep up its schedule of monthly cipher changes and so continued to use the old codebooks giving the codebreakers more time to study it, Station Hypo at Pearl Harbor was able to read 10-15% of naval traffic. By late May, they would have 90% of the Midway orders decrypted. Adm King, chief of Naval Operations, directed Adm Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC), to assign a task force under the command of an admiral to oppose the Japanese invasion in Alaska. Using the new Joint Chiefs of Staff arrangement (which had been adopted from the British model after Pearl Harbor), the Navy asked that the Eleventh Air Force be placed under the control of this admiral to better coordinate responses. According to the instructions of Adm King, the command relationship between … the remainder Army forces in Alaska and North Pacific Forces is to be by mutual cooperation.
Task Force 8, Pacific Fleet, or the North Pacific Force (NORPACFOR), was assigned to Alaska under the command of Adm Robert A. Theobald. The force consisted of two heavy and three light cruisers and 11 destroyers, with backup provided by 36 other vessels, including Parker’s provisional Alaska Navy. No aircraft carriers or Naval aircraft besides the PBYs on station were allotted, making Theobald dependent on the Army Air Forces for aerial coverage. When Theobald complained about force levels, especially in air power, he was told that he was to inflict strong attrition upon the enemy with such forces as he had on hand, albeit he was advised to avoid battle if possible when the odds were unfavorable.
The Alaskan forces interpreted this to mean that they were being abandoned to what could be a suicide mission: they were expected to fight the last man without hope of reinforcement. They were essentially correct; although the assaults anticipated were unlikely to result in such a contretemps, the personnel in Alaska had no way of knowing this at the time. King and CINCPAC had decided to make only a token attempt in the Northern Pacific, concentrating their forces around Midway in hopes of inflicting on Yamamoto the kind of damage he had envisioned inflicting on them.
Despite the advance warning that US intelligence had given to the defenders, the US understanding of the Japanese goals and tactics was fuzzy. US planners assumed that the objective of the Japanese strike was to capture Dutch Harbor, neutralize (if they could not capture) the airfields at Fort Glenn and Cold Bay, and perhaps invade the mainland of Alaska.
This posed a problem in the distribution of the limited forces which existed. Theobald distrusted the intelligence he had received regarding Japanese designs on the Aleutians, was new to the area (he had arrived at Kodiak on May 27, 1942, and had to make snap judgments based on limited data and supported by limited forces.
His first order was that the Eleventh Air Force be deployed to the advance bases, which was done over the objections of Gen Butler, who argued that the bases were not ready and/or adequate for operations. The engineers meanwhile had received orders to prepare these bases for demolition should they be in danger of capitulation. His second was to devise a plan as complicated to execute as Yamamoto’s for the defense of Alaska. Task Force Operations Plan No. 1-42 set up six different groups. The main group, under Theobald’s direct command, with the cruisers and four destroyers would position itself 400 miles south of Kodiak. Theobald felt that the Japanese would try to decoy his ships into the Aleutians in order to bypass him and attack Dutch Harbor and perhaps even the mainland; at the very least, the Japanese would try to lure him into an ambush, and he wanted to keep his options open and be able to respond from a central location.
A second group of nine destroyers was sent to Dutch Harbor to guard against amphibious assault, though the force would be dispersed to Makushin Bay on the other side of the island to disguise its presence and thus be out of the action. An air screening group would fly offshore patrols to locate the Japanese fleet, operating from seaplane tenders at Cold Bay, Sand Point and Dutch Harbor, and supported by the Eleventh Air Force’s heavy bombers (B-17, LB-30). A surface screening force, Parker’s Alaskan Navy reinforced by six pre-war S-Class submarines, would set up a picket line across the expected invasion route. The sixth group, the bombers, would close with the enemy and destroy his forces once they were located.
Butler and Buckner disliked the plan, but were unable to veto it. In addition, while Buckner and Parker had gotten along well, Buckner and Theobald took an immediate dislike of each other. Part of this was due to a clash of personalities, Buckner being a bluff man of action, while Theobald was a slow-moving by-the-book commander who saw three sides to every question, while part was Buckner’s frustration at having his special knowledge and viewpoint on the military situation in Alaska superseded by that of the uninitiated. Finally, there was simple command jealousy between services and individuals.
At any rate, communication and cooperation were strained during Theobald’s tenure. On June 1, Theobald departed to take up station south of Kodiak. By that date, there were seven bombers and 17 fighters at Fort Glenn and six bombers and 16 fighters at Cold Bay, while the Navy had eight PBYs operating out of Dutch Harbor. Reinforcements were on the way to bring the air strength up to 10 heavy and 34 medium bombers and 95 fighters, all of which were earmarked for Elmendorf and beyond, since the RCAF had taken over responsibility for the Southeast bases with two fighter squadrons at Annette Island, and a bomber and additional fighter squadron en route to Elmendorf. The total Army strength in Alaska on June 1, 1942, was about 45.000, of whom about 13.000 were west of Fort Randall. There were 14 ADC posts extant, with more on the way.
The Japanese task force left port in late May 1942, under the command of VAdm Boshiro Hosogaya. The weather turned bad, and the task force steamed east following the storm, which made for rough travel but screened the ships from US recon patrols. In the early morning hours of June 3, 1942, the carriers Ryujo and Junyo, commanded by RAdm Kakuji Kakuta, launched a strike force of Mitsubishi A6M Zero (Zeke) fighters, Nakajima B5N2 (Kates) and Aichi D3A (Val) dive bombers against Dutch Harbor. All of the Junyo forces had to turn back and about half of Ryujo had to abort their mission because of weather and navigational problems, with approximately 14 Kates, and 3 Zekes, participating in the attack.
The seaplane tender USS-Gillis (AVD-12) is credited with detecting the attack, and the base was at least partially ready when the enemy planes arrived. Dutch Harbor had actually been on alert for most of the month of May and was well prepared with foxholes, pillboxes, and antiaircratt protection. The attack at about 0545 was met by a barrage of ground fire as troops scrambled to positions and shelters and ships in the harbor tried to get underway. The result was full of sound and fury but signified very little. The Japanese bombing was ineffective, though there were 88 casualties (31 dead, including a Siems-Drake-Puget Sound employee, and 57 wounded). If the bombing was ineffective, so was the defense; though the Japanese pilots later remarked on the heaviness of the ground fire and two kills were credited to AAA-AV batteries, little damage was done to the attackers, who dropped their bombs and strafed at will for about twenty minutes. Fighters were scrambled from Cold Bay but arrived after the Japanese had left. Because of a breakdown in the jury-rigged communications system, the fighters at Fort Glenn failed to receive word of the attack. One of the Ryujo pilots had spotted the destroyers in Makushin Bay, and a force was sent from the Junyo, but was unable to locate the target in the storm. Observation floatplanes stumbled on Fort Glenn, where fighters finally scrambled, downing one.
