‘They both got bayonetted’
WWII soldiers recall carnage of Alaska battle 75 years ago
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — William Roy Dover’s memory of the World War II battle is as sharp as it was 75 years ago, even though it’s been long forgotten by most everyone else.
His first sergeant rousted him from his pup tent around 2 a.m. when word came the Japanese were attacking and had maybe even gotten behind the American front line, on a desolate, unforgiving slab of an occupied North Pacific island.
“He was shouting, ‘Get up! Get out!’” Dover said.
Dover and most of the American soldiers rushed to an embankment on what became known as Engineer Hill, the last gasp of the Japanese during the Battle of Attu, fought 75 years ago this month on Attu Island in Alaska’s Aleutian chain.
“I had two friends that were too slow to get out,” the 95-year-old Alabama farmer recalled. “They both got bayonetted in their pup tents.”
American forces reclaimed remote Attu Island on May 30, 1943, after a 19-day campaign known as World War II’s forgotten battle. Much of the fighting was hand-to-hand, waged in dense fog and winds of up to 120 mph.
The battle for the Aleutian island was one of the deadliest in the Pacific in terms of the percentage of troops killed. Nearly all the Japanese forces, estimated at about 2,500 soldiers, died with only 28 survivors. About 550 or so U.S. soldiers were killed.
American forces, many poorly outfitted for Alaska weather and trained in California for desert combat, recaptured Attu 11 months after the Japanese took it and Kiska, a nearby island. It was the only WWII battle fought on North American soil.
The Japanese staged a last-ditch, desperate offensive May 29 at Engineer Hill.
About 200 Japanese soldiers died in the assault; the remaining 500 or so held grenades to their bellies and pulled the pins. It was the first official case of “gyokusai,” a Japanese euphemism for annihilation or mass suicide in the name of Emperor Hirohito, which increasingly occurred in other battles.
Tomimatsu Takahashi said in 2010 he was being treated for a bullet wound when the order for the final charge came. “I was going to die, I thought,” he said.
But as he headed out to fight, he collapsed, likely because he hadn’t eaten in days. He was captured and sent to several mainland POW camps before he returned home to Japan in 1947.
After the battle, Dover said things went back to normal for the American soldiers — except:
“Somebody had to bury those Japanese.”
During the war, the U.S. Army buried the Japanese soldiers’ bodies with care, built a memorial, set up a grave post and paid respects to the spirits, said Nobuyuki Yamazaki, whose grandfather died on Attu.
Yamazaki was among a delegation of Japanese soldiers’ descendants who attended a 75th anniversary celebration this month in Anchorage.