WWII veteran recalls events of Independence Day 1943
To Army Pvt. Martin Thomas, the foggy, bleak, drab weather surrounding Alaska’s Aleutian Islands made his station, Dutch Harbor, seem like the least inviting military target of World War II.
Dutch Harbor was, at that point, the farthest the 23-yearold Fouke, Ark., native had been from home, and it seemed almost out of reach of enemy air attack until the bombs started falling near his base June 3, 1942.
“I remembered one of their bombs landing just behind a meat storage building we had on base,” he said. “I also remember our barracks getting burned up as we headed out to our positions on the island.”
Dutch Harbor, nestled on the northeast side of the Aleutian Island chain’s Unalaska Island, would become the second and last Navy base on U.S. territory the Japanese would launch an air attack on during the war.
Just six months before the June 3 raid, Thomas, who is now 94 years old and lives in Texarkana, Ark., said he remembers being stationed at Dutch Harbor as he listened to news about the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
“I heard about the attack, but it was hard to tell what was going on,” Thomas said. “I didn’t know much about where Pearl Harbor was at the time.”
Despite being detected on American radar and meeting heavy U.S. anti-aircraft fire, the Japanese air raiders managed to shoot up Dutch Harbor’s fuel tank storage farm, radio station and Army barracks.
The attack also left about 25 U.S. soldiers and sailors dead and strafed several of the Navy’s PBY Catalina flying boats in the harbor’s waters.
“At the time, we were headed out to where we needed to be in case the island came under invasion,” Thomas said.
However, for Thomas and the rest of his unit, a Japanese invasion would take place not on Unalaska Island, but actually some 900 miles farther west on the Aleutian chain’s last two islands, Attu and Kiska. Even that wound up not being a serious enemy effort.
As it would later be revealed during the war, the air attack on Dutch Harbor and the Attu and Kiska invasions were only diversionary assaults aimed at drawing U.S. military attention away from the larger enemy operation targeting Midway Island in the Central Pacific and the remnants of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
Both operations—the Midway Island assault and the Aleutian diversion—failed and wound up being long- and short-term disasters for Japan.
Besides failing to trick and divert U.S. military planners into sending military aid up to Alaska, the attack on the Aleutians proved to be a longterm success for the war’s ultimate outcome.
During the air assault on Dutch Harbor, one of the Japanese navy’s primary fighter planes, a Mitsubishi Zero, caught some .50-caliber machine-gun bullets fired from the ground. The bullet pierced the plane’s main oil line, causing it to crash as it attempted to make a safe landing in an open, grassy, flat field on Akutan Island—about 25 miles east of Dutch Harbor.
The pilot did manage to land, but soon got his struts and landing gear snared and sheared off in the mire of water and mud that saturated the grass. This caused the plane to flip and skid to a stop.
Most of the aircraft survived the landing intact, but the pilot died from a broken neck. The wreckage itself went undiscovered in the mist and mire, for about five weeks, before an PBY scout plane finally spotted it July 10, 1942, noted it on a map and brought the information to Dutch Harbor.
The Army then assembled a search, recovery and salvage team to bury the pilot and retrieve the Zero for inspection— team included Martin.
“We later found this Japanese Zero,” he said. “It landed in this soft, deep, tall, watery grass, and that’s what caused it to flip.”
Thomas and others went to Akutan Island July 15, hauled the Zero out of the field and placed it on a barge. The boat carried the warplane to Dutch Harbor and then to Seattle and on to San Diego Naval Air Station for repairs and combat test flights.
Those test flights rendered valuable technical information to America—expediting the war’s end.
“I helped retrieve it and carry it out of the field, but from there, I didn’t know what became of it,” he said.
Born April 22, 1919, in Fouke, Thomas grew up working on a cotton farm there until he turned 21. That year, heavy rains washed out the crops, which prompted Thomas to join the Army in October 1940.
“I needed a job, and the military paid $21 a month, so I made sure I sent my mom and grandma $10 of it each month.”
Upon joining, Thomas was sent to Minnesota for basic training. There, he learned how to contend with cold weather.
“After a month, a blizzard came through,” he said. “It was cold, and we had to wear wool overcoats.”
The Minnesota weather did help prepare Thomas for his deployment with the Sixth Infantry Division to Dutch Harbor the following year.
Following his Aleutian deployment, the Army sent Thomas back to Little Rock with the rank of private first class. There, he helped train new recruits before the Army sent him to Europe to be attached to the 75th Infantry Division for deployment to Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge. It was during this battle that Thomas received an artillery shrapnel wound to his left thigh.
“The snow was just as cold there as it was in Minnesota and Alaska,” said Thomas, who was a sergeant by then.
Following the Battle of the Bulge, Thomas’ unit managed to plow through Germany—mostly searching through houses for enemy soldiers, attempting to hide in the basements.
Following the war’s end in Europe, the Army sent Thomas back to the states on a British passenger liner full of hundreds or thousands of French, British, Italian, Dutch and German brides seeking to live with their new servicemen husbands in the United States.
Thomas took a bus back to Arkansas following his discharge from the service to resume farming for the next 10 years before getting into the timber cutting business.
“I actually came back to the states to get married to someone I knew here,” he said. “I took a train back to Arkansas, and from there on, I was just glad to be back home.”