![]() and Canadian) during the year-long campaign to push them off of American territory were in the thousands, with a grim percentage killed or severely wounded by the same hazards that troops have always faced when fighting in a wilderness thousands of miles from home: friendly fire exposure minor wounds that turn mortal when transportation proves impossible.Īnd then there was the fatigue the lethargy-inducing sameness of the place. Ultimately, long before the war was over, the Japanese were routed from the islands they did occupy. Here, decades after Japanese forces seized control of Attu and Kiska islands early in the war, presents a gallery of photos by Dmitri Kessel chronicling the day-to-day existence of Allied troops serving in the dramatic and forbidding landscape of the Aleutians. Was it a diversion ahead of another, critical attack elsewhere? Was it the vanguard of a far larger assault on America’s enormous, and perhaps fatally vulnerable, west coast? ![]() ![]() Or perhaps the isolated front was destined to a gradual, ever-deepening obscurity because no storied battles with stirring names (Iwo Jima, Bastogne, Normandy, Saipan) were fought there.īut in the early 1940s the Aleutian Campaign was news throughout the U.S.Some of the islands in the North Pacific, in what was then the American territory of Alaska, had been invaded and occupied by Japanese troops. Maybe it’s because the casualties, in relative terms, were light compared to those suffered in other theaters of conflict during World War II. ![]()
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