The Lonely Islands Attu and Kiska, AlaskaThe sea off the island of Attu, Aleutian Islands, Alaska. The North Pacific’s high seas, winds and reduced visibility were constant conditions

SPECIAL FEATURE

The Lonely Islands Attu and Kiska, Alaska

Essay by Nancy Lord

Photographs by Irene Owsley

Nancy Lord

Nancy Lord is the author of three collections of short stories; a novel, pH (WestWinds Press/ Alaska Northwest Books); a memoir, Fishcamp (Island Press/ Shearwater Books and Counterpoint Press paperback edition); and four nonfiction books: Beluga Days: Tracking the Endangered White Whale (Counterpoint Press and The Mountaineers Books paperback edi-tion), Early Warming (Counterpoint Press), Green Alaska: Dreams from the Far Coast (Counterpoint Press), and Rock, Water, Wild: An Alaskan Life (University of Nebraska Press). She has published seven essays in Alaska Quarterly Review, one of which was cited as Notable essay of the year in The Best American Essays. Other essays have appeared in Sierra Magazine, Hunger Mountain, Ploughshares, Center for Humans and Nature, Catamaran, and Utne Reader. Her awards include fellowships from the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the Rasmuson Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, and residencies including Denali Park, Wrangell Mountains Center, and Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. Lord served as Alaska Writer Laureate from 2008– 2010.

Irene Owsley

Irene Owsley, a freelance photographer, specializes in the outdoors and travel, particularly in northern regions. Her work has appeared in such magazines as Canoe & Kayak, Sierra, National Parks, Earthwatch, and Natural History and in the publications of several conservation organiza-tions. Since 2011, she has been selected for five artist- in-residence pro-grams: Bandelier National Monument, New Mexico, and four through Voices of the Wilderness in Alaska (Nellie Juan- College Fjord Wilder-ness Study Area, Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge and two in Tracy Arm- Ford’s Terror Wilderness). A panorama from the latter resi-dency was included in an exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Wilderness Act. She has exhibited her work in venues including the Anchorage Museum, Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, and the National Institutes of Health. She has also been profiled in Rangefinder, Photographer’s Forum, and Nikon World magazine. A long- time resident of Washington DC until 2014, Owsley found the “wild” in this metropolitan area by creating a body of work called “Wild Washington,” with images from the riparian areas along the Potomac River. She is now a resident of New Mexico.

This photographic essay collaboration was made possible by the Voices of the Wilder-ness artist residency program, sponsored by the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Ser-vice, and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Nancy Lord and Irene Owsley were selected by the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge to travel to the islands of Kiska and Attu in the summer of 2017.

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The sea off the island of Attu, Aleutian Islands, Alaska. The North Pacific’s high seas, winds and reduced visibility were constant conditions with which the military struggled during the WWII Aleutian Campaign.

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Credit: Frank D. W. Witmer, College of Engineering, University of Alaska Anchorage.

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Credit: National Park Service.

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View across Casco Cove to Massacre Bay and the formidable mountains of Attu Island.

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View of Massacre Valley and the prominent Terrible Mountain from the track leading up to Engineer Hill, the site of the deciding battle fought between U.S. forces and the Japanese for control of Attu Island. Traces of roads and encampments can be seen in the valley floor.

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Japanese cave bunker built into the cliff at Kiska Harbor to protect against sustained U.S. bombing raids, with a view of the wreckage of the Japanese cargo ship the Nissan Maru. Kiska Island was occupied by the Japanese from June 1942 to July 1943 during the Aleutian Islands Campaign of WWII.

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THE LONELY ISLANDS

I

Attu. Kiska. These place names belong to the Unangan language, a tongue spoken deep in the throat, with a vibrating palate and quak-ing consonants not unlike the calls of geese. Unangans would have voiced the words differently than the way the Russians transcribed them, or the flat pronunciation in modern English. Properly emplaced in their watery cosmos, the words would have referenced something meaningful:

Prickly sea urchins,beaches of drift logs caught

from far- off forests.

Now, their meanings are lost.Today, some pronounce Attu as At- too, others Ah- too, sometimes

At- TOO, like a sneeze. In Alaska, Kiska is a popular dog name; in Rus-sia, it’s a girl’s name, a diminutive of Katarina, meaning “pure.” Most Americans have never heard of Attu or Kiska. What? Where? Islands in Alaska. Islands at the far end of the Aleutian Chain. Islands at the end of the Earth. But the first people who lived there felt no confu-sion. Unangans’ name for themselves means “we the people.” They knew who they were. They knew those islands not as the ends of the Earth, but the center.

II

The Russians came. They arrived in the Aleutians from the west, start-ing in 1741, to confirm rumors of new land and in search of furs, the soft wealth of the sea otter trade. The Unangan people were skill-ful paddlers, able hunters, and the Russians quickly enslaved them. Russians called them Aleuts, which means “coastal dwellers” or “islanders,” in the language of the Chukchi, indigenous to the far eastern coast of Russia. This foreign name persists today, while the people themselves choose Unangan.

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According to scholars who have inspected shipping records, the Russians exported at least 80,000 sea otter skins from the North Pa-cific between 1785-1797. By the end of the same time period, the Un-angan population had fallen by as much as 80%, to 2,500 people in all of the Aleutian Islands. Some Unangans starved because the men were forced to hunt otters for Russian profit instead of caring for their own families. Many died of diseases to which they had no resistance. More than a few were blatantly murdered. Unangans left alive were often shuttled among islands by the Russians, to further their hunt-ing and trade.

Attu’s Massacre Bay and Murder Point bear honest names: there, Russian fur traders – the promyshlenniki – slaughtered fifteen Attuans in 1745, the first time they landed on the island. The specific trigger for the killings is lost to history.

Shell middens all arounderoding now to sea:

once these were villages.

III

The Americans came, after “buying” Alaska from Russia in 1868. They brought their missionaries and teachers. They brought government housing and government laws. They came with Coast Guard cutters.

In 1941, Etta and Foster Jones arrived on Attu Island, she as school-teacher, he to handle radio communications and school maintenance. Their friends on the mainland cautioned them against those far- off jobs – so close to Japan! The couple laughed. They couldn’t imagine what Japan would want with Attu, a barren island lost in fog.

The Native population of the island at the time totaled 43 Attu-ans, who lived in their single village on the northeast side, where they hunted and fished and attended the Russian Orthodox church on Sundays. For cash income, they trapped foxes, animals introduced by the Russians, mostly on a neighboring small island. Attuan women were known for their very fine basket weaving.

Green grass gathered from hillsides.Not too near the ocean – coarse.

Not too far – brittle.

Meanwhile, Kiska had been uninhabited for years, since perhaps the 1790s, except by visiting hunters. As World War II began, the Navy

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installed a small weather and radio station, operated by a handful of men. The war required silence by all ships at sea, and so, the men were told, this far- flung station needed to deliver the region’s weather.

Fog, wind, wind- driven fog:Only one place in the world

pairs them together.

IV

The Japanese came. On June 6, 1942, more than 1,000 soldiers landed on the beach at Kiska. They captured 10 Navy men at the weather sta-tion, although the commander, William House, escaped to the hills and evaded the Japanese for forty- nine days by hiding in a cave, eat-ing grass and scavenging the tideline at night. When help did not come and House’s options dwindled to starvation or surrender, he chose the latter.

“Traditionally a white flag is used,so I ripped off a piece from my undershorts

and waved it as I marched in.”

House, weighing 80 pounds, was given tea and biscuits.

V

The Japanese kept coming. The same night as the Kiska invasion, 1,200 soldiers landed on Attu and, in the morning, captured the villag-ers and Etta Jones, the schoolteacher. Her husband, Foster Jones, was killed, perhaps because he had hidden or destroyed radio equipment and communication logs. The Japanese raised their flag and told the Attuans that they had been liberated from their American oppressors.

Little Nick Golodoffremembers: mud “popping up,”

bullets tearing ground.

The Attuans were confined to their village for the next three months, a hardship that prevented them from gathering food or wood for fuel. The soldiers played with the children and gave them treats, but, eventually, all those captured were shipped to Japan as prisoners.

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VI

What did the Japanese want? Historians still debate this question. Control of the North Pacific. Defense against American advances. Di-version from attacks and attention elsewhere. A psychological “win” by establishing a foothold on American soil.

Brian Garfield writes in The Thousand- Mile War, “At great expense, Japan had captured a pair of islands she did not really want and had precious little use for. . . . Whether the Aleutians would ever have a strategic use remained to be seen; in the meantime both nations carried on the fight, simply because this was where the fight was.”

The Japanese dug in on both Attu and Kiska. Thousands of troops occupied the islands, underground and above, in comfort-able warmed quarters and with adequate food. They fortified with anti- aircraft guns and cannons, sea planes and midget submarines. They went fishing and skiing. Meanwhile, the Americans dropped bombs.

Five thousand three hundred eighteen sorties.Thirty- one tons of bombs.

Weather: always a problem.

Since clouds and fog covered the islands most of the time, target-ing was imprecise, and bombs often landed in the ocean or on tundra far from Japanese infrastructure. Still, it was enough to hinder prog-ress on the enemy’s construction of airfields. The village of Attu was destroyed.

VII

May 11, 1943. Twenty- seven degrees Fahrenheit. Thick fog. Eleven thousand American troops landed on the beaches of Attu to an eerie quiet. Three days, they were told. It should take no longer than that to defeat the enemy.

The battle raged for 19 days. The Japanese, holding the high ground, picked off the Americans as they advanced. The American soldiers, trained and outfitted for combat in desert conditions, suf-fered from the wet and cold.

Trench foot, Attu feet.Cold water soaked leather boots.

Limp, stagger, collapse.

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Eventually, the Japanese were pushed back and back, corralled into an island valley. With no hope of rescue or resupply, they waged a final, desperate attack, charging in a wave with shouts of banzai, “(may you live) ten thousand years,” their honoring of the Emperor. Those Japanese who weren’t killed outright committed mass suicide. Seppuku, the etiquette of self- destruction.

Final numbers: 2,351 Japanese dead, 28 taken prisoner. 559 Ameri-cans dead, 1,138 wounded, 1,555 injured (mostly from exposure), 577 with other “ailments,” including psychological trauma.

Japanese doctor, dead.In his pocket, a list – friends

trained with in America.

VIII

August 15, 1943. Certain they would overwhelm the enemy this time, 35,000 American and Canadian troops landed at Kiska Island. For eight days they searched the island, to finally understand that the Japanese had evacuated weeks earlier, leaving behind abandoned wreckage, booby traps, and a few loose dogs. In fog and fright, 21 Al-lied soldiers were killed by their own troops and 50 were wounded. A patrol ship in the harbor hit a mine – another 71 dead.

Newspaper headline:KISKA TAKEN!

Truer would be “given back.”

IX

Etta Jones and all the weathermen survived the war and returned to the States three years after their capture. Among the Attuans, one elder died during the occupation and one died en route to Japan. Of the 41 who reached Japan, 16 died there, mostly of malnutrition and starvation, often exacerbated by tuberculosis. Chief Mike Hodikoff and his son died of food poisoning after scavenging from garbage. Four of five babies born in captivity died.

Nick Golodoff remembersboys stealing food at night:Carrots, potatoes, turnips.

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The rescued Attuans were not allowed to return to Attu. The American government informed them that they were too few to rein-habit the island. Besides, there was nothing left of their village. Most resettled on Atka, another Aleutian island 550 miles to the east, with Atkans who had, themselves, been interned by the American govern-ment for the war’s duration, in camps in southeast Alaska. The vil-lage of Atka was rebuilt; it had been destroyed by American troops to prevent it from being used by the Japanese.

Twelve villages emptied.Four now lost: Attu, Biorka,

Kashega, Makushin.

X

After taking Attu back from the Japanese, the Navy built a base there with housing for 7,650 men, an airfield, a seaplane base, piers, and all the rest. It closed at the end of the war, almost as soon as it was completed, and then operated again for a few years in the 1960s. A LORAN station, for navigation, was also established on the island; a Coast Guard station followed. Since 2010, when the Coast Guard station was decommissioned, no one has lived on the island.

The U. S. military also built up facilities on Kiska Island in the last years of the war. Structures included troop quarters, docks and piers, a runway, a seaplane ramp, fuel tanks, and storage facilities. These were “abandoned in place” after the war. Later, the uninhabited island was used for rocket and bombing practice.

Pigeon guillemots,white wing patches and red legs,

nest now in shipwrecks.

Both islands today are part of the Alaska Maritime National Wild-life Refuge, managed by the U. S. Fish & Wildlife Service. The clean-up of debris and hazardous materials has been extensive and expensive. It remains incomplete.

XI

These days, the very few travelers to Attu include birders intent on adding to their lists species pushed by storms from Asia to North

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America. In a collapsing Coast Guard building where visitors have taken shelter, they’ve marked a wall with their names and two sets of numbers – one for their Alaska birds, the other for their North American species. (Spring 1992, Sandy Komito, 261 790.)

Veterans of the Battle of Attu who once made pilgrimages are, if still living, no longer capable of such a journey.

A fancy cruise ship, on a thirty- day itinerary from Hokkaido to Vancouver, plans stops at Attu and Kiska in 2019.

In 2017, the Refuge brought a group of Attuan descendants by research ship from Atka to their homeland. The group walked over the old village site, now vanished under waving grass.

They placed a white cross,gathered armfuls of basket grass,

eyes watering in wind.

The seabird colonies on Kiska Island include 14 species and over three million birds. Least auklets form swirling clouds around lava- creviced cliffs. Their chattering calls would deafen any person pres-ent to hear them.

XII

On an August day, Attu fog blows, low and wispy, breaking to streaks of sunlight. Weathered wooden pilings totter to the bay, topped with gardens of beach plants. Inland, knee- high grasses bend in the wind, and purple thistles wave their showy heads. Geese honk hollowly as they wing over. From a hillside vantage, the land across and below is scarred with tracks and rows of depressions – human history made visible. Crushed tanks, their steel rust- orange, mimic the peaks and valleys behind them. Here lie piles of wood and cable, overgrown with moss, grasses, Artemisia. Here, a shell casing in the dirt.

From out of the fog –towering peace memorial,

a bursting silver star.

XIII

At Kiska, shipwrecks accent the bay, slipping beneath the waves, masts tall and tilting. Along the beach, caves cut into sandstone show

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their scraping marks even as forests of ferns take over the water- seeping walls. Underground bunker, mound of coal, rusted stove, wooden tent stake – these remain. Now a gathering of truck bodies, engines, wagons, anti- aircraft gunnery, sections of the perforated steel used in airstrips.

Rubber shoe soles –big toe separated,

Japanese style.

XIV

Without their people, the islands are lonely, holding our history, fac-ing the future. What did we learn? What do we love?

Fog lifts and lowers.A single ruddy turnstone

pecks along the beach.

A miniature submarine molders in the grass, its side blown out. There sits a perfect round clear- water pond, a seventy- five- year- old bomb crater. Ah, cotton grass. Ah, cloudberries, not quite ripe.

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World War II- era pilings. Massacre Bay was one of the landing sites of U.S. troops dur-ing the Battle of Attu in May 1943 in the attempt to recapture the island.

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Kiska, Aleutian Islands, Alaska. Machine parts with Japanese lettering. Kiska was occu-pied by the Japanese from June 1942 to July 1943.

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Bomb crater, now a small pond, on the hillside of Gertrude Cove on Kiska Island.

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Assorted debris left behind by the Japanese along the beach at Kiska Harbor.

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Ammunition scattered on the hillside of Gertrude Cove, Kiska Island.

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Japanese anti- aircraft guns above Gertrude Cove, Kiska Island.

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Propeller from downed aircraft and a Japanese anti- aircraft gun erected as a plaque along the runway on Attu in honor of the retaking of the island by U.S. troops. Plaque reads: “A grateful nation remembers those who sacrificed to preserve freedom for Attu during WWII. This memorial is a testament to their courage and devotion. Dedicated on June 16, 1993.”

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Japanese anti- aircraft gun stands above Gertrude Cove on Kiska Island.

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Seat of a Japanese anti- aircraft gun emplacement above Gertrude Cove.

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World War II- era building remnants at Massacre Bay, Attu Island, one of the landing sites of U.S. troops during the Battle of Attu in May 1943.

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Japanese wood- burning stove amid the debris and materiel found on the hillside of Gertrude Cove, Kiska Island.

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Japanese vehicle debris above Gertrude Cove, Kiska Island.

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Detail of building remnants and Japanese occupation above Gertrude Cove.

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WWII- era Quonset hut constructed by U.S. forces stands above Kiska Harbor.

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Detail of rusted siding, WWII- era Quonset hut on the facing page.

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Type- A midget submarine was one of six the Japanese carried to Kiska Island in 1942.

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Japanese Type- A midget submarine.

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Japanese Type- A midget submarine.

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Close-up of damage to a Japanese Type- A midget submarine.

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Wreckage of the Japanese ship the Borneo Maru in Gertrude Cove, Kiska Island.

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Bow and anchor detail of the wreckage of the Borneo Maru in Gertrude Cove.

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Wreckage of the Japanese cargo ship the Nissan Maru in Kiska Harbor.

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Another view of the Japanese cargo ship the Nissan Maru in Kiska Harbor.

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Remains of the Borneo Maru in Gertrude Cove.

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Rope and iron debris left behind at Kiska Harbor.

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Remnants of communications infrastructure above Massacre Bay, one of the landing sites of U.S. troops during the Battle of Attu in May 1943.

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Remnants of WWII- era piers in Massacre Bay.

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Remains of a Type- A Japanese midget submarine on Kiska, Island.

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Debris strewn in the high grass overlooking Kiska Harbor.

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Split toe jika- tabi footwear left by the Japanese on the hillside at Gertrude Cove, Kiska Island. (Nancy Lord photo)

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Another view of split toe jika- tabi at Gertrude Cove.

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Japanese bunker built into the hillside at Gertrude Cove, Kiska Island.

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Japanese cave bunker built into the cliff at Kiska Harbor to protect against sustained U.S. bombing raids.

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U.S. monument along the runway on Attu Island. Plaque reads: “This plaque inscribed and placed here by those who fought by your side or served in the defense of this island during World War II to honor the boys – men who prematurely gave their lives dur-ing the Battle of Attu and in remembrance of the mothers, fathers, wives, children and sweethearts whose lives were forever changed due to their loss.”

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U.S. monument in the grass near Kiska Harbor reads: “To the Men of Amphibious Task Force 9 who fell here August 1943, Placed here August 1983 by the 87th Mountain In-fantry Regiment.”

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Rusted storage tank above Massacre Bay.

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Slopes of Attu Island above Casco Cove and Massacre Bay, one of the landing sites of U.S. troops during the Battle of Attu.

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View of Massacre Bay and the mountains of the island of Attu.

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World War II- era road grader on the hillside near Casco Cove and Massacre Bay on Attu Island.

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A Peace Monument on Attu Island honors all those who died in the Aleutian Cam-paign. The titanium monument was erected by the Japanese government in 1987. After being damaged in a storm, it was restored in 2003 by a team of Japanese and American metal technicians.