soldiers landed on Attu and fought valiantly over the following two weeks to wrestle control of the island from the Japanese troops. “I’m not sure exactly what happened, but they were dying one by one,” Golodoff wrote in his autobiography, “Attu Boy.” His father and an older sister were among the 21 Attuans who died there, as were four of the five babies who were born during the imprisonment. They had some freedom of movement, but food was scarce and many of the captives became ill, perhaps as a result of malnutrition. The Attuans were all housed in one building, guarded by a single Japanese police officer. Three months after the invasion, the Japanese shipped all 40 of Attu’s residents, mostly native Unangans, to the Japanese island of Hokkaido, where they would remain captive until the end of the war. Have you been to the USS Arizona in Hawaii where World War II began in the U.S.? Thank a park ranger for letting us all remember. “I did not understand the mud popping up at the time,” Nick Golodoff, who was 6 years old then, later recalled, “but now I understand that the Japanese were shooting at us.” Attu’s radio operator, Charles Foster Jones, was killed during the invasion. Most residents were leaving church that Sunday morning when they came under fire from machine guns, with bullets hitting the wet ground all around them. Attu’s misfortunes started on June 7, 1942, when Japanese forces invaded the island. forces fought the Japanese for control of the remote island of Attu and repelled a foreign invader for the first time since the War of 1812 with Britain.Īttu is at the westernmost end of the Aleutians, a chain of volcanic islands that extends westward from the mainland of Alaska toward Russia. Most people visit World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument for its Pearl Harbor sites in Hawaii, but the monument also includes the battlefield where U.S. soldiers arrive at Masscre Bay on May 12, 1943, in the only land battle of World War II on North American soil.
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