Forgotten Victims : Twilight of the Aleuts: A War Story

There is one last story from World War II that remains to be told. It is the story of a forgotten U.S. campaign on American soil and of a people known as the Aleuts, who sailed off from their island homes to a life of misfortune.

Many would never return, giving a ring of prophesy to the words John Muir had spoken about the Aleuts half a century earlier: “It is only a matter of time before they vanish from the earth.”

Some died in the squalid internment camps the U.S. government set up for them in abandoned canneries. Others drifted away to a life far from the Aleutians, taking the secrets of their wartime nightmares with them.

Unremembered Victims

Perhaps it is because the Aleuts, hardy fishermen and hunters related to the Eskimos, were so few in numbers that they, unlike the Japanese-Americans, have remained among the unremembered civilian victims of the war. Perhaps it is because the whole Aleutian military campaign in Alaska against Japan has been so overlooked that some histories of the war don’t even mention it. Or perhaps it’s simply because this island chain, where the Wind Devil is fierce and the Creator manifests power through the sun and the water, is so remote, so distant from the rest of the United States, that no one much cared.

“For 45 years we’ve been trying to tell our story,” said Agafon Krukoff, an Aleut businessman in Anchorage, whose parents were interned in a Funter Bay cannery the government rented for $60 a month. “And no one’s wanted to listen. At least until recently.”

The story they have tried to tell--and the one Congress is now listening to--begins in 1942 in the Aleutians, 70 treeless islands of rugged, volcanic beauty and intolerable weather that curl out from the Alaska peninsula for 1,100 miles, separating the Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean.

Maddening Isolation

Their isolation is so uncompromising that some U.S. servicemen here in World War II were quite literally driven mad by boredom, their climate so nasty that Bob Hope once joked that the Aleutians were the only place a man could “walk in mud up to his knees bucking a snowstorm that blew sand in his face, while being pelted (by hail) in the rear on a sunny day.”

Japan had coveted the Aleutians as a bridge to the U.S. mainland, and, hoping to divert the U.S. Navy’s attention away from Midway, its bombers attacked Dutch Harbor June 3 and 4, 1942, killing 77 American servicemen. On June 6, its soldiers invaded the island of Kiska, capturing 11 Americans manning a weather station. Attu, the westernmost island, just 650 miles from Japan, fell the next day, and the 42 Aleuts living there were taken prisoner and sent to Japan. For the next 11 months the outer reaches of Alaska would remain under Japanese occupation.

“The bloody Aleutian campaign was dogged by serious blunders (by the U.S. military),” notes the Alaska Geographic Society in its history of the Aleutians. “The Japanese invasion was initially kept secret for morale and security reasons, and despite subsequent public information, heavy censorship served handily to cover embarrassment of military leaders, so that the Aleutian campaign is often entirely omitted from accounts of World War II.”

Here’s how one Aleut, John Tcheripanoff, 65, remembers those early days of the war and the fate that befell him. Tcheripanoff lives in a tidy little house across the inlet from Dutch Harbor, a wind-swept town of 200 inhabitants that, with its unpaved main street and cluster of store fronts, seems reminiscent of Montana or Wyoming, circa 1880. Past the inn, whose bar is packed with hard-drinking fishermen just off the high seas, stands an oil storage tank, its skin still wrinkled and warped from the Japanese attack 45 years ago.

“After the attack, the government sent a boat and said we were being evacuated,” Tcheripanoff recalled. “ ‘Course, you could stay behind if you wanted. Henry Swanson stayed behind. But most of us wanted to get away from the war. They didn’t seem to know where to take us, though, and the place we ended up, in Ward Cove, was pretty terrible, with everybody being sick all the time and a lot of people dying.

“Outside of meeting my wife here, Eva, not much good happened at Ward Cove, and when I finally did get back home, I had lost everything. The outboard motor was gone, the house had been wrecked. I said, ‘What kind of people been living here?’ I couldn’t believe it when they said it was American soldiers.”

Unlike the 120,000 Japanese-Americans who were interned during the war as a perceived threat to U.S. security (“A Jap is a Jap; it makes no difference if the Jap is a citizen or not,” said the West Coast military commander, Lt. Gen. John DeWitt.), the 881 Alaskan natives were evacuated from the Aleutians and the tiny Pribilof Islands to the north for their own protection.

Where the system broke down, a bipartisan bill now before Congress contends, was at the filthy, disease-ridden camps run by the Department of the Interior along the southeastern Alaska coast where “the United States failed to provide reasonable care for the Aleuts.”

The Aleuts were kept “virtually prisoners of the government” in “quarters unfit for pigs,” said a report from inspecting doctors. Ten percent of the Aleuts died during their internment, and half would never return to their homeland. Tuberculosis, whooping cough, measles and mumps were the usual causes of death, though the cause of Leontry Lovoroff’s death was listed merely as “pain.”

‘Matter of Time’

One physician reported to the U.S. surgeon general that it was “only a matter of time before some publication, such as Life magazine, will get ahold of this story.”

As many as 100 people were jammed into damp, drafty, unheated canneries and herring salters, men and women sharing the same, unpartitioned space. The floors of the empty buildings were crumbling with dry rot, the windows were broken, the doors were off their hinges.

Women slept with their children, three and four to a cot. Candles were used for light. The outhouses overflowed, and waste was dumped from a slop chute into the bay. On the shores of that polluted bay, the Aleuts foraged for clams and fish. Then bootleggers found the Aleuts, and alcoholism soared; venereal disease, contracted from whites in nearby towns, spread like an epidemic.

“I have seen tough places during my days in Alaska but nothing to equal the situation at Funter,” the state’s attorney general, Henry Roden, wrote acting Gov. Ernest Gruening on Sept. 20, 1943. “I have not the language at my command which can adequately describe what I saw.”

Not everyone was so sympathetic, because Alaska in the ‘40s was a territory where signs posted outside bars and restaurants said: “No Natives Allowed.”

Ward Bowar, chief of the Alaska Fisheries Division, wrote the governor that year, saying, “It may well be that the natives . . . have been coddled too much and the time has come to bring home to them forcefully the need to look after themselves in more decent ways . . . . If they do not respond to ordinary instructions and suggestions along this line, more drastic measures will be necessary.”

And Harry McCain, the acting mayor of Ketchikan, told Gov. Gruening that in order to prevent his town from being “infected with their diseased condition” the Aleuts should be relocated. McCain suggested Hyder, “a dead town with less than 30 people.” He noted, “It is my feeling the residents there would welcome them because of the trade they would bring.”

John Tcheripanoff’s wife, Eva, 60, reflected on all this the other day in Dutch Harbor, which remained in American hands despite the two bombing attacks. She clicked off the television with her remote control while she gathered her thoughts. She held a little basket her mother had made of seal gut that she had just proudly showed a visitor.

John, a choir master at the Russian Orthodox Church down the road--most Aleuts practice the faith of their first colonial masters--sat next to her on the sofa, paying close attention, as he always does when his wife speaks.

“I think,” she said slowly, and John nodded, “this was a terrible thing. I can still remember me, my auntie and my auntie’s mother going into that camp for the first time. There were trees there and we had never seen trees before. That scared many of us. But I do not blame anyone for what happened. Crazy things happen in war.”

Such stoicism is typical of the Aleuts, a quiet, shy people who immigrated to the islands from the Alaskan mainland 4,000 years ago. They hunted seals, sea otters and whales, fished for salmon, lived in seaside villages of related families and could paddle the sleek kayaks known as bidarkas for 18 or 20 hours at a stretch.

Daily Miracle

Men greeted each dawn as the Creator’s daily miracle and pregnant women bared their bellies to the rays of the sun to gain strength for their infants. The sick and the unruly were immersed in the ice-cold waters of the sea, whose healing and cleansing power was said to be great.

When Russian fur traders came to the Aleutians in the mid-18th Century, nearly every island was populated and the Aleuts numbered an estimated 25,000. The Russians--whose names many Aleuts still bear--conquered, enslaved and frequently massacred the island natives. Flu and small pox epidemics in 1848 and 1918 further reduced their numbers. By the time Attu and Kiska fell to the Japanese, the Aleuts’ population had dwindled to about 1,400.

Early in May, 1943, nearly a year after the Japanese invasion, Walter Winchell opened one of his evening broadcasts with: “To Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea . . . Keep your eyes on the Aleutian Islands.” Just after midnight a week later, the U.S. 32nd Infantry Regiment landed secretly on the northern beaches of Attu--an island that today is a national wildlife refuge populated only by about 30 American Coast Guardsmen.

With the arrival of the 4th Infantry, the size of the American force swelled to more than 16,000 men, and slowly the fierce resistance of the Japanese, outnumbered 8 to 1, crumbled. At 8 p.m. on May 29, the surviving Japanese met in front of the hospital to discuss their final strategy. A Japanese medical officer wrote in his diary that night:

“The last assault is to be carried out. All the patients in the hospital were made to commit suicide. Only 33 are still living and I am grateful to die here. I have no regrets. Banzai to the Emperor. I am grateful that I have kept the peace of my soul . . . . Goodby, Farke, my beloved wife, who loved me to the last, until we meet again. Grant you God speed Miseka who just became 4 years old and will grow up unhindered. I feel sorry for you Fakiko, born February of this year. You will never see your father. Well, be good, Matsae (Brother). Goodby.”

The 19-day battle for Attu took the lives of 550 Americans and 2,600 Japanese, some of whom blew themselves up with grenades rather than surrender. Only the fight for Iwo Jima claimed a higher percentage of casualties among the combatants in the Pacific war.

In keeping with the general blackout of news from the Aleutians, pictures of the Japanese bodies stretched out across the tundra between Massacre Bay and Chichagof Harbor did not run in Life magazine until April, 1944, almost a year after the battle.

Allowed to Return

With the islands back in American hands, the Aleuts were allowed to return to their villages in 1944 and ‘45, though Attu and a few other islands were never resettled. Most returned to homes that had been wrecked by the occupying troops. Their personal possessions had been stolen, their religious icons were gone. For all the Aleut claims against the military, President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved a total of $10,000.

“I’d have to say the war changed us as a people,” Henry Swanson, 92, said. “We were used to living off the land ‘cause there was nothing here. We dried our fish for the winter. We had hunting parties for seals that supplied the whole town with meat.

“After the war, all that ceased. I suppose it was cause the people had been exposed to different ways--to money, to modern things. Our leadership was gone, our community was broken up by the camp experience. Now the herring have disappeared and instead of hunting for seal, when someone wants meat they go to the store and buy beef for $3 or $4 a pound.”

Of the 6,000 residents of the Aleutians today (excluding about 3,000 U.S. servicemen on Adak, Shemya and Attu), the majority are white fisherman, mainly descendants of New Englanders and Scandinavians. Only about 2,000 of the country’s estimated 12,000 Aleuts remain in this land that bears their name.

Old Language

Full-blooded Aleuts are few because of intermarriage, and fluency in Aleut, a language similar to Eskimo, is rare among the young. “People my age can barely speak the language any more,” said Dimitri Philemonof, 42.

But whatever the erosion of the Aleut culture, the Aleuts themselves finally stand to gain compensation for what happened three American wars ago. Bills making their way through the House and Senate would set up a $5-million trust, provide $1.4 million to restore damaged church property and give each of the 400 or so survivors of the internment camps $12,000.

The legislation, based on the 1983 recommendations of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, also deals with reparations for Japanese-Americans. Despite some opposition from the Reagan Administration--which believes the Aleuts should not be favored among all the groups of people who suffered during wartime--congressional sponsors are confident of success.

“I think--no, I know--that this bill is going to get through Congress this session,” said U.S. Rep. Don Young, an Alaska Republican. “The money is minor and I don’t see substantial opposition coming from any quarter. I think this is one piece of legislation in which justice is finally going to prevail.”