The second in July when Wolfgang Tutiakoff’s analysis ship first sighted Attu Island appeared nearly sacred: “It was actually emotional and fairly actually breathtaking,” she says. “About twenty individuals stood in silence for at the very least 5 minutes earlier than somebody stated one thing.”
Attu will get few guests today. Nobody lives there now, and the U.S. Nationwide Park Service screens entry. On the very finish of Alaska’s Aleutian Island chain, Attu is the westernmost territory of america—thus far west, the truth is, that it is technically within the japanese hemisphere and the Worldwide Date Line kinks round it.
In early June 1942, six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Attu and Kiska, one other Aleutian island about 180 miles east, grew to become the one components of america ever occupied by an enemy once they have been invaded by Japan. The occupation lasted for nearly a 12 months, till American and Canadian troops drove out the Japanese in Could 1943—a grim marketing campaign for either side often called the Battle of Attu, when nearly 3,000 individuals have been killed and 1000’s injured, typically due to the acute chilly.
For the reason that battle, nevertheless, Attu and Kiska have principally been uninhabited and are seldom visited—aside from just a few archaeological expeditions, just like the one Tutiakoff labored on, which purpose to doc the vanishing particulars of Alaska’s “forgotten battlefield.”
U.S. and Canadian troops retook Kiska Island in the course of the Battle of Attu in 1943. Right here each nations’ flags fly on a Kiska hilltop on October 12, 1943, as troops rush provides and ammunition ashore beneath.
{Photograph} by AP Photograph
Ancestral island
Maritime archaeologists Jason Raupp of East Carolina College and Dominic Bush, who’s now with the nonprofit group Ships of Discovery, led the July 2024 expedition to Attu that looked for wrecks and different sunken relics aboard the analysis vessel Norseman II.
A pupil on the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, Tutiakoff was one among two cultural liaisons from the Qawalangin tribe of the Unanga (Aleut) individuals. The Unanga individuals had lived on the Aleutian Islands for 1000’s of years, and her predominant process was to supply cultural context, particularly from tribal histories, for the expedition’s scientific discoveries.
Three U.S. Vega Ventura bombers go over a volcano on Kiska Island.
{Photograph} by U.S. Navy/Library of Congress
Bombs from a U.S. Military Air Drive aircraft drop on a Japanese holding on Kiska Island.
{Photograph} by FSA/OWI Assortment/Library of Congress
The voyage was additionally a private pilgrimage of kinds: Within the wake of the Japanese bombing of the Aleutian city of Dutch Harbor on June 3, 1942, Tutiakoff’s grandfather—then a baby—was one among nearly a thousand individuals evacuated from Attu and other Aleutian Islands by U.S. authorities and relocated to squalid huts within the Alaskan Panhandle. As well as, about 45 Unanga individuals have been captured on Attu in the course of the Japanese invasion and taken prisoner; solely about half of them survived the battle.
LAST CHANCE OFFER
$10 OFF & a BONUS situation with each subscription
Regardless of the battle’s eventual finish, the Unanga have been by no means allowed to return to Attu; as a substitute, the U.S. army occupied the island after the Japanese have been pushed out, and it was ultimately deserted—aside from a Coast Guard station that closed in 2010. The U.S. army additionally contaminated components of the island with poisonous chemical compounds.
Attu is now a part of a National Monument, and whereas it is authorized to go to, the previous residents and their households are nonetheless not allowed to reside there. For Tutiakoff, simply seeing the distant island was an necessary occasion. “It’s so magical,” she says. “It is a gigantic island, with mountains and tundra and rocky seashores… It is lined in seashore grass that is not solely inexperienced, however neon inexperienced… It regarded like a unicorn would walk out of it.”
Looking for shipwrecks
The S.S. Dellwood (proven right here in a sonar picture) was a U.S. Military cable laying ship. In July 1943, the ship struck a submerged pinnacle and sank because it was towed to a dock.
{Photograph} by East Carolina College/ThayerMahan, Inc./NOAA Ocean Exploration
The group searched the waters round Attu for 11 days. The Aleutian Islands are notorious for storms, excessive winds, rain and fog, however Raupp recollects that they have been blessed with unusually clear and calm climate.
Utilizing the newest in underwater search expertise, the researchers found and documented three wartime wrecks—two Japanese freighters and an American cable-laying ship—within the waters round Attu. The researchers suppose the 2 freighters had been carrying provides to the Japanese garrison, whereas the American ship dates from the months after the Japanese have been pushed out and the island’s defenses have been being strengthened.
(Archaeologists have also investigated Pearl Harbor’s wrecks. Here’s what they found.)
Expedition to Kiska
The Attu expedition echoes an analogous expedition to Kiska in 2018 that culminated within the discovery of the stern of the USS Abner Read, an American destroyer severely broken in August 1943 when it struck a Japanese sea-mine. The ship was saved, however 71 crew have been killed at Kiska and dozens suffered extreme accidents or inhaled poisonous smoke. (It was later sunk in 1944, on the Battle of Leyte Gulf within the Philippines.)
You Could Additionally Like
The 2018 expedition additionally documented the wreck of an Imperial Japanese Navy submarine, designated I-7, which was badly broken by gunfire from an American destroyer in June 1943 and intentionally run aground on rocks; the scuttled wreck of a Japanese two-man “midget” submarine, meant to torpedo enemy warships; and items of an American B-24 Liberator bomber that was hit by antiaircraft fireplace whereas attacking Japanese positions on the island.
Provide by submarine
A scientific report of the Kiska expedition was published last month within the Worldwide Journal of Nautical Archaeology.
“Our strategy was to survey and doc what the underwater battlefield regarded like,” says lead creator Andrew Pietruszka, a maritime archaeologist on the Scripps Establishment of Oceanography on the College of California San Diego who led the expedition. Necessary archaeological surveys had been carried out on the battlefield islands “and that was inspirational for our work… we got down to replicate what they have been doing on land.”
The I-7 submarine wreck was particularly notable. The Individuals had been bombing the Japanese on Kiska for the reason that invasion, so Japan tried to keep away from air assaults by utilizing submarines to produce the occupying garrison of a number of thousand troopers. “The U.S. gained air superiority, and that made floor ship help harder,” Pietruszka says. “So I believe [the Japanese] started relying extra on submarines for resupply, and that is what I-7 was doing when it was detected.”
New instruments
Each expeditions relied on underwater robots to map and search the seafloor.
The Kiska group spent two weeks on a analysis ship across the island and surveyed its predominant websites with sonar tools on 4 autonomous underwater automobiles (AUVs) that operated independently of the ship-bound researchers. It was the primary time that AUVs had been used round Kiska, and the examine authors be aware they will chart a lot bigger areas of seafloor in higher element than conventional towed sonars, whereas a number of AUVs can function constantly over a 24-hour cycle.
The researchers at Attu, nevertheless, labored with specialised light-weight remotely operated automobiles (ROVs) that have been tethered to the analysis ship and supplied reside video from the darkish depths. Bush says the real-time ROVs have been preferable in some circumstances to AUVs, the place the information in them must be “downloaded” after their restoration. Future maritime archaeological expeditions within the space will ideally use each applied sciences, he says.
(ROVs help scientists explore places that are too dangerous to dive.)
Studying extra about Attu
New points of the Attu wrecks are nonetheless coming to mild months later, because the lots of recorded knowledge are newly processed by the expedition companions, together with the Japanese World Scan Project that developed its ROVs.
Historic analysis additionally hints at new particulars of Japan’s wartime motivations for his or her invasion of the Aleutian Islands. Historians have normally seen it as a diversion for Japan’s ill-fated attack on Midway Atoll, which had taken place just a few days earlier.
However Bush says it appears Japan additionally hoped to make use of Attu as a base for air assaults additional up the island chain and maybe on the North American mainland—plans that by no means got here to go. “[The Japanese] got here to suppose that taking up U.S. soil in North America could be advantageous from a strategic standpoint,” he says. “They known as Attu their ‘unsinkable plane provider.’”
The Attu expedition was additionally a studying expertise for Tutiakoff, in addition to a chance to share her data with the researchers. She used a part of the time to analysis her household historical past, and to evaluate the possibilities that the Unanga individuals may in the future return to reside on Attu given the environmental hazards. “Returning is certainly a purpose of ours,” she says. “That is one among my missions that I wish to accomplish: to reinhabit the island and convey it again to our individuals, in order that we will develop as a neighborhood.”
