My dad - John F. O'Connor - was a co-pilot in a B-25 flying from Attu, the last of the Aleutian island chain, from September, 1943 through October, 1944. He flew 16 combat missions, most of them dull and boring. But 2 got hot. In February, 1944, his plane flew cover, along with several others, over a Navy task force which bombarded shore facilities on the Japanese island of Paramushiru, in the Kuriles. This was a very difficult flight, extreme range and bad weather. Two planes out of twelve never returned. In May, his plane and one other found 3 small - 150 foot length - auxiliary vessels sailing near the Kuriles. In the attack, two of the Japanese ships were sunk and one left severely damaged. Pop's plane darted in and out of cloud cover, so took little damage. The other plane, flown by a "hero" type, exposed itself to enemy fire and was shot to hell. On return, had to be guided in by my Dad's plane, still crash landed. Flying conditions for these guys were uniformly awful: constant fog, lotsa rain, bitter cold. Round trip flights were 8 or 9 hours. They were fighting a nuisance war, hoping to keep some Japanese assets up north, defending the Kuriles, to weaken the defense further south. It was boring, lonely duty. My dad wished that he was in the South Pacific, where his little brother seemed to be fighting the "real" war.
Thanks for sharing some of your dad's stories, Okie. As far as I'm concerned, he was fighting the real war. There might not have been as much action as other places, but what he was doing was important for the war effort. He may not have had as many enemy flags on the side of his plane as he would have liked, but how many mothers' sons came home because of what your father did in Attu? Obviously, we'll never know, but that's another way to look at it.
I think Tommy is right. No matter what theater they fought in, the war was real for all of them. Just because they weren't in on D-Day or the island-hopping campaigns of the Pacific doesn't demean their contribution. These men deserve to be remembered for their exploits. Thanks for sharing these anecdotes. If you have others, feel free to post them.
I spent a year there in the 90's at the old CG Loran station (now closed). We had a supply plane every two weeks and even then, with GPS, LORAN, modern radar and what-have-you, about 25% of those supply lifts were scrubbed when they reached the island. The Aleutians are where two great weather systems collide. North of there is dominated by extreme arctic high pressure, and from the south you get a constant stream of warm(er) wet low pressure. Also, from the south you get warm water from the subtropics flowing up along the Kuroshio current - sort of like the Pacific's Gulf Stream - to hit the cold water flowing from the Bering sea. All of that pressure and temperature differential collides at the Aleutians and spawn crazy cyclonic storms that move east along the entire chain. Even on a calm day the difference in water and air temps along the chain can spawn fog so thick that visibility is measured in feet. To land at all,on most "good" days, the plane would have to drop below 400 feet out at sea (some peculiarity of the conditions made a wall of cloud hang at the 400 foot level) and come in from the sea, then bank hard left to hit the runway. If you missed the approach you smacked right into the mountains ringing the runway. There are a good number of old aircraft littered on those mountains above the runway. Anybody who survived flying out there before modern navigational aids had to be counted as the best flyers in the world.
They are standing on the Marsden matting of the original runway. That matting is just steel sections punched full of holes that was linked together on top of the muskeg (swamp) that covered the flat area they designated as an airport. Through most of the year, the ground was so soft that a landing plane would actually bend the matting to create a "bow wave" ahead of the plane. If a section came unhinged it would fly up into the undercarriage and usually tip the plane onto its nose. Eventually they put in an actual tarmac runway, but until they did every landing and take off was an adventure. In my time (and still today I suppose) there were acres and acres of discarded Marsden matting piled up next to the runway.
Thanks for sharing about your dad. Not everyone got to act out the John Wayne part during the conlfict but that doesn't lessen his contribution to the war effort.
