Here is one i had never Seen/Heard Of before. In the respect of being "forgotten" it kind of reminds me of The Italian Campaign...which was frequently overshadowed by North Africa before it, and the invasion of France During/After it. Anyway.....The Alaskan Campaign............... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkvqM6RvJW4
I spent a year on Attu in the nineties with 19 other Coasties and a dog. The dog was huge and entirely insane, but he was the only dog we had so we overlooked his faults. For example, he would kill foxes and instead of eating them, would attempt to have sex with the corpse. He was a hard dog to love. The site was an old USCG LORAN station, closed not long afterward when GPS replaced the need for LORAN. Nobody is there to maintain the runway now, so I suppose the only way to get there is via boat. The salmon fishing was outstanding, and the ptarmigan so tame it seemed unfair to shoot them for dinner. The battlefield was never cleaned up, so it's still covered in all the rusty garbage of war. People think the Aleutians are "Arctic" and describe it as such in videos like the one above. It's not arctic at all. It's at the same latitude (and has the same weather) as coastal British Columbia or SE Alaska - it rains 300 days a year. When you get snow it doesn't lay around long, at least at sea level. The surface is indeed "tundra" but instead of tundra like you find in the arctic (water creating a bog because it can't drain down through permafrost), Aleutian tundra is there because the islands just have a thin skin of soil over volcanic rock. That constant rain can't drain into the rock, so you have a thin skin of grass and lichens growing on top of a muddy soup 8 or 10 inches down. Those poor GIs had to slog knee deep up Massacre Valley through that ooze, under fire from the ridges on both sides and ahead. That terrain also meant that low velocity shells (mortars, for example) usually didn't detonate. And since they couldn't get the real artillery off the beach (or see anything through the constant rain and fog), it was a rifleman's war on both sides. I don't know if the Japanese soldiers were blooded, but the Americans were certainly green. Surely, it must have been the ugliest battle of the entire war.
I am glad you mentioned the "stuff left behind". Until i read your post, i did not even realize what seemed "weird" about this video....... ALL the Gear/Weapons/Material that is still there after 75 years. But Yes.....must have been a rather Bleak and Wet place to fight a war...not that there is Any Good Place.
One thought would be that they could threaten the trickle of Lend-Lease material going from the US/Canada to the USSR. Another is "Ha,ha! We're on American soil!"
If they had ever expanded the airfield into something usable (which they didn't have the heavy equipment to accomplish), they could have dominated the entire North Pacific by air as if they had a huge aircraft carrier parked up there. It was also envisioned as a submarine supply base which could have been used against the entire west coast of Canada and the US. Really though, once they took it they seemed to lose interest and never invested the equipment and manpower to build it into a real base.
One theory I read somewhere was that it was to prevent them from being used as bases to bomb Japan. The flying weather was bad enough that no real effort was put into it by the US but that may not have been well known to the Japanese.
