Japanese Occupation of Attu and Kiska (Aleutian Islands)

As part of the campaign to take Midway Island in June 1942, the Japanese bombed Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands and occupied Attu and Kiska islands as part of a diversion away from the main operation at Midway. Films from there show Japanese soldiers interrogating Americans who look like civilians (they didn't look like they were in very good condition). Can anyone tell me what happened to any American civilians or soldiers who were captured there? Also, what effect did the Japanese occupation, if any, on the larger war effort? How large was the American operation that liberated the islands in the end? (When I was a student in university in the US, one of my professors who had been born and raised in Japan mentioned that he had been assigned as a meteorogist for the Japanese army in the Aleutians, but unfortunately I was too stupid to ask him any questions about it).

As a minor nit, I realize that this is how the operation is usually described in American histories and documentaries, but from what I read in Japanese books, it was not really the case. Rather, following the April 1942 raid by Doolittle's B-25s, the Japanese undertook a broad effort to push back their boundaries to prevent any further such raids. (They knew that it was carrier-based, but they took more seriously the threat of land-based bombing.) This effort took three forms: an offensive to roll up the airfields in China, a major effort to capture Midway, and securing the outmost Aleutian islands.

Specifically, no, but as you know, prisoners of the Japanese did not fare well. Most eventually were moved back to Japan or (as slave labor) to work camps somewhere in the occupied lands. The ones who reached Japan were the lucky ones.

None, really. It was a psychological blow, of course, but there were many of those in 1941-1942.

Huge. Kiska proved to have been abandoned. (There is extensive documentary footage of this operation

I don't have my sources to doublecheck where I am at the moment, but IIRC the American captives were meteorologists, Aleuts, and others. In one memorable case, the Japanese machinegunned a shack, but some of the Americans survived and escaped to hide out on the island. The last holdout after an extended period of time finally found it necessary to surrender because of exposure and starvation. Some of the American captives were murdered and others were sent away from the Aleutians as prisoners. For one of many sources about these captives, see:

Garfield, Brian. The Thousand-Mile War: World War II in Alaska and the Aleutians. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1995.

The Japanese occupation of Alaskan territory had a profound effect upon many of the early war efforts of Japan and the United States, but these efforts subsided into the 'Forgotten War' as the overall war expanded in scope and size in the other theaters. The vulnerability of the Alaskan area of operations and the line of communications to Vladivostok and the Soviet Union prompted the development of airways to Alaska and the Soviet Union and the construction of ALCAN, the Alaskan-Canadian Highway. The loss of so many combat aircraft, nearly a whole squadron in one instance, while simply being ferryed to Alaska prompted the unprecedented development of cold weather laboratories for aviation.

Likewise for the Japanese, Alaska and the Aluetians remained a threat to the Japanese Home Isalnds throughout the war which caused Japan to heavily defend Paramushiro from an invasion which never came when such forces were urgently needed elsewhere.

See Garfield's book for specifics. There are also many online sources for information. For example, see: Michael P. Nagel; Attu Island: Hell Frozen Over: A Brutal Winter Rules Campaign in the Aleutians. http://www.relativerange.com/rrnl/rr04/attuisle.htm