Voices of WW2@VoicesofWW2
On this day in 1943, a thousand starving Japanese soldiers ran screaming out of the fog on a frozen Alaskan island, bayonets lashed to broken sticks, to die.
The island was Attu, the westernmost tip of the Aleutian chain. It was the only piece of North American soil the Japanese had captured in the entire war. The Americans had been trying to take it back for nineteen days in the worst conditions either side had ever fought in: freezing rain, knee-deep mud, fog so thick a man could not see his own rifle, and tundra that swallowed boots and never gave them back.
The Japanese garrison was down to 800 men. They had no food left. No medicine. No way off the island. They had been told no rescue was coming.
Their commander was Colonel Yasuyo Yamasaki, a 51 year old career officer who had been on Attu for less than three weeks. On the night of May 28, he gathered every man who could still hold a weapon. This included his wounded. Those who could not walk were shot or given grenades. Those who could limp were given anything that could stab. Some had bayonets. Some had bayonets lashed to ski poles. Some had bayonets lashed to tent stakes.
Then he led them straight at the American line in the dark.
It was the largest banzai charge of the Pacific war up to that point.
They came through a gap in the fog at 3:30 AM, completely silent until they were inside the American positions. Then they screamed. They overran the front line in minutes. They overran the artillery batteries behind it. They reached the field hospital and butchered the wounded in their cots. They got within a hundred yards of the American command post before they were finally stopped by a scratch force of engineers, cooks, military police and walking wounded who fired at point blank range until their rifles were too hot to hold.
When the sun came up, the snow on the slope was carpeted with bodies.
The Americans counted 500 dead Japanese on the ground in front of them. Then they began finding the rest. Almost all of the remaining defenders had killed themselves with grenades held against their chests. American soldiers walking the field afterward described finding small groups of three or four men curled in a circle, their bodies folded around the same grenade.
Out of a Japanese garrison of nearly 2,900, the Americans took 28 prisoners.
It was the second highest American casualty rate of any battle in the Pacific war, after Iwo Jima.
Almost no one in the United States has heard of it.
