On the 1st of June 1943, the light of the American landing force was working at the intelligence section tent in Massacre Valley, three days after the guns fell silent on Attu. A translator there finished an extract of a diary pulled off a dead Japanese soldier. The garrison’s own daily account of its end sat on a desk before the burial parties had finished counting. The men turning it into English had grown up in California, Colorado, and Washington.
The diary belonged to an army doctor killed by the very nation that had licensed him to practice medicine. He wrote under the heading Northern 5216 Detachment, North Sea Defense Field Hospital. He started on the 12th of May, the day after American troops came ashore, and wrote for eighteen days. The entries are short.
They remain the most complete and graphic surviving account of what the last two thousand men on Attu did while the American ring closed. Day and night, his hospital was pounded. Naval shells fell twenty meters away on the 20th. A strafing run caught him in the middle of an amputation the next day.
The 23rd brought a shell that collapsed a patient tent and killed two wounded men where they lay. On the afternoon of the 24th, a fragment passed through an orderly’s heart in a foxhole five yards off; the roof came in. By the 26th, he wrote that the last line at Umanos was gone and no help was coming. Against this, higher command fed him victories.
He recorded with relief that Japanese subs and small craft had sunk an American battleship, thirty-seven destroyers and transports, and sixty other transports off Chichagof Harbor. None of those ships existed. He logged poison gas that had never fallen; the shells were white phosphorus marking American positions. He gave credit to seventeen Japanese bombers for sinking a cruiser; American fighters had knocked down six and nothing had taken a scratch.
He left a note about walking through the abandoned village church at Chichagof, blankets on the floor, and wrote that it felt like somebody’s home. About sixteen Japanese-American linguists of the Military Intelligence Service had come ashore with the assault element to do this work. Their own army’s official history names the man who turned the diary into English: Staff Sergeant Yasuo Sam Utani, and reports that he wept working through it. Another, Staff Sergeant Shigeo Ito, kept an overnight watch under the rocks, shoving three Japanese bodies aside to find a place to lie down.
The next day he questioned a badly wounded man whose wounds were full of maggots, got nothing out of him, and said plainly that he had failed. A third, Staff Sergeant George Hayashida, went into the caves with a flashlight and a pistol and talked ten men out into the open. The army did not fully trust these Nisei. The command put commissioned Navy language officers over them and shipped some of the best translators off the convoy out of fear that a reception aboard ship might reveal the destination.
The meaning of that decision was never settled; the Army historian who quoted it put a question mark right inside the sentence. Miscalculation ran through the whole operation. The first American figure for the garrison was five hundred men, and it was that number that persuaded Rear Admiral Kinkaid to switch the objective from Kiska to Attu. By early May the Western Defense Command had more than doubled it.
On the 15th of May, four days into a battle meant to last three, American officers aboard the Pennsylvania read captured Japanese papers showing a garrison of well over two thousand. The assault force had sailed with about eleven thousand men. By the evening of the 28th, the ring was shut. The Japanese had lost Holtz Bay, Fishhook Ridge, and Buffalo Ridge.
They held only flat ground around Chichagof Harbor with the sea behind. General Landrum ordered a full-force attack the next morning seconds—he held no infantry in reserve. Colonel Yasuyo Yamazaki had roughly seven hundred men left. He had lost two-thirds of his force, most of his artillery, and his supplies.
The War Department’s 1944 account lays out the four choices open to him: surrender, which the Japanese Army code forbade; a last stand where he was, which would gain nothing; a withdrawal into the mountains, which he could not feed for more than days; or an attack. He reasoned that the weakest point in the American ring was the valley floor, because American strength sat up on the ridges. If he cut through in the dark and reached the American howitzers behind Engineer Hill, he might turn those guns on Massacre Bay. At half past midnight on the 29th he gave the order.
At three in the morning, Company B of the 32nd Infantry, sitting in the valley near the southern end of Lake Corries, received an order to pull back. The War Department volume says the purpose was to let the men walk to the rear kitchen for a hot breakfast before the morning attack—then states, without softening anything, that the official files are obscure on the order. Nobody has found a better answer since. What is certain is that nobody expected enemy action that night, and a rifle company was walking backward off the exact piece of ground the Japanese commander had chosen to come through.
The Japanese hit the rear guard around 3:30, screaming, bayonets fixed, grenades in hand. The main body drove for Clevesy Pass, shedding small parties to keep its flanks clear. The divisional engineers, the 50th Engineers, and service units were camped in the draws behind the pass. They heard firing, thought nothing of it, and then infantry and medics came pouring down, shouting that the Japanese were through.
Within ten minutes the engineers had thrown an improvised line on the slope of Engineer Hill, firing at point-blank range beside cooks, clerks, and drivers holding whatever weapons they had. Small parties cut around and reached the rear area outside Massacre Valley, a few hundred yards from one battery of howitzers—the objective. And there the attack died. At the foot of Engineer Hill stood a clearing station with fifteen wounded Americans inside waiting for daylight.
Captain Yellen and Lieutenant Friedberg had worked on them all night, had no way to evacuate, and no intention of leaving. The Japanese slit the tent open, threw in four grenades, then put an automatic rifle through the hole and emptied it. Friedberg died; every man inside was hit. Yellen gave morphine to everyone he could reach and passed the syringe to a sergeant for the rest.
They lay under a Japanese machine gun just behind the tent until American patrols came through that afternoon. When the fog lifted, the heavy machine gunners of Company M on the tableland saw the whole valley floor. The camps in the draws were wrecked, wire cut, bodies in rough circles around the tents. For most of the morning the gunners held fire because they could not tell friend from foe.
Toward noon an officer put his glasses on a line of men at the foot of a hill 1,800 yards away, saw his own troops at the top and the Japanese below, gave the range, and afterward counted twenty-six figures at the foot and in the creek bed. Mopping up went on for three days. A tractor driver and his partner, pinned by a sniper at daylight, killed their man and found two paper practice cartridges in his rifle, two more in his pouch, and nothing else. One grenade thrown into a cave produced two explosions—each answering blast was a man setting off his own.
At Chichagof Village, soldiers fired into three tents, shouted, and finally set them alight with tar paper and rags; inside, men killed themselves rather than come out. One man surrendered there that entire day. The counting took longer. Burial crews counted roughly 2,350 Japanese dead and put them into mass graves.
The National Park Service, which manages the ground today, states that several hundred more lie in the hills where they fell, never recovered. The doctor’s final entry, timed at six o’clock that evening on the 29th, records that all his patients were made to kill themselves, that he dealt with them with a grenade, and that thirty-three men of his unit were still alive. He said goodbye to his wife by name, and to two daughters—the younger born that February, who never saw him. His last note gives the attack’s size, just over a thousand men, and their intention of taking the American guns.
General Landrum reported twenty-four prisoners on the 31st. But the count would not sit still. Men were pulled out of the rocks for weeks in ones and twos, from ground the histories had already handed over. On the 8th of June, a patrol chased a single figure over a ridge, fought a party of Japanese at ten feet in a rocky hollow, and came away with two prisoners—one walking out with hands up, shouting in English that he had no weapon, and saying he was from San Francisco.
The last man on Attu surrendered in September, more than three months after the island was called secure. In Tokyo, on the 30th of May, the Imperial High Command announced the loss of the island, called the charge heroic, and gave the American force 20,000 men with 6,000 casualties—roughly double the real strength and roughly four times the actual loss. Engineers had a fighter strip on Alexai Point operational by the 9th of June. Shemya was occupied on the 30th of May and given a bomber runway the same week.
In July, aircraft from the new field struck the northern Kurils—the first American attack on Japan since Doolittle. And the diary outlived them all. Copies of the translation spread around the island. Senior officers, who had spent a year telling troops the enemy was barely human, ordered every copy confiscated.
It did not work. Soldiers mimeographed it, copied it by hand, added their own margin notes, passed it between themselves. A writer who went looking for it decades later found ten separate English versions of the same original.
That is why the wording shifts from book to book, and why the copy typed in Massacre Valley on the 1st of June 1943 garbles the doctor’s commander’s name, his wife’s name, and the name of his God.