Foggy Steppingstones

Army bombers for two weeks had tried to probe the fog-blanketed Aleutian Islands, find out what the Japs were up to after their first landing on westernmost Attu. Last week the murk lifted enough to reveal Japanese tents and temporary small buildings dotting bleak Kiska Island, Japanese warships riding in Kiska's wide, deep anchorage 600 miles west of the Navy's Dutch Harbor base. Before wheeling back to report that another craggy U.S. outpost had fallen, Army bombers sank one Jap transport, scored hits on a cruiser.

The Hepburn Board, which reported in 1938 on U.S. defense requirements in the Pacific, suggested that, from "purely strategic considerations," an air base west of Dutch Harbor (probably Kiska or Attu) would be desirable. It was thought impracticable in time of peace, and the U.S. never got around to establishing it. Kiska was used only as a radio station and weather-observation post.

Because gale-tossed, foggy Aleutian waters breed weather for much of North America, Kiska will be useful to the Japs. From Kiska reports, they can guide submarine forays, such as those which sent a few shells crashing into Vancouver Island and into the Oregon coast in the neighborhood of Columbia River harbor defenses at Fort Stevens last weekend (doing scant damage except to the peace of mind of shore dwellers). But that the Japs were after more than a new Aleutian weather bureau the U.S.S.R., as well as the U.S., fully realized.

Attu tips the Aleutian scimitar poised over Japan's head on the great-circle air route for more attacks such as Jimmy Doolittle's Tokyo raid. So the first Jap objective appeared to be defensive. The second seemed offensive, aimed at both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. At Kiska the Japs had gained a new anchorage for warships about midway between Dutch Harbor and Russia's Komandorskie base, off the Siberian coast. This put them enough farther north along the U.S.S.R.'s Siberian flank to attack Komandorskie from two directions. Japan's previous northernmost base had been Paramoshiri. If the Japanese were getting ready, as many military authorities believed, to join a double-barreled Axis attempt to knock Russia out of the war before the summer ends, the overt move had been made over the foggy Aleutian steppingstones.

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