Fading Adventure

The Japanese, who had some idea three months ago of chewing up the Aleutians, last week faced the prospect of having to let go their hold on Kiska, Attu and Agattu.

U.S. submarines harried them from the sea. U.S. planes pounded them from the heavens. During those brief periods when there was a rift in the nearly perpetual mists, U.S. and Canadian pilots swooped down on their shore installations and strafed their shipping. Flying blind, the pilots dropped destruction through the fog bank. Japanese losses during more than three months of raids, according to the U.S. Navy:

Sunk: ten (possibly 18) vessels, including six or seven destroyers and probably two cruisers. Damaged: 24 vessels, including destroyers, cruisers, submarines and transports. Destroyed: 22 planes. Estimates of Japanese troops on the islands had run as high as 25,000. Actually there were about 3,000, and they were subjected to constant and frightful attrition. Said a U.S. officer: "The Japs are now getting an idea of what Corregidor was like."

Last week the Navy command lifted a corner of the censorship that has been as thick as the Aleutian fog bank. U.S. forces, said the Navy, had been entrenched on one of the Andreanof Islands since Sept. i. Which island was not disclosed, but any one of the Andreanofs (which are part of the Aleutians) is well within fighter range of the main Japanese base at Kiska.

A motley armada of transports, barges, converted yachts, tugs and a codfish schooner, heavily convoyed by naval craft, waddled up to one of the treeless humps which stick out of the northern sea, emptied men and materiel into lighters and landing boats. Under command of 41-year-old Florida-born Brigadier General Eugene M. Landrum they rolled shoreward through the surf. Caught by surprise or too harassed to do anything about it, the Japanese did not raise a finger. Ten days later U.S. engineers had built an airdrome big enough to accommodate air transports. Fighting planes were taking off from it and escorting bombers westward.

The Japanese, who might have counted on the Aleutians as a flanking base during operations against Siberia, as a point from which to threaten Alaska, Canada and the U.S. West Coast, and as a handy spot from which to block supplies to Asia, appeared to have made a bad bargain.

The possibilities of their attacking Siberia grew dimmer as winter crept like a paralysis over the far North. In their present state of harassment they were no great threat to the North American coastline. They had failed to block communications to Asia: cargo planes bypassed them, flew across the Bering Sea; Alaskan air routes were in operation. Last week the Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce revealed that supplies in quantity were being flown from the U.S. to Alaska, thence to Russia and China. U.S. bombers may one day take the same route.

The Alaskan situation was in hand.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.