Stan Cohen

Part of a multi-volume series, this is not a straightforward history but an assortment of photographs, first-person stories, newspaper articles, and other miscellanea on the Second World War in Alaska and the Canadian northwest. Things included are a 1944 dinner menu for the Baranof Hotel in Juneau; an interview with Attu schoolteacher Etta Jones (she was treated well in internment in Japan, but her weather observer husband was killed and all the Attu natives were deported); a letter from novelist Dashiel Hammet, who was stationed on Adak; various accounts of construction of the Alaska Highway and the CANOL pipeline; an interview with a Russian-speaking American meteorologist assigned to the Lend-Lease ferry program; an account of the Japanese evacuation of Kiska, facilitated by a radar set salvaged from the sunken British battleship Prince of Wales; wartime documents relating to the salvage of a Zero fighter from Akutan island; an official warning to female workers that they were not to have men in their barracks after midnight; and accounts of air and naval raids on Paramushiru, the main Japanese base in the Kurile Islands.

Interesting, sometimes sad, sometimes amusing. But you definitely need a more conventional history of the Aleutian campaign first to understand what’s going on.… (mehr)

All aspects of military activities in Alaska and northwestern Canada from 1939-45 using 367 photographs to complement the narrative. The Battle of Attu was the second most costly battle as per troops Involved in the Pacific Theater for the United States during the war. The Battle of Attu was the first amphibious island Invasion by the U.S. Army In WorldWar II. The first bombing of the Japanese homeland by land based Navy bombers was from the Aleutian Islands. More than one billion dollars was spent on construction projects in Alaska and northwestern Canada by the U.S. Government in World War II. The Alaska-Highway-Canol Project was the largest overseas construction project during the war. The first invasion of U.S. soil since the War of 1812 happened in the Aleutian Islands In 1942. The first Japanese Zero captured intact in the war was on Atkun Island in July 1942. The longest continuous telephone line In the world was strung from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Edmonton, Alberta, along the Alaska Highway. The Battle of the Komandorskls In March 1943 was the longest continuous gunnery battle in modern naval history.… (mehr)