Attu woman and child, 1941. She'd never see another summer on her home island again. By Malcolm Greany - https://www.flickr.com/photos/12567713@N00/2667001144/sizes/o/in/photostream/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17118121
On June 7, 1942, the Imperial Japanese Army landed on Attu Island, ferried there, of course, by the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Attu is part of the Aluetians. It's 344 square miles in size. For comparison's sake, that's a little bigger than Molokai in the Hawaiian Islands, and a little smaller than Kauai.
It's relatively large, in real terms, 35 miles by 20.
It has an Aleutian climate, with average temperatures below 60F in the summer and in the mid 20s in the depth of winter. It's coldest temperature ever was -17F, in 1902, and the hottest temperature ever, 77F in 1925.
The island has been inhabited since antiquity, and it's estimated that prior to contact with Europeans, the island had a native population between 2,000 and 5,000 souls. Archeologists believe that settlement came from the east, not the west, even though it's the closest of the Aleutians to Asia and very distant, today, from the nearest Alaskan settlement of any kind.
It's one of the "Near Islands", as its near Asia.
Attu, along with the other Near Islands, seems to have first had settlements about 3,000 years ago, surprisingly late if it's considered that the arriving populations had spread throughout North America far before that.
The first contact with Europeans came from Russian fur hunters in 1745, when they actually went to Attu after being confronted by a large body of armed natives on the first island they attempted to land at. The first Russian contact on Attu violent, withe Russians taking an old woman and a boy hostage, oddly keeping the boy as an interpreter, although it has to be presumed he spoke no Russian.
A few weeks after that, the Russians raided an Attu village and killed fifteen men, with the purpose of the raid to take Attu women as sex slaves. The location has ever since born the name Massacre Bay.
In 1750, the Russians introduced Arctic Fox to the island.
The Russian presence caused the decline of the local fauna rapidly, a devastating event for the natives, and the Russians also introduced disease, playing out a story that is often associated with the European conquest of North America. By 1762 the population was estimated at about 100 natives, which would mean that the population decline had been unbelievably massive in just a twenty or so year span.
The decline in fortunes for the Russians on the island meant that it thereafter largely skipped the Russian colonization of the Aleutians, to the extent it could be called that, and it remained free of Russian economic control. The Russians reappeared in the early 19th Century, and the Attu population remained very small.
Christianity was introduced at least as early as 1758, but a chapel was not built until 1825, with a Russian Orthodox Priest being assigned to it, along with other island churches in 1828. He made his first visit to the island in 1831. By 1860 the native population had rebounded to 227 plus an additional 21 individuals who were "Creole", i.e., of mixed heritage. When Alaska was sold to the US in 1867, services to the island dropped off massively, and by 1880 the population had declined by half. Nonetheless, visitors to the island in the early 20th Century, who were few, were impressed by how happy the residents were and how clean the two villages were. In the 1920s the sod structures were replaced by the natives with wooden ones, with imported wood, which included building a wooden Russian Orthodox Church in the 1920s and a school, without a teacher, in the 1932. The teacher first appeared in 1940.
In the 19th and 20th Centuries, and indeed before, the men worked as trappers part of the year and moved to the hinterlands to do that. Again, in the 20th Century, visitors were uniformly impressed by how happy the people living on the island were. And why not? Free of the chaos of the outside world, living a natural life, and with a Christian world view, they were as close to living in a paradise on earth as any people could be.
And then the Japanese came on June 7, 1942.
The Japanese removed all of the Attuans and kept them on Hokkaido. By the war's end, half of them had died. The US retook the island itself in May 1943.
The survivors wished to return to their homes when the war ended, but the US government did not allow them, garrisoning the island instead for a long range navigation site. Truly, the government really did not have an existential right to deprive the Attuans of their home, but it did so.
The U.S. Coast Guard left in 2010.
In 2018 the descendants of the dispossessed Attuans were allowed to visit Attu.
