Casualties of War. The Attu Islanders and their island.

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.

Friday, December 12, 1941. The spreading of disaster.

The Struma when she was new in 1867.

With the United States now in the war, Hitler announced in a meeting in the Reich Chancellery that a full scale effort to exterminate European Jews would commence.  This was noted in our item on Today In Wyoming's History: December 12:

Adolf Hitler announces extermination of the Jews at a meeting in the Reich Chancellery.

The meeting was held behind closed doors and no official records of it exist, but at least two of the participants noted what was to occur.  Goebbels noted the following in his diary entry for the day:

Bezüglich der Judenfrage ist der Führer entschlossen, reinen Tisch zu machen. Er hat den Juden prophezeit, daß, wenn sie noch einmal einen Weltkrieg herbeiführen würden, sie dabei ihre Vernichtung erleben würden. Das ist keine Phrase gewesen. Der Weltkrieg ist da, die Vernichtung des Judentums muß die notwendige Folge sein.   

Regarding the Jewish Question, the Führer has decided to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that, if they yet again brought about a world war, they would experience their own annihilation. That was not just a phrase. The world war is here, and the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.

Hitler was referring to an earlier speech of his in which he'd stated that if the Jews caused a second World War, they'd be annihilated.  Of course, the Jews hadn't caused either WWI or WWII.  The first and the second statements show the warped way in which Hitler imagined Jews to be in control of things around the globe, as a bizarre view still held by some today.

This conference is often noted as one of the stepping stones to the German "Final Solution".  The Germans were, of course, already killing Jews en massse in the East so what exactly this meant in real terms is a bit difficult to discern.  All throughout 1941 murder repression had been a constant feature of German policy towards Jews withing their territorial control, and murder certainly had been since the invasion of the Soviet Union.  Things were getting worse for the Jews by the day prior to December 7.

Indeed, on this day:

Germans begin house-by-house search for Jews in Paris.  

Also, on this day the Struma, a cargo ship, left Romania with over 700 Jewish passengers fleeing Europe.  Turkish authorities would not allow it to allow the passengers of the disabled vessel to disembark at Istanbul as it feared they'd be given certificates to travel to Palestine by the British.  The British for their part did not, and urged the Turks to return the vessel to Romania.  Ultimately, Turkey towed the vessel into the Black Sea, where it was sunk by a Russian submarine.

Jews in Germany were forbidden on this day to use telephones.

The wide-ranging Japanese offensive in the Pacific kept on expanding.

1941 British decide to abandon northern Malaya. 

Japanese abandon their first attempt to capture Wake. 

Japanese complete the occupation of southern Thailand. 

Japanese invade Burma. 

Japanese troops land at Legaspi, southeastern Luzon and advance from Vigan and Aparri. 

Filipino pilots engaged Japanese pilots over Batangas Field. They were successful in the air action, in spite of flying obsolete P26 fighters, sustaining one loss.

Naval Air Transport Service is established  

The Navy, going into the war, was extremely short of transport aircraft.  After the war the NATS woudl be ultimately folded into the Military Airlift Command.

U.S. Navy takes control of the ocean liner Normandie while it is docked at New York City.   

UK declares war on Bulgaria.

 Hungary and Romania declare war on the United States. India declares war on Japan.  

Haiti, El Salvador and Panama declared war in Germany and Italy.

1941   The Wyoming Township, Michigan, Police Department founded.

Director Frank Capra joined the U.S. Army.

In other news from the entertainment industry, the move The Wolf Man was released.

Gatherings were happening at college campuses across the US. like this one in Wisconsin.

Campus Reacts to WWII

These members of the Salvation Army were photographed in Australia.

Australian Salvation Army officers, December 12, 1941.

Diana Barrymore sat for a series of portraits in the studios of the famed black and white portrait photographer Arnold Genthe, who was approaching his final months.  

She was the daughter of actor John Barrymore and died of undetermined causes in 1960 at age 38.  Her short life was troubled and her career produced a limited number of appearances.

Greenland?

 The White House Retweeted

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump 15h15 hours ago

Denmark is a very special country with incredible people, but based on Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s comments, that she would have no interest in discussing the purchase of Greenland, I will be postponing our meeting scheduled in two weeks for another time....

43,699 replies19,488 retweets94,918 likes

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What on earth?

There is a point at which the news becomes so surreal, you just can't quite grasp that something is really in the news.  The bizarre news on the President making sounds on purchasing Greenland is news of that type.  The New York Times, no friend of President Trump's headlined an article on this in this fashion:

Trump, Greenland, Denmark. Is This Real Life?

Or a Peter Sellers movie?

Whatever a person thinks of Trump, or the New York Times, the Times pretty much nailed it.  It feels sort of like something out of The Mouse That Roared, or something like that. It's really hard to grasp what's going on here and a person has to suspect its some sort of odd news cycle diversion.

The story started off with what seemed like a joke and then evolved into something that just seemed like innocent ignorance, combined with a discount of the original suggestion.  But now its escalated to cancelling a state visit with the Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, who made it plain that purchasing the Danish possession was not going to be discussed.  Trump has since referred to Frederiksen as "nasty".

The irony there is that while Frederiksen is a Danish Social Democrat, she's a populist conservative on the European scale.  As Prime Minister she's opposed liberal immigration into Denmark, supported confiscation of items from refugees, and supported banning the burka.  She's critical of globalism and has made open comments about Islam being a barrier to integration in Denmark in a way that no American politician would dare.

In other words, Trump and Frederiksen should get along fine.*

Instead, we now have the American populist President insulting the Danish populist Prime Minister over Greenland.

I'm quite certain that 100% of the leadership in the President's party, as well as probably 98% of the people who work in the Administration, have the same reaction. Greenland?

The United States isn't going to buy Greenland.  Denmark isn't going to "sell" Greenland.  Greenland is self administering and if it has a change of status of any type, and it could, it would become an independent nation, something that it more or less would like to do, and which with its independent status, it more or less nearly is.  In my view, that's what it should be, which is not to say that its really actively asking to be that.

The flag of Greenland

Moreover, there was never an era when the US was going to "buy" Greenland.  If the country ever had any interest in doing that, it would have been about the same time as we fought the War of 1812.

88% of the residents of Greenland are Inuit.  Culturally, that places Greenland a lot closer to northern Canada, which isn't purposing to annex it, than it does to the United States.  If Greenland, however, was to join a North American nation, it'd be Canada. . . not the United States.

Greenland has belonged, in one fashion or another, to Scandinavian countries since 986 when it was first settled by Norwegians and Icelanders.  At that time, all Scandinavians, while not unified in rule, were close in culture and the distinction between a Norwegian, Swede or Dane was more theoretical than real.   Hitting Greenland during the Medieval Climatic Optimum, Scandinavians successfully colonized the coastal areas and a Christian Scandinavian population lived there all the way into the 1400s.  At the same time Greenland was also inhabited by the Dorset Paleo Indian culture, which also disappeared from the region around 1500.

The 15th and 16th Centuries were not kind.

As the Dorsets declined the Thule came in. They're an Inuit people and they make up the vast majority of Greelanders today, as noted.  The Danes came back in as early as 1605 when they started a dedicated effort to relocate the Scandinavian communities of Greenland which they had never forgotten, unaware that those colonies had been abandoned.  Still, a 200 year long recollection that they had been there is impressive.

Denmark and Norway shared a joint monarchy during this period which dissolved in 1814.  Norway went into a sort of unhappy union with Sweden shortly thereafter, but it maintained a fair degree of independence until Norway formally left that union in the early 20th Century.  All the way until 1933 Norway, however claimed unoccupied areas of Greenland until that claim was extinguished in favor of Denmark that year.

The first real substantial contact with the United States came in World War Two, during which the U.S. occupied Greenland as Denmark was occupied by Germany.  Greenland basically became self administering during this period but the experience did open up what had been a highly isolated society due to the American presence.  It pushed for self administration after the war but did not achieve it until 1979, in part, and 2009, in full.

It's pulled out of the European Community, which shows how self governing it is.

After World War Two the United States did maintain a military presence in the form of Thule Air Force Base, which was opened in 1943 and is still in use.  The US actually offered to buy Greenland at that time, offering Denmark $100,000,000 in 1946.  As Greenland was much less independent than it is now, perhaps this is not surprising.  The US had actually pondering buying it once before, in 1867, when Congress put an end to the idea.

In 1867 and 1946, of course, the situation was much different than it is now, in 2019.  Greenland for all practical purposes is independent in everything but name.  Greenland has full internal autonomy but does not administer its own foreign affairs.  With the 2009 arrangement, however, granting fully sovereignty over resources to Greenland, it's assumed that independence is on the horizon.  Greenland still maintains a close association with Denmark, and Danes make up a significant portion of the 12% of the population that's not Thule, but the end of Danish rule is coming.

The beginning of American ownership is not and its a really odd thought that anyone bothered to ask the Danes to sell something that they basically are giving back to the people who live there.  The Danes have never shown any interest in giving up Greenland to another country and remarkably reestablished contact with Greenland after a 200 year absence in the first place.  They contested Norway's claim to an unoccupied portion of it. They've been very clear in their views.

So what brought this about is really a mystery.  To Americans, it's probably just one more distraction, but if you are Greenlandic or Danish, it's no doubt insulting.  And now the insult for the Danes has been compounded.  And for what reason?

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*Which may be trivializing the seriousness of her views.  She's also a strong opponent of legal prostitution in Scandinavia.  Frederiksen is Prime Minister, it should be noted, as head of a minority party in coalition with parties of the left.