Tuesday, January 12, 1943. Landings at Amchitka, Operation Iskra.

The U.S. landed troops on Amchitka.  It was an unopposed landing, as the Japanese had chosen not to occupy it.  Weather was bad and unpredictable and the USS Wordon was swept into rocks and ultimately broke up.  Fourteen of the crew died and the commanding officer was swept off the ship, but survived, while it was being abandoned.  The Japanese learned of the landing several days later when weather cleared sufficiently for a scout plane to overfly the island.

USS Worden sinking.

The island was used as an airbase by the U.S. in spite of the horrible weather it experiences, and set the stage for the US assault on Kiska.

The island is large by Aleutian standards, consisting of 116 square miles.  Not too surprisingly, given its size, it was historically occupied by the Aleuts but there has been no population on the island since 1832.  It's tectonically unstable.

Because of its uninhabited status, it was chosen by the US for underground detonation of nuclear weapons in order to test seismic detection, with nuclear weapons being inserted in bore holes in 1965, 1969 and 1971.

The parents of the Sullivan Brothers were informed for the first time that their sons, who had gone down in action in November, were missing in action.

In our last entry we noted the ship named in honor of the Sullivan brothers, the USS Sullivans.  Oddly enough, it was in the news yesterday after taking a huge haul of Iranian AKMs that were being shipped to Yemen.

Winston Churchill departed for Morocco to meet with Franklin Roosevelt, who had left the day prior.  Their departures were obviously kept secret.

The Soviets launched Operation Iskra aimed at breaking the German's siege on Leningrad.

Pierre Laval concluded a deal with Nazi Germany, allowing the Germans to administer the Departments du Nord and Pas de Calais.  France, under the arrangement, also pledged to provide 400,000 skilled workers to Germany and to essentially provide the remaining elements of its navy to Germany.  France retained the policing role in the German administered territories.

President Roosevelt addressed farmers for Farm Mobilization Day.

January 12, 1943

All over the world, food from our country's farms is helping the United Nations to win this war. From the South Pacific to the winter front in Russia, from North Africa to India, American food is giving strength to the men on the battle lines, and sometimes also to the men and women working behind the lines. Somewhere on every continent the food ships from this country are the life line of the forces that fight for freedom. This afternoon we have heard from some of the military and civilian righters who look to us for food. No words of mine can add to what they have said.

But on this Farm Mobilization Day I want to round out the picture and tell you a little more about the vital place that American farmers hold in the entire war strategy of the United Nations.

Food is a weapon in total war- fully as important in its way as guns or planes or tanks. So are other products of the farm. The long-staple cotton that goes into parachutes, for example, the oils that go into paints for the ships and planes and guns, the grains that go into alcohol to make explosives also are weapons.

Our enemies know the use of food in war. They employ it cold-bloodedly to strengthen their own fighters and workers and to weaken or exterminate the peoples of the conquered countries. We of the United Nations also are using food as a weapon to keep our fighting men fit and to maintain the health of all our civilian families. We are using food to earn the friendship of people in liberated areas and to serve as a promise and an encouragement to peoples who are not yet free. Already, in North Africa, the food we are sending the inhabitants is saving the energies and the lives of our troops there. In short we are using food, both in this country and in Allied countries, with the single aim of helping to win this war.

Already it is taking a lot of food to fight the war. It is going to take a lot more to win the final victory and win the peace that will follow. In terms of total food supply the United Nations are far stronger than our enemies. But our great food resources are scattered to the ends of the earth—from Australia and New Zealand to South Africa and the Americas- and we no longer have food to waste. Food is precious, just as oil and steel are precious. As part of our global strategy, we must produce all we can of every essential farm product; we must divide our supplies wisely and use them carefully. We cannot afford to waste any of them.

Therefore the United Nations are pooling their food resources and using them where they will do the most good. Canada is sending large shipments of cheese, meats, and other foods on the short North Atlantic run to Britain. Australia and New Zealand are providing a great deal of the food for American soldiers stationed in that part of the world. Food from Latin America is going to Britain.

Every food-producing country among the United Nations is doing its share. Our own share in food strategy, especially at this stage of the war, is large, because we have such great resources for production; and we are on direct ocean lanes to North Africa, to Britain, and to the northern ports of Russia.

American farmers must feed our own growing Army and Navy. They must feed the civilian families of this country and feed them well. They must help feed the fighting men and some of the war workers of Britain and Russia and, to a lesser degree, those of other Allied countries.

So this year, as never before, the entire Nation is looking to its farmers. Many quarters of the free world are looking to them too. American farmers are a small group with a great task. Although 60 percent of the world's population are farm people, only 2 percent of that population are American farmers. But that 2 percent have the skill and the energy to make this country the United Nations' greatest arsenal for food and fiber.

In spite of the handicaps under which American farmers worked last year, the production victory they won was among the major victories of the United Nations in 1942. Free people everywhere can be grateful to the farm families who made that victory possible.

This year the American farmer's task is greater, and the obstacles more formidable. But I know that once more our farmers will rise to their responsibility.

This farm mobilization is the first day ever dedicated by a President to the farm people of the Nation. I know that the whole country joins with me in a tribute to the work farmers already have done, in a pledge of full support in the difficult task which lies ahead for farmers, and in a prayer for good weather to make farmers' efforts more fruitful.

Our fighting men and allies, and our families here at home can rely on farmers for the food and other farm products that will help to bring victory.

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.