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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Bolivar_Buckner_Jr.

Alaska


Buckner was promoted to brigadier general in 1940 and was assigned to fortify and protect Alaska as commander of the Army's Alaska Defense Command. He was promoted to major general in August 1941. He became known as a hard, tough leader, sleeping under a single sheet no matter how cold it was and denying his men the use of under arm deodorants, declaring that a man should smell like a man.[6]

The Japanese launched a surprise attack on Dutch Harbor 3–5 June 1942; farther west, Imperial Japanese forces seized the islands Kiska and Attu, bringing ashore some 7,000 troops (at Kiska) and nearly 3,000 at Attu. American commanders, including Buckner, feared that the Japanese would use the islands as bases to strike within range along the rest of the US West Coast. Lieutenant Paul Bishop of the 28th Bombardment Group recalled that:

General Simon B. Buckner Jr. said to us that the Japanese would have the opportunity to set up airbases in the Aleutians, making coastal cities like Anchorage, Seattle, and San Francisco vulnerable within range to attack by their bombers. The fear of that scenario was real at the time because the Japanese were nearly invincible and ruthless in Asia and the Pacific. We knew that they bombed China relentlessly and by surprise on Pearl Harbor, so we had to make sure it wouldn't happen here in the continental U.S. similar to what the Germans did over London and Coventry.[7]

Buckner gave orders in June 1942 for the indigenous Aleut people to be evacuated and for their villages to be burned. The Aleut people were not allowed to return until 1945, after the war was over.[8] Buckner furthermore objected to the deployment of African American troops in Alaska, writing to his superiors of his concern that they would remain after the war, "with the natural result that they would interbreed with the Indians and the Eskimos and produce an astonishingly objectionable race of mongrels which would be a problem".[9]

The campaign to take back Attu Island took nearly a year. The Battle for Attu, Operation Landcrab, occurred across three weeks in May 1943. The casualties on both sides were high. On shore, some 549 US soldiers were killed, 1,148 were wounded, and 1,814 suffered cold and disease. Of the 2,900 Japanese garrison, only 28 survived.

The loyal courage, vigorous energy and determined fortitude of our armed forces in Alaska—on land, in the air and on the water—have turned back the tide of Japanese invasion, ejected the enemy from our shores and made a fortress of our last frontier. But this is only the beginning. We have opened the road to Tokyo; the shortest, most direct and most devastating to our enemies. May we soon travel that road to victory.

— Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., a few months after the Aleutian Islands Campaign[10]

Subsequently, in August 1943, Kiska was invaded by Canadian and US soldiers. However, its Japanese garrison had been secretly withdrawn under cover of fog prior to the arrival of Allied forces. Allied commanders refused to believe that the Japanese could have completely evacuated Kiska. For eight days, troops searched the island, firing into the dense fog and sometimes accidentally shooting their comrades. The bombardment and invasion of the deserted island was written off as a "training exercise", and the Aleutian Campaign officially ended after 439 days of warfare. In 1943, Buckner was promoted to lieutenant general.