Divers have located the wrecks of three ships in the waters near Attu Island, which sits at the westernmost end of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. The ships made their way there during WWII to take part in what has come to be known by historians as “the forgotten battle.”
One ship was an American “cable ship,” a craft that laid underwater communication cables, the SS Dellwood. The other two were Japanese freighters.
The two Japanese ships were taken down by American bomber airplanes right after Japanese soldiers invaded Attu Island in June of 1942. This was about six months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the only significant invasion of U.S. territory that America suffered during the second world war. About 2,400 people died during the attack.
Project leader and archaeologist Dominic Bush said Japan had hoped to turn Attu Island into an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” to be used to launch attacks on additional U.S. targets. But the Japanese Imperial Command abandoned the Pacific theater at one point, he said, and the Japanese left up near Alaska tried to “hold out” as long as possible and “die with honor.”
Most people think of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii as the only U.S. territory that was invaded during the war, and that’s mostly, but not quite accurate. The Japanese occupied Attu Island and nearby Kiska Island, too. These spots were the only part of North America that were invaded by an enemy force during WWII (the mainland of the U.S. suffered no land invasion or aerial attack).
In retaliation for the bombings of the Aleutians, American forces bombed the Japanese for the better part of a year. American and Canadian forces combined numbered about 35,000 in the region and they successfully expelled the Japanese.
The “forgotten battle” does have a name: the Battle of Attu. It took place during May of 1943 and killed 2,351 Japanese troops, and cost the lives of 549 Allied soldiers.
The team co-led by Bush and his co-leader historian Jason Raup researched the battle and studied the ships and equipment that were said to have taken place for years before diving to find the ships. They set out to find all three, and that’s just what they did, discovering the three ships during a two-week dive in July of 2024.
