The Great Alone (105 page)

A few minutes ago the sergeant had returned with the word that they were off Adak Island—code name “Fireplace.” The talking had subsided as they rechecked their packs and weapons. Wylie felt the tension in the air. His palms were clammy, but he wasn’t sure how much of that was nerves and how much was the closed quarters of the submarine. At the moment he would gladly face a Jap rather than spend another hour cooped up in this underwater coffin.

The watertight bulkhead door swung open and one of the submarine’s officers stepped through. “The skipper has given the order to surface,” he announced.

“That’s the best news I’ve heard yet.” Wylie straightened, keeping his legs spread slightly apart to brace himself against the roll of the deck. “These quarters are about as comfortable as a straitjacket.”

“You get used to it after a while,” the young ensign assured him. “It’ll seem just like home.”

“Your home maybe, not mine,” he replied dryly.

Moments later the submarine broke onto the surface and the hatch was cracked. Silently, one after the other, the Scouts scrambled up the ladder onto the
Triton
’s sea-washed deck. Surrounded by the inky blackness of a cloud-covered night and the murky dark sea, they swiftly inflated their rubber boats, communicating with hand signals. Not far away, another submarine rode on the surface of the heavy sea, showing no light to reveal its presence to the enemy.

As soon as the boats were launched, Wylie and the other commandos slipped over the side to take their places in the rubber rafts. A mile away, they could barely make out the dim outline of the Adak coast, marked by heavy surf breaking on its shore. They paddled away from the pitching submarine and headed for the mouth of the bay.

Within minutes both submarines had submerged. Wylie felt a tightness in the pit of his stomach. Restlessly, he scanned the area, trying to detect any movement that would betray a Jap position—if there were any Japanese on the island. All the natives and civilians in the island chain had been evacuated within days after the first Japanese attack, most of them to camps in the southeast panhandle.

The War Department had finally authorized the establishment of a new base in the Aleutian chain that would be closer to the Japanese-held islands of Kiska and Attu than the airfield at Cold Bay, which was twelve hundred miles round trip. The Navy had picked Adak Island for the new location.

In two days, an invasion force of forty-five hundred men was scheduled to land on Adak. It was known that the Japanese regularly landed small parties of soldiers on various islands, including Adak. But no one knew if they were still there. The mission of the commando unit, commanded by Colonel Castner himself, was to seek out any Japs on the island and make sure no radio messages were transmitted to Kiska. The long months of training that Wylie, Big Jim, and the other Scouts had gone through were about to be put to the test.

The wind was constant and cold. Hardly anything could be heard above its incessant rush and the roar of the sea. The minute Wylie felt the raft scrape bottom, he clambered over the side and helped drag the boat onto the beach. On land, he didn’t feel nearly as vulnerable or exposed. Now he could move.

Stealthily the commandos fanned out under the cover of darkness and began their sweep of the three-hundred-square-mile island. All night long, Wylie crept over the rough terrain and spongy tundra, sweeping his assigned sector. Once, he startled a big black raven—or it startled him. He was never quite sure which of them jumped the highest before the bird took off, cawing loudly in protest.

At dawn, a fog swirled over the island. Wylie rejoined his unit and reported that he’d found nothing, no trace of any Japanese, not even the ash of a campfire. He felt let down and angry, like a hunter who had spent all night searching for game, only to discover there was none in the area. It was small consolation that no one else had seen any Japs either.

“I feel like a groom who’s been left standing at the church,” muttered Big Jim Dawson.

“I think we all feel pretty much that way.” Wylie heard the drone of an airplane’s engines overhead and looked up, recognizing the PBY as one of their own, scheduled to fly over the island that morning. The colonel set out a cloth strip to signal an “all clear” to the plane, and the Scouts settled in to wait for the invasion force to arrive at the island, unpopulated except by bald eagles and ravens.

The troops arrived on Sunday, August the thirteenth, along with a storm. High winds and heavy seas wreaked havoc with the barges and lighters that transported the supplies, machinery, and equipment, capsizing several and sending their cargo to the bottom, driving others against one another on the beach, and scattering them along the coast. Yet one way or another, nearly everything made it ashore, including anti-aircraft guns, a variety of heavy construction equipment, and crack units of the Aviation Engineer Battalion.

While the beachmaster organized the storm-strewn landing, the Engineers sought out the Scouts to help them locate a likely place to build a landing strip. They split up in small groups, with Wylie and Big Jim taking one party of Engineers on a tour of the island’s mountainous terrain. The storm continued to blow fiercely. The winds were so strong Wylie had to lean into them to stay erect.

“You’ve got your work cut out for you,” he shouted to one of the Engineers. “You aren’t going to find any flat ground on this island unless you make it flat.”

“If the rest of the island is like this, you’re right.”

“It is.”

But Wylie had overlooked one place in Sweeper Cove that flooded every time the tide came in. As a joke, another Scout mentioned it to one of the Engineers, but the Engineer didn’t laugh. Within hours, they had their men building a dam, a set of dikes, and a tide gate. At low tide the next day, they shut the gate. Before the morning of September first, graders and weasels were rolling through the mud. The steel matting for the runway was at the bottom of the bay. Bulldozers packed down sand to make a landing strip.

Ten days later, the first plane landed at the new base, code-named “Longview.” Two days after that, the Thirty-sixth Squadron of B-17s arrived, along with eighteen other planes and another shipment of steel matting, which the Engineers laid overnight. The new base was in full operation, as yet undiscovered by the Japanese.

* * *

In the latter part of September, Wylie’s commando unit was sent out again, this time on a reconnaissance mission to scout the island of Amchitka, only seventy miles away from the Japanese-held island of Kiska. Again they encountered no Japanese and reported back that the island had the customary volcano; other than that, it was a long, narrow flat marsh.

Then it was back to Adak. Rain, wind, and fog seemed to hang over the island like a pall. It hadn’t taken Wylie long to discover that the weather in the Aleutians was anything but agreeable. While the tropical Japanese current that blew warm air up from the south kept the sea ice-free and the temperature mild all year, when it came in contact with the cold Arctic mass of air from the north, storms were the inevitable result. And the long chain of islands was like a buoy marking the site where the two systems clashed.

For pilots, it was a nightmare flying in fog thick as soup and simultaneously bucking gale-force winds. In the Aleutians, there was no such thing as good flying weather. If a pilot could see to get off the ground, the plane took off. But he didn’t dare try to climb out of the soup. The higher he flew, the colder the outside temperature became, and ice formed on the wings. Countless planes were lost when their wings iced and they spun out of control into the ocean.

Navigating was no simple feat either. The combination of winds with fog could blow a pilot a hundred miles off course. Radio navigation beams were rarely effective because of the electrically charged air from clashing weather fronts which created a static so loud that it drowned out the radio signals. The constant turbulence threw instruments out of whack, and the heavy mineral deposits in the volcano-born islands affected the compasses.

In an attempt to keep pressure on the Japanese, two and three bombing missions were flown daily—when the planes could get off the ground. Wylie had watched the bombers limp back. If the Japanese fighter planes or their ground flak had succeeded in damaging one bomber, the weather usually scored six. They were fighting two enemies—the Japanese and the weather. But the Japanese were in the same position.

Mess call sounded, but Wylie didn’t budge from his cot in the small pyramidal tent. Instead he glanced at the can of chili sitting atop the little metal stove that heated the tent, its tin lid pried open. He swung his legs off the cot and stepped on the mud-soaked papers that served as a floor in the tent.

All the mess tent had to offer was C rations. That was hardly worth slogging through the mud and the bone-chilling wind for when he could have hot chili, jam, and crackers in the relative comfort of the tent. With luck, he and Big Jim had enough canned goods squirreled away to last them until they made it back to headquarters at Kodiak.

He pitied the poor guys who were going to have to stay here. The conditions were as miserable as the weather. The Seabees were working like crazy, building barracks, warehouses, hangars, offices—virtually an entire city—but in the meantime the men lived in tents erected on a small bulge of land affectionately termed a hill. All the vehicle and foot traffic had turned the ground into a quagmire.

Wylie stirred the chili, then tasted it to see if it was hot, but it was barely lukewarm. He added two more chunks of coal to the stove’s fire and sat back on his cot to wait. The slog of footsteps sounded in the mud outside the tent. He glanced up as the tent flap was lifted aside and Big Jim walked in, giving Wylie a glimpse of the gray, dismal clouds outside.

“Brrr.” Big Jim growled and shuddered like a dog shaking off water. “That’s the coldest damned wind I’ve ever known. Hell, it don’t even feel that cold in the dead of winter on the Yukon River.” He stamped over to the stove and held his gloved hands out to the heat, rubbing them together.

“It’s the damp.”

Big Jim reached inside his parka. “You aren’t going to believe this, but some of our mail caught up with us.” He tossed a couple of thin envelopes onto Wylie’s cot. “Don’t ask me how or why, but there it is.”

Wylie picked them up and glanced first at the return addresses. One was from his mother, and the other from his grandmother. Nothing from Lisa. He looked at the postmark. “August. Here it is the last day of September. Why does it take so long to get mail from Anchorage?”

“Hey, I’ve gotten letters from relatives in the States that have been four months old. I wouldn’t complain if I were you. We’re lucky to get any mail at all. Sometimes I think people forget we’re even up here.”

“Most of them don’t know we are.”

There was a virtual blackout of news regarding the campaign in the Aleutians. Two weeks passed before the Navy had even admitted that the Japanese had bombed their base at Dutch Harbor and had taken over the islands of Attu and Kiska. All journalists and members of the press had been “escorted” out of the Aleutians. Not even the four-page
Military Press,
mimeographed more or less daily at Dutch Harbor, was allowed to print stories about what was going on in the Aleutians without clearance from the Navy Department in Washington, D.C. Three weeks after the fact, the
Military Press
published an article about a bombing attack on Kiska. Any mention of Alaska was clipped out of every magazine and newspaper that came into the Territory. Not even Alaskans knew what was going on here—and that included Wylie’s own family.

Wylie could guess the War Department’s argument. It would have a demoralizing effect on the American public if it became widely known that the Japanese had seized U.S. soil. When they were forced to acknowledge it, they preferred to downplay it by saying the Japanese had erected temporary facilities on an undefended island in the Aleutians that had no significant strategic value.

As he opened the letter from his mother, he heard the drone of an airplane, followed by the screaming wail of the air-raid siren. Both he and Big Jim moved simultaneously, grabbing their rifles. The anti-aircraft guns opened fire as they bolted out of the tent and headed for the trenches. Wylie glanced up and identified a Japanese “Rufe” swooping in, an amphibious plane. The first bomb exploded, its thundering blast joining the boom of the anti-aircraft guns.

Everywhere men were scrambling for cover. Wylie slid into the muddy trench and spun around to bring his rifle to bear on the Japanese plane. He squeezed off a couple of shots at the plane while it was in range, adding his groundfire to the flak of the guns. The “Rufe” climbed out and banked to make another run at the base. Wylie kept one eye on it while he scanned the cloudy skies, waiting for more Jap planes to emerge.

“Where’s the rest of them?” Big Jim wondered.

“I don’t know.” Wylie watched their own fighters scramble to get in the air as the “Rufe” returned to strafe the airfield, flying through the black puffs of flak smoke that dotted the air.

By the time the first American fighter was airborne, the Jap plane had ducked back into the clouds. He didn’t come back and no more came. The all-clear signal sounded.

“Well, I shot at my first Jap,” Big Jim said as they crawled out of the mud-slick trench.

“Yep. And now they know where we are.” As Wylie stepped back into the tent, he smelled the scorched chili on the stove and started swearing.