The Great Alone (106 page)

The base at Adak was bombed every day for five days straight, but the Japanese never sent more than three planes at a time, and their bombs inflicted only minimal damage.

At the end of November all the wire services carried the story of the completion of the Alaska-Canada Military Highway on the twentieth of the same month, eight months and eleven days after construction had started. Wylie read the myriad statistics with brooding interest: 1,523 miles long, 200 bridges, 8,000 culverts, 16,000 workers, $138,000,000 cost.

The road was all Lisa had talked about in the last letter he’d received from her in October; nothing else, not even a question when he might get leave again or a reminder that she was thinking of him or looked forward to seeing him. He tried not to read anything into it, but at the back of his mind the possibility nagged that Steve Bogardus was the cause of it.

In the middle of December, orders came through to establish an advance base at Amchitka, virtually in the enemy’s backyard. Wylie’s unit had already reconnoitered the island in September. A lone bomber was sent over the island to ascertain whether any Japanese troops had been stationed on Amchitka in the interim, and to level the native village.

When Wylie and the Scouts landed on the island, accompanied by a survey party headed by Engineer Colonel Benjamin Talley and Lieutenant Colonel Hebert, the native buildings lay in rubble, including the small Russian Orthodox Church. While they were scouting the island to locate a site for a new air base, one of the Scouts, a Sioux Indian, found indications that the Japanese had been there ahead of them conducting a survey to establish an airstrip of their own.

No one was willing to let the Japanese gain another foothold in the Aleutians. The islands could too easily turn into steppingstones. Plans were immediately set into motion to gather a full-scale force to occupy the island.

As usual, the Alaska Scouts were assigned to spearhead the landing. On January 5, 1943, Wylie and the rest of his commando unit boarded the destroyer
Worden,
part of the combat task force of four destroyers, three cruisers, and four transport ships. The fleet set sail right into the teeth of a raging blizzard. The storm continued for a week without letup, while the task force pitched about the heavy seas well off the Amchitka coast.

After a week of being confined below deck by the storm, Wylie was restless and edgy. On the night of January 11, he slept fitfully, strapped in his bunk. An instant before a hand touched his shoulder, he came wide awake and stared up at Big Jim’s dingy white beard. “No, I won’t lend you any money and I don’t give a damn whether you’ve got a royal flush or not,” Wylie muttered irritably and started to roll onto his side. “Go back to your poker game and leave me alone.”

“We’re going in, Wylie.”

“What?”

“The storm’s died down a bit, and the big brass has decided it’s now or never. Our supplies won’t hold out much longer. So we’re going in.”

Wylie sat up. “What time is it?”

“Somewhere around one in the morning. Does it matter?” Big Jim grinned. “We’re steaming toward the harbor now. We should get there before dawn.”

The sea was still running with better than twenty-foot swells. When the
Worden
entered the mouth of Constantine Harbor shortly before dawn on the twelfth, the surf ran bridge-high on the destroyer. Wylie and the other Scouts negotiated the wave-washed decks and clambered into the whaleboats, then set off for the shore in a blinding snowstorm. Wet, cold, and half frozen, they battled their way through the twenty-foot surf to the beach, landing safely.

Within minutes after they had dragged the boats onto the beach, the storm’s roar was pierced by the eerie wail of a ship’s whistle signaling its distress. The sound sent chills down Wylie’s spine.

“It’s the
Worden
,” Big Jim said through cold-stiffened lips. “It has to be.”

Instinctively Wylie stepped closer to the crashing waves and peered anxiously into the driving snow, straining to see the disabled ship, but the storm obscured it. The eerie whoop of its whistle reminded Wylie of the frantic bleat of a wounded animal being dragged down by a predator. He kept thinking about the crew on board—the men he’d spent the last week with.

It wasn’t long before the wind carried the whistle’s chilling cry to abandon ship. The
Worden
was going down. “Damn it,” Big Jim cursed beside him. “The water’s freezing. Those men won’t last long in it.”

“Come on.” Wylie started moving along the beach, trying to get closer to the sound.

Everyone in the landing party joined the search for survivors, spreading out along the beach and scanning the waves for bodies in the water. By some miracle, they managed to rescue several of the crew and drag them ashore. From them they learned what had happened to the
Worden.

As the destroyer had steamed from the harbor, a powerful current had tossed the vessel onto a rock pinnacle. It had pierced the hull, ripping through the steel plates to flood the engine room. The destroyer
Dewey
had steamed to her aid, but the attempt to pull her off the rock had failed when the cable snapped. The
Worden
capsized. The destroyer
Dewey
had managed to pick up most of the survivors, but fourteen sailors had drowned before she could get to them.

But the task force remained committed to a landing. The transport ships carrying the twenty-one hundred troops, composed of soldiers and Engineers, threaded their way into the harbor, carefully skirting the wreck of the sunken destroyer, and unloaded their troops. One transport made the mistake of presenting her beam to the eighty-knot wind when she was leaving. It hurled her onto the reef, running her solidly aground.

The blizzard continued to rage as night fell. Cold and wet, Wylie kept moving to stay warm and guard against the real enemy, which was frostbite. Mentally he cursed the bombs that had destroyed the native village and the shelter its housing could have provided. It was a long night without shelter and only cold rations.

By morning, the storm still raged. But with the Japanese-held island so close, an observation post had to be established and manned. Wylie and Big Jim were among the Scouts picked to form a squad to cross the thirty-mile-long island to its northwest tip. From there, the peaks of Kiska Island were visible—weather permitting.

After a week, the storm finally passed. Assigned to the lonely outpost, Wylie had to daily fight tedium and boredom under miserable conditions. His sleeping bag lay on the mud floor of the tent. His extra pair of shoes and socks were kept atop the stove, so he could change them every half hour to keep his feet from freezing. It was almost a welcome diversion when the Japanese finally discovered the base on Amchitka on the twenty-third of January. At least now when he took his turn at watch there was a chance he’d see something.

During the following two weeks, he had plenty of opportunities as the Japanese “Amchitka Express” began. Two and three, sometimes as many as six, “Rufe” floatplanes took off from Kiska and made bombing strikes on the runway under construction. U.S. fighter planes provided some air cover, but the “Rufes” usually waited until the fighters left to refuel, then took off to make their sorties over the base. As soon as they were spotted from the observation post on Aleut Point, as the northwestern tip was called, a warning was flashed to the base.

Despite the enemy’s harassment, the Engineers finished the runway. By the end of the month, Chennault’s group of Flying Tigers had landed their squadron of P-40 Warhawks at Amchitka. Now when Wylie signaled the approach of “Pontoon Joe,” as they had dubbed the pilot who regularly flew the Amchitka Express, the Tigers went up to form a reception committee. The enemy bombing raids started tapering off after the arrival of the P-40 squadron.

After being stationed at the isolated outpost for a month, Wylie believed he was in real danger of catching the “Aleutian stare.” He’d seen it in other dogfaces, and among flight crews and pilots, too. It was the vacant stare of a person who no longer cared. Some blamed it on the dismal weather—the constant wind, cold, and fog—the miserable living conditions, the endless monotony of their jobs, whether it was flying in soup, repairing a plane for the hundredth time and knowing it would have to be repaired again, or building things and watching a williwaw roar down from the mountains and level them in seconds, or digging trenches, then filling them up in the Army’s endless attempts to keep the soldiers busy at something even if it meant making work.

There was no rotation of troops, and diversions were few, usually limited to radios; a few scratchy phonograph records; and for those stationed at Dutch Harbor, Umnak, and recently Adak, old Hollywood B movies. Liquor was scarce. At Adak, Wylie had once seen a line a block long at the PX after it received a shipment of Coca-Cola.

Apathy, malingering, irritability, insomnia, and disinterest were just some of the symptoms. Some lost their sense of humor and couldn’t even joke about sex. Others became homosexuals. Several suicides were committed every month. Some just withdrew completely into themselves and stared. They usually went home—in strait jackets.

Being a member of the Alaska Scouts, Wylie had not only escaped a lot of the Army discipline but also a lot of the boring routine. He knew what was going on, while most of the others didn’t. Out of the two hundred thousand troops now stationed in Alaska, most were support personnel, non-combatants who would never see action. Wylie knew that Command was intent on pushing the Japanese out of the Aleutians. It was only a matter of time before an invasion was launched against the two enemy-held islands. In the meantime, though, he was stuck at the observation post on Amchitka.

At the end of January, another squad of Scouts relieved them. They made the trek back to the base camp, where Wylie discovered conditions weren’t much better than they had been at the tiny outpost. The most direct route to the tent area went through a series of lake-sized puddles. Beside him, Big Jim cursed as they waded through the mud to their tents. They dropped their bags inside.

“Let’s go to the mess tent. I gotta have some decent food,” Big Jim complained.

“Who says they’ve got it?” But Wylie adjusted the strap of his loose-slung rifle and stepped back out into the cold wind.

Just then the air-raid sirens went off. Automatically Wylie swung around to scan the skies to the northwest, the direction of Kiska. All around him men were scrambling to man the anti-aircraft guns or seeking cover. He spotted a large V-formation approaching Amchitka at a high altitude.

“Hell, they’ve never sent more than six planes.” Big Jim stared, straining to identify the aircraft. “There must be thirty of them.”

“Something’s not right.” He narrowed his eyes, but the formation was too far away. “I wish I had a pair of binoculars.”

“We’d better get the fuck out of here. When they drop their bombload, there ain’t gonna be nothing left of this base.” He started to push Wylie toward the hills. Wylie let Big Jim hurry him away from the tent area, but he kept tracking the formation.

“Hey, where are you going?” someone called to them.

Wylie recognized the Navy pilot insignia the man wore and paused. Along the flight line, the P-40 Warhawks of the Flying Tigers were revving up their engines, the whirling props blurring the snarling Bengal tigers painted on their snouts.

“You’d better get moving, mister,” Wylie advised. “If you don’t, those Japanese planes are going to blow your ass to smithereens.”

“If those are Japanese planes, they’re the first ones I’ve ever seen that flapped their wings,” he jeered.

“Shit, they’re geese,” Big Jim said, and he started to laugh.

Wylie joined him and laughed until his sides hurt and tears ran from his eyes. Still laughing, Wylie and Big Jim slogged through the mud toward the mess tent.

“Reminds me of the time those Navy PBY’s thought they’d picked up the Japanese fleet on their radar and started dropping their bombs. Turned out, they damn near sank the Pribilof Islands,” Big Jim recalled and broke into a fresh peal of laughter.

All along the way they traded stories, trying to top one another by telling the most ludicrous. En route to the mess tent, they stopped to pick up the mail that had been forwarded to them. Both of them were so weak with laughter they could hardly stand up.

When they entered the mess tent, Big Jim paused to wipe his teary eyes. “I bet everybody’s wondering what the hell we’ve been drinking.”

“Hell, they’ll just take one look at us and figure we’ve been sipping our shaving lotion,” Wylie replied.

About a dozen soldiers were in the mess tent, and more were wandering in. Wylie and Big Jim walked over to take their place in the chow line.

A cook came out of the kitchen area carrying a steaming tray of some unrecognizable dish, and shoved it onto an empty place in the line. A wool scarf was wrapped around his neck and head, a fur cap with ear flaps perched on top of it, and his sleeves were rolled up, exposing his bare forearms.

Big Jim set his tray of food down next to Wylie’s, then crawled over the bench seat and sat down.

“Corn-willies, Vienna sausage.” Big Jim stabbed a leathery-looking pancake with his fork. “What do you suppose this is?”

“I think I heard it called a ‘manhole cover.’ ”

“Goddamn, but I’ll be glad to get back to Circle. I bet the bears wouldn’t even eat this shit.” But he dug in just the same. “I don’t know what I’m missing the most—food, whiskey, or women. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had a piece of ass? I don’t even know if I remember what a woman looks like.”