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June 28, 2009 – At Sea, 57 30N 165 25W
by Herb McCormick
(June 28): Ocean Watch is humming, and not in a figurative sense. When the big steel cutter is under sail, making better than 8-knots, on a tight reach with perfect sail trim and the opportunity to employ every inch of her 64-feet of waterline, she quite literally resonates with sound. It comes from below (the spinning prop shaft) and above (the pitched purr of the wind through rigging). Actually, the cacophony was somewhat unnerving, at first. But now it’s the sound of music, the satisfying whirr of miles rushing by.
In a very good sense, Saturday’s first foray into the Bering Sea from Dutch Harbor was quite hard to believe. By mid-afternoon, the sun was shining overhead, and when it finally dipped into the sea-a shade before midnight!-the sky overhead was graced by a rising sliver of moon and a celestial saucer full of stars. First mate Dave Logan, scientist Michael Reynolds and I came on watch at 0300, and though it was bloody chilly, it was still clear overhead and Ocean Watch was moving apace under a reefed main and the auxiliary diesel.
A couple of hours into our watch, the horizon ahead turned a dark, ominous shade of gray. Logan and I simultaneously ducked below-he to a cabin aft, me to my quarters forward-and both returned on deck with our foul-weather gear. The man and I are starting to think alike, which in fact is a frightening notion, but when we switched on the radar there was no precipitation in sight, and the barometer remained steady at 1021 millibars. However, there was a change in the weather: The wind rose into the mid-teens, just north of west, and we rolled out the genoa and shut down the engine. By mid-afternoon Sunday, as I sat down to type, we’d been trucking along at 8-9 knots for several hours, and continued to do so.
Our visit to Dutch Harbor was indeed momentous, and we met some wonderful folks there, though we all left with the feeling it could be the subject of a quite humorous Northern Exposure-type TV show. But its quirky nature is not what we’re really going to remember about Dutch. On the eve of our departure, skipper Mark Schrader, photographer David Thoreson, Logan and I piled into our filthy, rented Ford Expedition, and began the climb out of town to the relics of the World War II installation known as Fort Schwatka, a thousand feet above the waters at Ulakhta Head. We didn’t yet realize how our ensuing hike would affect us, or that we were about to commune with the ghosts of war.
This wasn’t David T’s first visit to Dutch, and he’d wandered about the ruined fort before and had told us that it had been a moving experience. But the rest of us still weren’t ready. Up in the haunting mist, the place was still, silent and a bit spooky. Today it’s part of the Aleutian World War II National Historic Area. We got out of the truck and started wandering around. It was an engineering marvel, a warren of gun emplacements, barracks, tunnels, pillboxes and fortresses. It had been built in a year, to withstand 100 mph winds. A sign on a bunker explained that that particular vantage point was the former site of a pair of 8-inch, 30-foot long guns that could fire a 240-pound shell some 22 miles.
“They didn’t have backhoes or excavators,” said the skipper. “They had bulldozers and people. That was a movable howitzer over there. See the track? Spectacular. They had the high ground, didn’t they?”
The high ground, however, was rugged duty. Many who served in these islands were sent home sedated, in straightjackets, suffering from a rather graphic infliction known as the “Aleutian stare.” And the native Aleuts suffered even greater indignities, if that was possible. Whole communities were ripped apart, the villagers sent to internment camps for the duration of the war.
It all went down to repel the Japanese, and the Japanese did come. The remote Aleutians were a strategic prize, an important waypoint on the Great Circle shipping points, as well as a possible staging area to launch aerial attacks against the U.S. west coast.
The Japanese bombers hove into view over Dutch Harbor on June 6, 1942. But Dutch was not destined to become the second Pearl Harbor. Roughly three weeks earlier, a coded Japanese message had been intercepted in Honolulu, with the precious intelligence that a carrier-launched raid on Unalaska Island was in the works. The invading aircraft were well expected, and repelled by anti-aircraft fire.
But the enemy did not return home. Instead, they headed west to the outer islands of Attu and Kiska, and landed there, where they met little resistance from the local Aleuts, most of whom had already been interned on the mainland. It was the first and only Japanese occupation of U.S. soil.
Historians would come to call what happened nearly a year later the “Forgotten Battle,” as it took place during the simultaneous Pacific campaign at Guadalcanal. On May 11, 1943, the operation to recapture Attu began; the U.S. invasion force included a group of native Alaskan scouts called Castner’s Cutthroats. The landing was conducted in brutal weather, which the Japanese soldiers left uncontested as they dug in on high ground. The ensuing battle was still a bloodbath, with U.S. forces suffering nearly 4,000 casualties. But the Japanese army was also decimated.
It all climaxed on May 28, when a banzai charge at Massacre Bay by the remaining Japanese soldiers led to brutal, hand-to-hand combat. It was, indeed, a massacre. In the aftermath, U.S. burial teams counted 2,351 dead Japanese troops. Only 28 prisoners were taken alive.
Back on Ulakhta Head, the crew of Ocean Watch looked out over the breathtaking waters in this corner of America that so few Americans are privileged to see. We were in awe of the vast expanse before us and of the sacrifices made by so many to ensure the freedom we have to venture to sea, lucky and proud to fly an ensign emblazoned with the Stars & Stripes.
Honestly: An eagle was perched on a stump nearby as we climbed back into the truck. He glanced in our direction, and very quietly, we drove down into town.
- Herb McCormick with photographs by David Thoreson
This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos
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