Overview
Charlie Groth was just eighteen years old when he was drafted into the US Army's 7th Infantry as a medic. And in October 1942, he found himself aboard a transport ship headed for Alaska. He and his fellow soldiers were assured of one thing: although they would be facing the Japanese forces, it was bound to be an easy fight. The boys would be home within weeks.
It would be three years.
Paul Nobuo Tatsuguchi was a medic in the Japanese Imperial Armed Forces with a penchant for journaling and documenting his daily life. As Charlie and his fellow American troops made their way to Attu Island, Paul was constructing fox holes, caves, and trenches in preparation for the vicious battle to come.
The Battle of Attu would become the second bloodiest battle in the Pacific after Iwo Jima.
In the spring of 1942, four months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese commander Admiral Yamamoto, in his quest for dominance in the Pacific, recognized the truth: Japan could not win a long war against the United States unless they destroyed the United States's four remaining aircraft carriers. But Yamamoto needed a surprise, something to distract the American forces in the Pacific.
He plotted a sneak attack on Attu Island, a forbidding outpost in the far western Aleutian Islands of Alaska -- on American soil.
In June 1942, Japanese soldiers attacked and occupied Attu. America, desperate to cover up news of the Japanese invasion of US territory, had to get the island back, and so more than 100,000 young, untested American soldiers were enlisted in an Alaskan military campaign.
Following two parallel stories from opposite sides of the conflict, acclaimed author Candace Fleming brings history alive with this thrilling, fast-paced examination of a little-known military campaign on American soil during World War II, which would culminate in a ferocious, bloody battle and play a key role in the ultimate defeat of the Japanese Admiralty in the Pacific.
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