Ghosts in the Fog: The Untold story of Alaska's WWII Invasion

This is, indeed, about an area that seems to never have received that much coverage and that is the Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands where they actually took over islands belonging to the United States making that their beachhead, sort of, in North America.

The book has some photographs and it reads well. Some of the interesting points I found include:

One June 7, 1942, Japan invaded American territory. On June 10, 1942, the American government denied that they had. The reason was, I am sure, to stop any panic from happening. However, this is yet another example of the government overtly lying to the American people. Maybe if the people had known about this then they would have demanded much better defensive measures on the West Coast then were actually in place.

The book claims that the reason Hirohito did not overtly oppose the military decisions was that he was afraid he would be killed.

The Battle of Midway and the invasion of the Aleutian islands were part and parcel of the same plan.

The Japanese orders included a part that said the Aleutian natives were to be freed from American tyranny and no harm was to come to them. This was, of course, ignored as food stocks were taken from them and some were sent to Japan and died there.

The American public found out about the Japanese taking two of the islands through Japanese radio rather than their own government. Of course at the same time Japanese radio was keeping their loss at Midway a secret.

High military officers had a very tough time convincing the U.S. government that the Aleutians were going to be a target for a Japanese invasion.

The Japanese managed to get their bases up and running and the Americans were unable to drive them away easily due to weather and lack of planes, pilots and other materials.

Once American bombers and fighters got in the battle, though, they managed to bomb the Japanese-held areas quite thoroughly.

A group of American soldiers were moved in to fight the Japanese. No one seemed to think, though, about the fact that the guys came from desert fighting into Aleutians-weather type fighting and they weren't given proper clothing and other materials.

There was a banzai charge which left around 500 Japanese soldiers died that way, some blowing themselves up with their own grenades.

Many of the Aleutian Island natives were evacuated and forced to live in terrible conditions in camps that had been set up for them. (This part of the book is really disgusting that the people were treated this way by the U.S.)

There's more material in the book, of course. This book is quite worth getting.

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