The site of the only land warfare engagement to be fought in North America during World War Two, the island of Attu is a search zone for missing Japanese soldiers.
The US Coast Guard maintains several out of the way bases. Among these is the isolated Loran Station on the windswept Aleutian island of Attu ("Home of the Horny Bird"). Attu is the almost westernmost part if the United States, reckoned closer to Russia than the United States. The Loran station, set up to aid long range navigation, is manned by twenty coastguardsmen who together make up the entire population of the island. The Japanese Navy landed a battalion there in 1942 during the Battle of Midway as part of an unsuccessful diversion to draw the US Fleet away. The Japanese Army languished on the fog shrouded (Attu typically has less than ten sunny days per year) arctic garrison for almost a full and uneventful year. The US Army arrived in force in May 1943 to displace the invaders. In a taste of what awaited on Iwo Jima (Iwo To) and other scarred islands across the pacific the Japanese garrison fought from highly defensible positions under impossible odds. Eighteen days of fighting ended in one of the largest and most fatal banzai charges of the war. The Japanese soldiers, following the ancient bushido code rushed the American lines near what was afterward known as Massacre Bay. Only 28 enlisted prisoners of the 2300 man Japanese garrison were taken alive. it was the site of the only land battle of World War two fought on American soil.
Soon forgotten after the war the only American presence since 1960 has been the Loran station, built very near the Massacre Bay site. The Coast Guard recently flew a team of Japanese and American researchers to the island to inspect several suspected mass graves of the more than two thousand Japanese heroes still interred on the island far from home.
