ALASKA IN WW II---BATTLE OF THE ALEUTIAN ISLANDS

           ALASKA IN WWII---A SERIES
THE BATTLE OF THE PIPS, A NAVY TALE


As an American I can get away with saying that we Yanks are not really too good at History or Geography.  In fact, unless it just happened in the city we live in we probably didn’t hear about it.  I mention this because D-Day, the Sixth of June, just passed.  I happened to be talking about WWII with some fairly intelligent and well traveled friends who were planning a cruise to Alaska and I mentioned the War in the Pacific. I said that Alaska was one of the few American territories that were invaded during the war.  My reward for being a little known fact maven was the usual blank stare and wrinkled forehead that usually meant that the listener felt sorry for the poor old guy.

But, what I said was true.  Six months after Pearl Harbor, the famous battles at Guadalcanal were taking place in the South Pacific.  In June ’42 Japanese forces began to move toward Alaska.  The same task force that battled the U S Navy at the pivotal Battle of Midway near Hawaii sent a force to attack the Aleutian Islands, bombing Dutch Harbor in Unalaska and landing on Attu and Kiska Islands.  I will talk about the Japanese Invasion of America in another post.  Today I want to tell a Sea Story about How early Radar flipped the US Navy the Bird.

IDAHO SHOREBOMBARDING JAPANESE TROOPS AT KISKA

We fast forward to July 1943 when the United States got tired of having the Japanese troops living on American islands threatening to keep moving eastward to the sparsely occupied north west of the American Continent.  The US Navy and the Army Air Corps had flown over 1500 sorties hitting Japanese territory from the Aleutian Islands and succeeded in tying up 41,000 Japanese troops protecting their Homeland instead of taking part of the defense of the Pacific Islands that were being taken back one by one by Allied forces.

ADAK 1943

The Navy put together Task Force Gilbert, centered on a pair of pre-war Battleships, the USS MISSISSIPPI (BB-41) AND the USS IDAHO (BB42).  There were also a number of Heavy Cruisers and destroyers that made up the attack force.  The intention was to soften up the Japanese forces on Kiska and Attu with a bombardment by the 14” Naval Rifles of the battleships and 8” guns of the cruisers.



A BRIEF INTERLUDE WHERE YOU WILL LEARN MORE THAN YOU EVER THOUGHT YOU NEEDED TO KNOW ABOUT BATTLESHIP GUNS

Bear with me for a bit.  When I was a lad, I was the Gun Captain of Gun 2, Turret  One on the USS WISCONSIN (BB-64).  I fired the 16” gun at targets that, thankfully, didn’t fire back.  Let me bore you a bit about what the Japanese troops on Attu and Kiska had to face.

On the MISSISSIPPI and the IDAHO, each ship had four turrets with three 14” 50 cal Naval Rifles, a total of twelve big guns.  The 14 incher could throw a 1500 pound projectile over 13 miles, driven by the force of 420 pounds of high explosive gun powder.  Each projectile was rammed into the breech of the gun and driven well up into the gun barrel by a hydraulic ram.  There was enough room left behind the round for four 105 pound silk bags of gun powder which were also gently pushed into the breech by the same ram, very carefully so as not to create a horrendous premature explosion in the gun room.  Those things did actually happen every now and then with great loss of life.

The best way to describe what happened when a battleship’s main guns were fired was to think of it as an explosion of hundreds of pounds of high explosive gun powder in a very strong enclosed steel pipe where the weakest part of the container was the projectile that blocked the long barrel of the gun.  The exploding gun powder blew the 1500 pound bullet out the pipe an sent it 13 miles away where it could penetrate a foot and a half of high tension steel or destroy a heavily reinforced structure.

Battleships NEW MEXICO, MISSISSIPPI & IDAHO

By the way, the nine 16” guns on the IOWA Class Battleships like the WISCONSIN used six 110 pound silk bags of gun powder to throw projectiles that weighed anywhere from 1900 to 2700 pounds as far as 24 miles.  That is over the horizon.  An IOWA class battleship could fire its main battery and 90 seconds later, a full minute and a half, tons of high explosive death could fall on ships or shoreside targets that never saw the source.


WE RETURN TO OUR REGULAR PROGRAM

Where was I?  Oh yes.  It was July 1943 and the Task Force had already shelled Kiska.  It was steaming around in the normal, incredibly thick fog that was what Summertime in the Aleutian Islands usually provided.  Radar had been invented, I think by the Brits, and was just getting out to the Fleet.  It didn’t work like it does today.  Many of you have had bridge tours when on a cruise or have sailed on ships with a radar based display that showed the ships nearby, islands and other geographic or man made objects within range.  The pictures are very good and there is even a sense of the density of the target so sailors can tell whether they are looking at a heavy shower or a sand bank.

In the early days the screen would show blips or pips, something that looked like a spike or one of the towers you see on your cell phone that tells you how strong the signal in the area is.  The blip would be there and then it would be gone.  A good radar operator was as much an artist as he was an engineer or technician.  Really sharp guys were able to guess the size or density of the signal.  Guess is the operative word here.

Cut back to the Task Force.

USS MISSISSIPPI BB 41

The ships were on a high state of alert.  Adrenaline was pumping since they had just finished a shorefire exercise.  The fog and limited visibility added to the nervousness any sailor would feel when sailing in close company through waters that had reports of many enemy ships and submarines.  

All of a sudden the radar operators reported numerous bogies.  Bogies are unknown surface contacts.  The big guns trained out to t to the far away targets and the order to Commence Fire was given to the ships that had the targets on their radars.  Round after round was sent on its way.  There was no return fire.

The one way battle continued until the Cease Fire order was given.  518 of the 14” shells were fired by the MISSISSIPPI  and IDAHO.  That is 777,000 pounds of steel and high explosives sent on its way by 217,560 pounds of gun powder.  That’s what we crude sailors used to call “A real load of whale shit”.

It seems like that huge amount of cetacean fecal matter was wasted.  Subsequent aerial reconnaissance flights that looked through breaks in the clouds and fog found no trace of ships or any other man made items.  They did, however, see some evidence of large flocks of sooty shearwaters, a kind of petrel.  Shearwaters tend to congregate in great numbers and, it has been assumed, the huge floating pods of sea birds looked like surface targets to the early vintage radars.  There is another school of thought that thinks that there were some aberrant bounces of the radar signals off the water and the clouds overhead that sent the signal hundreds of miles beyond the farthest radar range ever encountered.  Somehow the radar signal bounced off the water and went up until it hit the clouds and was sent back to the sea and back to the cloud and on and on until it hit a solid surface, like an island.  That’s great, but how did it get back? Quien sabe?

The Bird

It still makes a pretty good story of how early radar gave the US Navy the bird.

SOOTY SHEARWATERS