08 February 2004

I spent the day assembling the Murphy Bed. I think I am probably only a month away from completion, and have resigned myself to sleeping on the floor amid the parts. But there is room for optimism. I have heat and light and the whole of a Sunday to fritter away.

I took the elevator to the new unit and made some coffee. The computer is down there, so while it brewed I checked the e-mail. A buddy sent me an update on the Michigan primary. Senator Kerry seems to have put a headlock on the nomination up there, but he voted for Al Sharpton. I am not sure it was out of protest, either. My pal likes his sense of humor and his James Brown imitation. If he stays in the race maybe I will vote for him, too.

He also mentioned that he had seen a fascinating special on the Aleutian Islands up in the Gulf of Alaska, stretching a bony beckoning finger toward their former Russian owner. He had not been aware of the extent or scope of the war there. I hadn't either, until I was sent to fight another one there. My fingers started to fly. I can get to the bed later.

They called it the "Thousand Mile War" up there, I typed furiously. And here is how I came to know about it.

We had a listening post on an island called Adak. We used it mostly for Patrol aircraft that searched for Soviet submarines coming from their major operating base at Petropavlovsk. Adak is half way across the chain. At the far end, much closer to Russia than the U.S. proper was Shemya. It was a contingency fighter base and we had a precision radar- a very expensive one- that glared at the Russian Far East. We used it to examine the re-entry vehicles from ballistic missiles they would test, firing east from the waters of the Berant's Sea north of Europe.

That is what we kept open after the war. Adak was a strange wild place. The weather changed about every fifteen minutes. It was barren and beautiful. There was a little cluster of pine trees- Christmas tree sized- that grew near the headquarters. It was called the Adak National Forest because there was no other vegetation over a couple feet tall. They also said there were as many virgins on the island as there were pine trees, which was a curious remark. In the war there had been no women on Adak at all. With the defense build-up there were. Maybe it was still true, I don't know.

The mother of weather may not have lived on Adak, but she certainly was in the neighborhood. The strategy of the Pacific war against the Japanese was three parts. The services despised each other. The Navy had a strategy that ran across the Pacific to Tokyo, and featured the systematic annihilation of atolls to serve as forward bases to consolidate the next advance.

The Army had a strategy, too, the island-hopping forward progress conducted by Doug MacArthur. The two were essentially independent operations. Chester Nimitz ran the one, and Doug-out Doug had the other. Doug was committed to liberating the Philippines, and the Navy didn't really care. They figured the Philippines would fall if decisive Naval Action destroyed the Home Fleet and relentless and merciless submarine action strangled the supply lines on which the Home Islands depended for food and raw materials.

There was another war. It was vital, but it was a sideshow. The Japanese made periodic feints tothe northwest, toward the islands that led to Alaska. The only ground combat action of the entire war on U.S. soil happened there. They bombed Dutch Harbor and they put troops ashore at Kiska and Attu.

As part of the strike on Midway Island, bomber appeared over Dutch Harbor in June of 1942. Anchorage began to panic. The Japanese were coming! They landed troops on Kiska and Attu islands. They stayed there in defensive positions until they were ejected in a small, tough fight in May of 1943, and some of them much longer.

The Japanese had intended to block movement by American forces toward Japan through the Aleutians. Operations by all concerned were restricted by the severe weather. The whole enterprise was a struggle against nature as much as it was against any physical enemy. By one estimate, almost 80% of the casualties suffered by Air Corps units were weather, rather than combat-related.

We maintained forces in the Aleutians through the war, though a major offensive against the Japanese northern islands never materialized. The conditions were just too hard. But the very presence of the American forces pinned down substantial numbers of enemy aircraft, maintained as a defense against a major attack that didn't happen.

When the mushroom appeared at Hiroshima and the war ended, the Army couldn't get out of the islands fast enough. At Adak, for example, they didn't even look around for anyone to hand the keys to. There were Quonset huts to accommodate over 100,000 troops there. Long after, sailors assigned to the island would have them as little vacation huts, far away from the officers and what passed for civilization at the base. You can imagine the sort of things that went on in the endless night of the northern latitudes.

My former Uncle-in-Law was one of the long-range P-38 pilots who served up there and his stories of the weather were unreal. A flight of Lightnings got lost in a white out and landed on a glacier, out of fuel. They got the pilots out but the planes were entombed in ice and snow. Pristine condition. I heard someone was going to try to go recover them, but I think they will find the conditions just as severe as they were back then.

Of, the deal about the two campaigns? The Alaskans still consider the Navy to be one of their enemies. The "Pineapple Admirals" were not going to lift a finger to defend the island chain, seeking to isolate them rather than contest. It was the Air Corps that was the hero to the Alaskan Mainland, and the legacy of hostility still remains. Senator Stevens, Chairman of the Appropriations Committee, was in the Air Corps. He is still pissed.

I wandered into the Aleutians by accident. I was working on the Third Fleet staff. That outfit had once belonged to Bull Halsey in WW II. Now we were located in Pearl Harbor, in the very land of pineapples the Alaskans thought effete and soft. Our mission was to conduct Anti-submarine operations against the Soviet Red Banner Pacific Ocean Fleet. Quaint though it seems now, the threat was quite real and we played a shadow game with the Russians. They would send Yankee-class boomers with medium range ballistic missiles to patrol in the waters between Hawaii and the West Coast. There was a parallel presence off the East Coast. It was part of their triad of deterrence, the mirror image of ours. The nukes beneath the waves were thought to be immune to first-strike elimination, and constituted the strategic reserve of both out nations.

If you could take it out, then it would enable a first strike. So that was our mission. Seek them out, locate them, track them. Be prepared, on command, to destroy them.

Adak had continued a minor Navy mission after the Army pulled out in 1946-47. There was the location, after all, to monitor Russian signals activity. So the sub base was allowed to disintegrate and some of the huts fell down, bu a presence stayed. Later, acoustic devices were strewn across the ocean floor to track submarines, and the accident of orbital mechanics made the island a fortuitous place to receive information against the major target.

So we had a presence up there and we had operational tasking authority over the airplanes that we put there on a rotating basis to fly against the Russian subs.

In 1984 the Carter-Reagan defense build up was finally putting money into the fleet and expanded operations. Our Admiral decided he was going to make Adak the "Iceland of the North Pacific," a reference to the strategic position our base at Keflavic played as the Russians sent their submarines down through the Greenland-Iceland -UK gap on the sea lanes from Murmansk.

The Russians knew something was up, too, since their spies had penetrated the communications security involving our codes. They knew what we knew almost as fast as we did. They were aware of our plans for Adak and began to fly long-range aviation on periodic missions to remind us of the simple facts of geography. If they wanted to take the island, it was closer to them than it was to us.

Hence Lieutenant Socotras mission to the Aleutians. The Admiral directed me to investigate what we might do to make Adak more secure. We contemplated how we might convince the Russians that there were fighters there. We considered placing derelict jets on the flight lines, and broadcasting communications from the Adak tower to suggest tactical jets were operating there. There was an overture to the Disney people to construct mock-ups of F-14 Tomcats near the runway to spoof their satellites.

The while thing was ridiculous, but so were the times. I looked at the weather statistics and sheepishly reported that there was only a 5% chance the Russians would ever see them, and thus it was far more likely that they had human spies on the island. Much more efficient than launching thing on orbit for this target.

The best document to look at what was actually in the Islands was a vast survey conducted at the behest of the Environmental Protection Agency to document the disaster that had attended the wartime presence in the island chain. As I said, there were accommodations for tens of thousands left on Adak. There were similar bases on virtually all the islands. Perhaps not so grand, but everywhere there were dumps of potentially toxic war material, chemicals leaking out of corroded drums, tangled metal and aluminum, dioxins, the whole support infrastructure of the war machine were just left behind when the troops pulled out.

I took the survey in hand and three yeas of check-book records and climbed on a P-3C Orion patrol airfract at NAS Barber's Point on Oahu to fly up there and get a look at the situation on the island. I had plenty of time to study. The four-engine turboprop took the better part of the day to get there. I took up a position in the rear near the observation port to look at the gray angry sea and try to rectify the former military installations with what might still be usable and try to rectify the bank account. I had plenty of time. I think I was about $400 dollars up on my accounting when the head set crackled from the flight deck and the pilot told me we were nearing the area of interest.

We buzzed a couple islands nearby. There were landing strips on all of them, but to prevent pilots from landing on them in error, they were dotted by ancient equipment placed so that anyone could see that the facility was closed permanently. They said in the EPA survey that the departing airmen pulled the generator carts and other yellow gear out in the middle, removed the oil plugs and ran them until the engines melted to ensure they wouldn't be moved.

That accomplished, there were other stories indicating that the adjoining islands were still in use. Equipment was occasionally found that suggested our Soviet buddies used them for reconnaissance and practice for missions to knock out the sensors that terminated on Adak. Military equipment and empty ration packs suggested the Russian Special Forces- the Spetzialnaya Naznachinya (SpetzNaz) had a periodic presence. No one would ever know.

I drank a fair amount of coffee, but on a military plane the one who uses the head has to empty it on arrival, so it was with a full bladder and fair amount of discomfort that I made my first pass over Adak, looking at the hundreds of derelict WW II huts strewn around the island.

The only flat land suitable for a runway long enough to accommodate four-engine aircraft had some disconcerting cross winds and a small hill halfway down the concrete made for a very colorful swirl in the winds. The SeaBees had been trying to knock in down for more than a decade. This particular landing was not as interesting as it could have been, perhaps reflecting the seniority of the Pilot in Command. We rolled out and ran the aircraft through the wash rack to sluice down the corrosive sea salt that turns all metal back into oxide up in these climes.

I got the windshield tour of the place, the big SIGINT station and the downlink complex. I heard stories of how the young people handled the endless dark of winter, the complex dynamics of a command populated, due to the personnel assignment restrictions of women on warships, mostly by young female sailors and officers. I heard of suicides in the long night, and the isolation.

On the upside, there were those who loved the place. There was something magical and raw in the bracing air and the savage beauty. I saw eagles fly right across the windshield as we drove on the gravel roads, and seagulls attacking the abundant marine life by the disintegrating piles at the sub base. By turns the day was brilliant and blue and dark and ominous. After a long day of investigation, and several beers at the O Club, we stopped at the McDonalds that had just opened on the reinvigorated facility. I asked for a Big Mac and fries. The sandwich looked familiar but the potatoes were the large and ungainly type I knew from the wardroom in the Fleet.

The off-duty sailor who was working behind the counter to make some extra money (God only knew what she was going to spend it on) said she was sorry but the barge with the frozen fries on it had sunk in a storm and these were from the Chief's Mess. There wouldn't be any real ones for a few weeks.

I was going to fly out commercial after the inspection was done. They had a regular flight by Alaskan Airways a couple days a week to service the contractors who worked construction and the DoD civilians who ran the school and the commissary. The Congressional delegation was headed by Ted Stevens even then, and there was a lot of interest in the MILCON funds the Navy was pouring into the base. The 727 pulled up to the military terminal on time, but there was a mechanical problem they wanted to work on. I spend some time in the Adak Museum, which was part of the shed with some tables on which objects found on the island were displayed. Old helmets and curious pieces of equipment that had been found in the wilderness. It was a microcosm of the Aleutians themselves, all the ships and bunks and radios and trucks and transformers, left exactly where they were, and swirled together by the mother of winds.

The clean-up, if anyone ever did one, would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

The buildup continued through the rest of the 1980s. We had exercises as far west as Attu, with forces on the ground. The Japs left a mini-sub in a mini-drydock. A tourist attraction, though little visited. A Marine pal was leading a squad on exercise deployment and was looking for likely defensive positions. He found one, a little overhang of rock with what appeared to be shelter underneath. He led his guys up there and discovered the snout of a Japanese light machine-gun protruding from a small cairn of rocks the gunners had raised to conceal themselves.

The gunners were still there. Perhaps they had been killed by a fluke ricochet, or the cold or something. My pal called a halt in the simulated action, and the mummified remains were hauled out. Eventually, based on personal effects recovered at the scene, they were returned to their families back in Japan. I don't know what they did with the machine-gun.

Last I heard, we walked away from Adak again. No threat. No reason whatsoever to be there.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra