[Vigilanteman]

Years ago, I met a grizzled old North Dakota veteran of Guadalcanal. He actually wished he’d been sent to Attu instead. “What was the army thinking,” he asked me, “when they sent North Dakota boys to fight on Guadalcanal and Arizona boys to fight on Attu?”

[Strategerist]

We should have sent nobody to fight on Attu. The Aleutians campaign consumed an astounding proportion of US military resources in the war, and there would have been no harm in just letting the Japanese sit on the islands and rot till the end of the war.

[W.Lee]

I have the book,” The Thousand Mile War” that chronicles the action in Alaska. The Army ignored the input from the units that had been stationed there before the invasion, and sent in the GIs with no winter gear. Those guys were issued leather boots which resulted in many losing feet to frostbite. Incredible conditions, yet they threw the Japanese out. One interesting tactic developed there was the use of airborne forward observers, which we still use today. If you can find this book, grab it.

[Fiji Hill]

Years ago, I met a grizzled old North Dakota veteran of Guadalcanal. He actually wished he’d been sent to Attu instead. “What was the army thinking,” he asked me, “when they sent North Dakota boys to fight on Guadalcanal and Arizona boys to fight on Attu?”

I once met a Marine who said he was given special cold-weather warfare training before being sent to Vietnam, where he fought at Khe Sanh.