These awful conditions are worsened by poor American planning. The Aleutians are cold, wind-driven and frequently covered in fog. It is hard to imagine a worse place to fight a war. These battles were very important because imperial command posts in the Aleutians could have given Japan bases to launch attacks on the West Coast. Now the American government was forced to attack the islands to reclaim their own territory. The Japanese successfully landed their forces in Alaska. The Japanese launched a full-scale attack on the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. Shortly after the Battle of Midway, the country found out. Underequipped and ill-prepared, the United States tried to imagine where the next strike might be. In rapid succession, the Japanese military attacked and conquered the Philippines, Singapore and French Indo-China. 7, 1941, the United States military was rocked off its feet.

With the destruction of so much of the Pacific Fleet on Dec. Samantha Seiple tells the harrowing facts about this battle in “Ghosts in the Fog: The Untold Story of Alaska’s WWII Invasion.” The Alaskan Campaign to retake these Aleutian Islands turned into a brutal and bloody conflict. While most Americans know that Imperial Japan attacked the United States Naval Fleet at Pearl Harbor in 1941, very few people are aware of the Japanese military invasion of the Aleutian Islands in Alaska in 1942. Because of this, war seems far away and not part of American life. Some of the countries in which these wars are taking place seem “backward” to Americans. Most of these war broadcasts are from the Middle East and usually involve some type of religious extremism. Images of wars are constantly shown each day on television newscasts. Scholastic Press, New York, 2011, 221 pages, 7-9. “Ghosts in the Fog: The Untold Story of Alaska’s WWII Invasion”

Ghosts in the fog by samantha seiple