Japan's Fleet Vanished From Kiska With 5,000 Men. Then America Invaded an Empty Island

Kiska was empty. On July 28, 1943, a Japanese squadron slipped into the fog-covered harbor in the Aleutian Islands and took off 5,183 men in 55 minutes. Eighteen days later, 34,000 Allied troops stormed ashore against an island that held nothing but dogs, and not one Japanese soldier would ever be found there. This documentary follows the Kiska evacuation from the Japanese occupation of June 1942 to the landing of August 15, 1943. It covers the Battle of the Komandorski Islands, the loss of Attu, the radar kill of the submarine I-7, the Battle of the Pips on July 26, when two battleships and three heavy cruisers fired 1,005 shells at targets that were not there, and Rear Admiral Kimura Masatomi's run into Kiska harbor with the light cruisers Abukuma and Kiso and ten destroyers. It also counts the cost of Operation Cottage, including friendly fire in the fog and the 71 men lost when the destroyer Abner Read struck a mine. Every figure comes from after-action reports, ship histories, loss tables and the Japanese officers interrogated in 1945. Where the sources disagree, the script says so. Subscribe for the definitive history of the United States in the Second World War - new documentaries every few days. #WW2 #WorldWarII #PacificWar #Kiska #AleutianIslands #BattleOfThePips #USNavy #MilitaryHistory #WWIIHistory #USAInWW2