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For eighteen months, Japanese forces in the northernmost islands waited for an American invasion that never came. On Paramushiro, gunners fired into the night sky as Japan reinforced its garrisons and held back fighters—while the decisive fighting unfolded far to the south.
This military history documentary explores the forgotten North Pacific campaign through B-25 crews over Paramushiro, Navy Ventura crews flying long-range night missions from Attu, and a submarine that never left a Japanese harbor. It reveals why the threat of an American fleet from Alaska shaped Japan’s strategy, and the airmen, sailors, and submariners who fought in a remote theater of World War II. Discover a lesser-known chapter of the Pacific War through historical storytelling and wartime operations. A WW2 history story for viewers interested in the North Pacific war, Japanese defenses, American air missions, and overlooked military history.
This military history documentary explores the forgotten North Pacific campaign through B-25 crews over Paramushiro, Navy Ventura crews flying long-range night missions from Attu, and a submarine that never left a Japanese harbor. It reveals why the threat of an American fleet from Alaska shaped Japan’s strategy, and the airmen, sailors, and submariners who fought in a remote theater of World War II. Discover a lesser-known chapter of the Pacific War through historical storytelling and wartime operations. A WW2 history story for viewers interested in the North Pacific war, Japanese defenses, American air missions, and overlooked military history.
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LearningTranscript
00:00At 2.31 in the morning on February 4, 1944, two American light cruisers and seven destroyers
00:07opened fire on a stretch of frozen coast called Kurabuzaki. It is the southeast tip of Paramushiro,
00:15an island in the Kurils, about 1,280 miles north of Tokyo. The sea was black. The shore was a
00:23smudge of snow. And according to the admiral who ordered the raid, no American surface warship had
00:29shelled Japanese territory in this war before that minute. Stop on that for a second. More than two
00:37years after Pearl Harbor, the first American ships to shell Japan did it not off Honshu, not in the
00:43warm Pacific, but here, at the top of the map, in water cold enough to kill a man in minutes.
00:50Rear
00:51Admiral Wilder Baker had brought Task Group 94.6 out of Massacre Bay on Attu three nights earlier.
00:59He didn't steer straight for the target. He took a southward course, meant to suggest he was heading
01:04for Matsua, an island farther down the chain. Whoever was watching was meant to guess wrong.
01:11On the destroyer loose, a lieutenant named Tom Lynch had built a three-dimensional floor model
01:17of Kurabuzaki so his director crews could learn the shoreline before they ever saw it. Now they were
01:23seeing it, in the dark, through gun smoke. For 34 minutes, the group fired. 5,745 shells,
01:34roughly 141 tons of steel, on one peninsula. The destroyers Badger, Luce, and Kimberly worked over
01:43the hangars of the southern airfield. The cruisers hammered the coast guns at the tip of the cape.
01:49A merchant ship of about 5,000 tons, spotted just before the shooting started, was hauled
01:55and run aground with fire in her forward hold. On the cape, something, probably a fuel dump,
02:02went up. It could be seen 20 miles out to sea. Five hours later, it was still burning.
02:09Now here's a detail I want you to keep. Japanese gunners did fire back, from about 10 points
02:15along the coast. But much of that fire went straight up. The defenders believed the star
02:21shells lighting their beaches were being dropped by aircraft. So they shot at the sky. At planes
02:28that did not exist. That is the first time in this story that Japanese soldiers in the Kurils
02:34fought an enemy who wasn't there. It won't be the last. If you want to follow what the U.S.
02:40Navy
02:41and American airmen in the North Pacific were doing up there, take a second to like the video
02:45and subscribe. It helps the channel keep digging. The task group took no damage. A few gun crews
02:52passed out from smoke inside their own mounts, and that was the worst of it. Baker turned for home.
02:59Within days, Vichy Radio was passing along a Japanese communique announcing that the invasion
03:04of the Kuril Islands was underway. There was no invasion. There were nine ships, and they
03:11were already gone.
03:12Picture it from Tokyo's side. Nine ships fire for half an hour in the dark. And a government
03:19tells the world that an invasion of its own territory has begun. And that is where the real
03:26question of this video begins. Because the raid was a diversion. Days earlier, American troops
03:33had gone ashore in the Marshall Islands, at Kwajalein, nearly 3,000 miles to the south.
03:39Admiral Nimitz had ordered the Kuril's hit to drag Japanese eyes north. Hit and run. Nothing
03:48more. But on Paramushiro, Lieutenant General Fusaki Tsutsumi was not treating it as hit and
03:54run. He was already receiving reinforcements. From Honshu. From Manchuria. And they kept coming.
04:04In 1943, as American analysts later worked out from Japanese records, the Kurils had held
04:11somewhere around 8,000 to 14,000 men. By the summer of 1944, the figure was about 41,000,
04:19with tens of thousands more on Hokkaido right behind them. Read that again. The garrison at
04:26least tripled in a year in which not one American soldier set foot on those islands. And by the
04:33end of the war, the count of Japanese troops waiting in the north would reach a number far
04:37higher than that. I'll give you that number later, along with who counted them. Because
04:43who did the counting turns out to matter almost as much as the number. Think about what those
04:49soldiers meant. Every one of them had to be fed through harbors that froze and seas that sank
04:56supply ships. Every one of them was a rifle that was not on Saipan, not on Guam, not on
05:03Leyte when the Americans landed there. Japan was losing a war in the Central Pacific, and
05:09it was feeding men into the fog at the top of its map. So why? What exactly were they waiting
05:16for? The answer isn't one thing. It's a fear that began two years earlier, with 16 bombers.
05:24It's a deception American planners built out of radio traffic and paperwork. And it's
05:29a string of very real raids, flown by very real crews, many of whom never came home. Each
05:35piece made the next one easier to believe. And here's the strangest part. When an invasion
05:41of the Kurils finally did come, it came in American-built ships. Just not with Americans aboard. To understand
05:49why a general on Paramushito was so certain the Americans were coming from the North, you have
05:55to go back to April 18, 1942, and a question Tokyo could not answer. Where had those 16 bombers come
06:03from?
06:03On April 18, 1942, 16 Army B-25 bombers lifted off the deck of the carrier Hornet, roughly 650 miles
06:12from Japan, and flew low toward Tokyo. Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle led them. The damage they
06:20did was small. The question they left behind was not. Three days later, President Roosevelt told reporters
06:27the bombers had come from Shangri-La, the hidden valley of a popular novel. It was a joke. In Tokyo,
06:36nobody was laughing. Japanese planners had to work out the map for themselves. And here is something
06:42worth seeing with your own eyes. Take a globe, not a flat map, and stretch a string from Seattle to
06:49Tokyo.
06:50The shortest line does not run across the middle of the Pacific.
06:53It bends north, along the Aleutian Islands, and comes down onto Japan through the Kurils.
06:59Keep that string in your mind. It explains almost everything that follows.
07:04Seven weeks after Doolittle, as part of the same operation that ended in disaster at Midway,
07:10Japanese troops landed on Attu and Kiska, at the far western end of the Aleutians.
07:16American soil. In the United States, it made headlines. For Tokyo, it was something more practical.
07:24A fence across the northern road. The fence lasted less than a year. On May 11th, 1943,
07:32the 7th Infantry Division came ashore on Attu. Many of its men had been preparing for desert war.
07:40They fought for 19 days in fog, mud, and snow, in leather boots that soaked through almost at once.
07:48The last Japanese charge came at dawn on May 29th, and broke into American rear areas before it was stopped.
07:55When it was over, the army had lost 549 men killed, and more than 1,100 wounded. Nearly 2,000
08:04more went down
08:05to cold, trench foot, and sickness. The Americans counted 2,351 Japanese dead. 28 were taken alive.
08:15That figure reached Tokyo, too. And it carried a message the Japanese command did not want to hear.
08:22The Americans had gone to the far end of the Aleutian chain, in some of the worst weather on earth,
08:27and finished the job. Now look at that string on the globe again. From Attu to Padamushito is roughly
08:35760 miles. Attu is closer to Japan's northern islands than it is to Anchorage. On July 10th, 1943,
08:46Captain James Huddleston of the 77th Bomb Squadron led 8 B-25s west toward those islands. When they arrived,
08:54the target was buried under solid cloud. So they bombed by dead reckoning, timing the run by clock
09:00and compass over southern Shumshu and northern Padamushito, without ever seeing the ground.
09:06No anti-aircraft fire came up. No fighters came up. The bombers turned around, staged through the new
09:13airfield on Attu, and flew home to ADAC. Think about that silence. Bombers from American land bases had just
09:21crossed into Japanese home territory, and the islands below had not fired a shot. The Japanese answer
09:28pointed straight north. The official history of the Army Air Forces puts it in one flat line.
09:35Japanese reinforcements had moved northward with the loss of Attu. Then came Kiska. On July 28th,
09:42under cover of fog, Japanese ships slipped into the harbor and took off the entire garrison,
09:47more than 5,000 men. Nobody on the American side saw them go. On August 15th, about 34,000 American
09:55and Canadian troops, backed by battleships, cruisers, and destroyers, landed on an island with no enemy
10:01left on it. Men still died there, to friendly fire in the fog, to booby traps, and aboard the destroyer
10:08Abner Reed when she struck a mine offshore. It is easy to tell Kiska as a joke. From Tokyo,
10:16it did not look like one. Picture it as a Japanese staff officer would. An American force of tens of
10:21thousands, a fleet with battleships in it, now sitting at the western tip of the Aleutians with
10:27nothing left to fight. Where does a force like that go next? Follow the string. So here is the first
10:35piece of our answer, and notice that it has nothing to do with deception yet. Before anyone in Washington
10:41invented a single fake ship, Japan already believed the north was an open door. Attu and Kiska only
10:48confirmed it. And Japan acted on that belief with something it could least afford. Through the rest of
10:55the war, despite desperate needs elsewhere, it kept more than 400 army and navy aircraft in Hokkaido and the
11:03Kurils. In the words of the official history, against the possibility of an invasion. 400 planes.
11:11Set that against the south, where Japanese air units over the Solomons and New Guinea were being
11:16ground away month after month. And every one of those 400 was a plane that wasn't there. But the American
11:23crews flying out of Attu were about to learn that the Kurils could hit back. On September 11, 1943, the
11:3111th Air
11:31Force sent its biggest strike yet against Paramushiro. By nightfall, it had lost about half of its striking
11:38power, and seven of the bombers that survived did not come home at all. They landed in a country that
11:44was
11:44not at war with Japan. What happened to those crews there, and what Tokyo concluded from it, is the next
11:51piece of the puzzle. On the morning of September 11, 1943, 20 American bombers lifted off from Attu.
11:58Eight B-24 Liberators, 12 B-25 Mitchells. It was the third strike of the year against Paramushiro, and for
12:07once,
12:08the sky over the Kurils was clear. Remember Huddleston's raid two months earlier? The cloud, the silence, nobody firing
12:16back. This time the crews could see everything below them. And everything below could see them.
12:24The Mitchells went in low, after shipping in the strait between Shumshu and Paramushiro.
12:30The Liberators went for the staging area at Kashiwabara. Waiting for them were about 40 Japanese fighters.
12:37A B-25 of the 77th Bomb Squadron, flown by First Lieutenant Quinton Standiford, was passing west of
12:44the naval base at Kataoka when it exploded and came apart in the air. The crews around it believed
12:51anti-aircraft fire had found it. One man came out of that explosion alive. Staff Sergeant Francis McEwen,
12:58a gunner from Indiana, was suddenly in water cold enough to kill him within the hour. He grabbed an
13:04oxygen bottle floating in the wreckage and hung on. The coast was too far to swim. He shouted for help.
13:12The help that came was a Japanese fishing boat, the Seishin Maru. Keep McEwen in mind. You'll hear his
13:20voice again before this part is over, from a place nobody expected. Major Frank Gash was leading the
13:27Liberators. Over Paramushiro, his number one engine was hit, and the big bomber began to slide back out of
13:34the formation. Falling behind is exactly what fighters wait for. They knocked out his number
13:40three engine. At ten minutes past two that afternoon, Gash's B-24 went into the sea, about 50 miles east
13:49of
13:49Arahata Cape. Two men in another bomber watched it happen. They reported that the tail gunner was still
13:56firing after the plane hit the water. All eleven men aboard were lost. The formation broke apart.
14:04And here the story takes a turn nobody in Alaska had planned for. Bombers too badly shot up to make
14:12the long run back to Attu turned north instead. Toward Kamchatka. Toward the Soviet Union. Which was fighting
14:21Germany alongside the United States, but had a neutrality pact with Japan and was not at war in
14:27the Pacific at all. On September 24th, in Moscow, Deputy Foreign Commissar Andrei Vashinsky read a
14:35statement to the American Chargé d'Affaires, Maxwell Hamilton. Seven American planes had come down on
14:42Soviet territory, he said. Three with engine trouble. Four more, in the Soviet telling, after Soviet aircraft
14:50forced them to land. Then came the sentence that shut the door. The crews of the planes have been interned
14:58in
14:58accordance with international law. Moscow asked Washington to see that it did not happen again. Let me put the
15:07whole day into one line. The official history of the Army Air Forces says the 11th Air Force lost about
15:14half of its striking power that day. For five months afterward, it could not strike the Kurils at all. Five
15:21months. Now think back to where this video began. When Wilder Baker's cruisers came out of the dark that
15:27February night, no American bomber had been over Pardamushito since this afternoon in September. So the puzzle gets
15:34sharper. At the close of 1943, American striking power in the north was at its lowest point of the war.
15:41The bomber force had been gutted. Its crews were dead, captured, or sitting out the war as guests of
15:47a neutral country. And on Pardamushito, the garrison kept growing. That's the second piece of the answer,
15:53and it is the one written in American blood. From the Japanese side of the strait, an enemy who would
15:59throw away half his bombers in a single afternoon did not look like an enemy making a gesture.
16:04He looked like an enemy who meant it. The raids had cost too much to be a bluff. So Tokyo
16:10didn't
16:10treat them as one. Around November 14th, Navy radio operators on Amchitka picked up a broadcast from
16:17Radio Tokyo. An American voice, introduced as Sergeant McEwen, described being pulled from the sea.
16:26He said the Japanese had treated him kindly. He talked about the war and about his family. Nobody
16:33who knew him recognized the voice. His squadron mates were certain he was dead and decided the broadcast
16:40was a fake. It wasn't. Francis McEwen was alive, in the Omori prison camp on Tokyo Bay. And he would
16:50stay
16:50there until the war ended. Tokyo radio would talk about the north again. Each time it did, it would
16:57tell the Americans listening something about what Japan expected next. Now put yourself in the place
17:04of the planners in Washington and Pearl Harbor that winter. They needed Japan to keep looking north.
17:11Every Japanese soldier on Pardamushito was one fewer on the islands Nimitz actually meant to take. But the
17:18bombers that kept that fear alive had just been cut in half. And new ones were months away.
17:25So they reached for a different weapon. One that cost no fuel and lost no crews. Within months,
17:32Japanese radio intelligence was tracking something new in the North Pacific. A fleet with a number. The
17:38Ninth. And it was about to become the most closely watched American fleet the Japanese Army ever prepared
17:45to fight. On April 20, 1944, the headquarters of Japan's Northeast Area Fleet began moving north,
17:52to Kataoka on Shumshu. That is the same naval base Quentin Standiford's bomber was passing when it blew apart.
17:59Eight days earlier, the Japanese Army had activated a new division for the Northern Islands, the 91st.
18:06A fleet headquarters does not move to the edge of the map, onto a rock in the fog, unless its
18:12admirals
18:12believe the fight is coming there. So what were they reading? To answer that, go to ADAC in the
18:19Aleutians. The Americans had set up a joint Army and Navy communications center there with an unusual job.
18:25It's operators sent traffic. Orders, reports, movement schedules, supply requests. The ordinary
18:33chatter that any large force produces every hour of every day. Except that a great deal of this
18:39chatter belonged to units that did not exist. The operation was called Wedlock, and the force it
18:45built had a name and a structure. A Ninth Fleet, based in the Aleutians in Alaska. Under it, an amphibious
18:52command. Under that, five infantry divisions. The 108th, the 119th, the 130th, the 141st, and the 157th.
19:05They had shoulder insignia. They had headquarters. On paper, the assault force ran to more than 100,000
19:13men. Not one of those five divisions had a single soldier in it. Here's what makes Wedlock worth
19:20studying. And I want you to count the layers as we go. The radio was only the first. On Attu,
19:27dummy installations and dummy landing craft went up where Japanese reconnaissance could find them.
19:33There were landing rehearsals. Newspapers carried hints that the Army was ordering Arctic gear.
19:39On the West Coast, troops boarding ships for the warm Central Pacific were issued winter underwear and the
19:45shoulder patches of Alaska-based units. Picture one of those soldiers, sweating on a troop ship bound for
19:51the tropics, wearing the patch of a Northern command. He had no idea he was part of a deception.
19:58That was the point. If anyone on those docks was watching for Japan, what he saw was men dressed for
20:04the
20:04North. And the invasion date was set, changed, and leaked, again and again. It went out through double
20:12agents the Japanese believed were working for Germany. It went out through Soviet fishermen in
20:17the Northern waters, who were often stopped and questioned by Japanese patrols. One of the dates
20:23in circulation was August 15, 1944. D-Day in the Curials. Remember that date. Not because anything
20:31happened on it in 1944. Because of what happened on the same date one year later. Now, a lie is
20:39only as
20:40strong as what it is stitched to. This is the third piece of our answer, and it is what separates
20:46wedlock from a simple bluff. Almost every false thing the Japanese heard was attached to something
20:52real. The Ninth Fleet was notional. But real destroyers sailed north under that name. The history
21:00of Destroyer Squadron 57 records that its divisions sailed for the Aleutian Islands for duty with the Ninth
21:06fleet, and from there went out on mission after mission to the Curials. The airfield on Attu was
21:13real. The cruisers that shelled Kurabuzaki in February were real. The bombers lost in September were
21:21real. And Japanese fishing boats had pulled at least one of their crewmen out of the sea. And in Alaska,
21:28a real American general, Simon Bolivar Buckner, had pressed for an offensive toward Padamushiro.
21:35The idea of going north was never pure fiction. Real staffs had argued over it. Wedlock simply told
21:43Japan that the argument had been won. Now look at the numbers, because this is where the lie shows
21:50its true size. In mid-1943, with Attu and Kiska still to be taken back, Alaska had held around 140
21:58,000
21:59American troops. By 1944, with the Aleutians cleared, the figure was falling fast to roughly 65,000,
22:08with about 350 aircraft and a handful of warships. By one post-war account, the Japanese estimate of what
22:16stood in Alaska that year was more than 400,000 men, around 700 aircraft and a very strong naval force.
22:24Turn that around for a second. For every American soldier actually in Alaska, Japan was preparing to
22:31meet about six. And it prepared accordingly. A new division. A fleet headquarters on Shumshu.
22:39Air units held back in the north. The garrison figures you heard earlier, 8-14,000 climbing past 40,000,
22:48belonged to exactly these months. But there was one thing Wedlock could not fake. Radio can invent a
22:56fleet. Dummy boats can invent an invasion. Only airplanes overhead can tell an enemy, night after night,
23:03that somebody is still studying his beaches. And the 11th Air Force was still rebuilding after September.
23:10So in the spring of 1944, that job fell to the Navy. To patrol squadrons flying from Attu in the
23:18PV-1
23:19Ventura, a twin-engine bomber that had started life as an airliner. They flew to Patamushito in the dark,
23:26often in small groups, through some of the worst weather on the planet. One Ventura crew would carry
23:32two words, shouted over the intercom, all the way to Kamchatka. Another, a few weeks later,
23:39would fly out toward Patamushito and never be heard from again. On March 25, 1944, five PV-1 Venturas of
23:50Bombing Squadron 139 took off from Attu for Shumshu. The crews called these runs the Empire Express.
23:58Men who flew from Attu described the place as a fog with an island in the middle.
24:03The round trip to the Kurils ran about 1,500 miles, every one of them over open water. And on
24:10night
24:10missions, a Ventura could lift off carrying some 3,000 pounds more than it was designed to carry.
24:16Two of the five aborted and dumped their bombs. Only one would finish the mission and come home.
24:23One of the planes that did not was flown by Lt. Walter Whitman Jr. of Philadelphia.
24:29Look at his crew list for a moment, because it reads like a map of the country.
24:34His co-pilot, John Hanlon, nicknamed Moose, was from Worcester, Massachusetts. The navigator,
24:41Donald Llewellyn, from Omaha. The engineer, Clarence Fridley, from Manhattan, Montana.
24:48The radioman, Samuel Crown, from Columbus, Ohio. The gunners, James Palco from Superior, Wisconsin,
24:55and Jack Parlier from Decatur, Illinois. Seven men. Seven states.
25:01About six hours into the mission, the radio on Attu sent Whitman his bearing. He was over Kamchatka,
25:09Soviet territory. Far off any route home. Whatever had happened near Shumshu, the plane was in trouble.
25:17Then came his last transmission. Two words. Down. Down. After that, nothing.
25:28Those are the two words I told you about. Whether Whitman was shouting them to his crew or to Attu,
25:34the radio carried them out. And keep Donald Llewellyn, the navigator from Omaha, in mind.
25:41His family comes back into this story at the very end, along with the question of where that Ventura went.
25:47Now stop and think about what that flight was for. Five aircraft. 1,500 miles. A target of airfields and
25:57bullets on an island most Americans could not have found on a map. Measured in damage, raids like this did
26:05modest harm. Their real weight was the signal they carried. Someone is still looking at your beaches.
26:12Someone is still coming. Whether any of those crews ever heard the code word wedlock, I found no record
26:19that says. What they knew was the target, the weather, and the fuel. On May 4th, Bombing Squadron 135 relieved
26:28139 on Attu, bringing 15 new Venturas. On the night of May 12th, seven of them set out on the
26:36squadron's
26:36first night photographic and bombing mission against Shumshu. Three reached the target, at around three in the morning.
26:44The searchlights came on. The anti-aircraft fire was heavy and accurate. One of those three,
26:51flown by Lieutenant Hardy Logan, with five men aboard besides himself, never came back.
26:57A search plane flew the route between Attu and Paramushito and found no trace. A second search
27:04found nothing either. No sign of that aircraft or its crew has ever been found.
27:11Then, Radio Tokyo spoke. Remember McEwen's broadcast the autumn before? Once again, the North was on the air.
27:19The Japanese announced that an American bomber had been shot down over the target, and Japanese
27:24records credit two gecko night fighters of the 203rd air group with the kill. Here is why that matters to
27:31our question. A country does not station night fighters at the far end of its empire and boast
27:37about them on the radio, unless it believes the far end of its empire is where the next battle will
27:42be
27:42fought. The Ventura crews were making the deception visible, and Japan was answering it, plane for plane.
27:50The price of that exchange was brutal. By mid-June, Bombing Squadron 135 had lost more than a third of
27:58its
27:58crews. A night takeoff crash on May 23 killed one crew outright. By early June, three aircraft and seven
28:07men were confirmed dead, and three more aircraft with 21 men were missing. On June 12, the squadron went
28:15back in daylight with six volunteer crews. Two more planes did not return. So here is the fourth piece
28:21of the answer. Wedlock worked because it was never only paper. Behind every invented division on ADAC
28:28stood real crews flying real missions to the Kurils, and some of them dying there. The Japanese watched an
28:35enemy pay that price month after month, and they concluded, reasonably, that he wanted something up there
28:42very badly. Now look at the calendar, because that June 12 raid did not happen in isolation.
28:50On June 13, American warships came back to the Kurils and shelled Matsua, the very island Wilder Baker
28:56had pretended to aim for in February. Two days later, on June 15, about 2,500 miles to the south,
29:04marines went ashore on Saipan. Japan now faced two American threats at once. One was real. The other
29:13was mostly a fleet of radio messages. Which one had Tokyo prepared for? And what had that choice left
29:21sitting in the fog when the real battle began? On June 1, 1944, the submarine Herring slipped into the
29:27anchorage at Matsua in the middle of the Kuril chain. Her captain was Lieutenant Commander David Zabriskie,
29:34Jr. It had already been a busy patrol. The evening before, Herring had met the submarine
29:40Barb off the Kurils so the two boats could divide up the hunting ground. Japanese records credit her
29:46with sinking an escort ship, the Ishigaki, and a merchant ship, the Hokuyo Maru, in those same days.
29:52Now she went after ships at anchor. Two of them, the Hiburi Maru and the Iwaki Maru, went down where
29:59they lay. That is where the shore batteries on Matsua found her. By the Japanese account, they scored two
30:06direct hits on her conning tower. Afterward, they watched bubbles rise over a patch of water about 5
30:12meters wide and an oil slick spread across a large area. Herring never answered another radio call.
30:19Every man aboard was lost. For more than 70 years, nobody could say exactly where she lay.
30:25Hold on to that. We will come back to it. Now notice something about that scene. Matsua sits in the
30:32middle of the chain, far from Padamushiro. Yet, it had guns ready to kill a submarine in its own harbor,
30:38and an airfield at Tag and Point that American analysts would rate as comparable in size to the
30:44American bases in the Aleutians. They knew that because on June 14th, four specially equipped B-24
30:51photo planes caught the Kurils in rare, clear weather, and brought back some 2,000 pictures.
30:58What those pictures showed was an island chain fortified on the scale of a major front.
31:04And on June 15th, the real invasion came, about 2,500 miles to the south.
31:11Here is a number I want you to set beside the ones you already have.
31:15When the Marines landed on Saipan, the Japanese garrison defending the island was,
31:20by the count of the US Army's official history, a little over 31,000 men, Army and Navy together.
31:27Now remember the Kurils that same summer, around 41,000, with tens of thousands more on Hokkaido
31:34behind them. Let that settle for a moment. On the day the decisive battle for the Marianas began,
31:41Japan had more soldiers waiting in the fog of the Kurils than it had defending Saipan.
31:47Tokyo understood within days which threat was real. Commander Koichi Shimada, the air officer on the
31:54staff of the northeast area fleet, later told American interrogators what happened next.
31:59When the Saipan operation began, most of the fighters in the north were ordered to Iwo Jima.
32:05From there, they went on to the Tokyo area. So the airplanes moved. Of course they did.
32:11A fighter can fly south in a matter of days. But 40,000 soldiers on frozen islands cannot fly.
32:19They have to be moved by ship.
32:21And this is the fifth piece of the answer. The one that turns the deception from clever
32:26into decisive. The same American submarines hunting in the Kurils, boats like Herring,
32:33were sinking the very transports and escorts Japan needed to move those men anywhere.
32:39Every ship that went down in the north made the garrison harder to feed and harder to pull out.
32:45Wedlock helped put the soldiers there. American submarines and bombers helped keep them there.
32:52Japan did thin the northern garrison in the end. The post-war figures show the Kurils falling to about
32:5827,000 in 1945. But by the time any of those men moved, the Marianas were gone. And with them,
33:06the islands that would put B-29s within reach of Tokyo. Now think about the men on the American side
33:13of
33:13this ledger. Zabriskie's crew. Logan's crew. Whitman's crew with its seven-state roster.
33:21Gash's tail gunner still firing as the bomber hit the water. None of them ever landed on a Kuril beach.
33:29None of them were meant to. And every one of them helped hold tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers
33:34in place without a single American infantryman going ashore. Which brings us back to the title,
33:41and to the promise I made at the start. The fleet never came. The Ninth Fleet stayed a set of
33:47call
33:47signs. The five divisions never existed. So who finally counted all those Japanese troops in the
33:54north? And what number did they arrive at? Because someone did come to the Kurils in the end.
34:00They came in August 1945, in ships built in American yards, crewed by men who had been
34:07trained by Americans at a quiet base on the Alaska peninsula called Cold Bay. And the defenses waiting
34:14for them on Shumshu had been built for somebody else entirely. Who were they? And who had those guns
34:21been aimed at all along? On August 15, 1945, Japanese soldiers on Paramushiro and Shumshu heard the
34:29voice of their emperor on the radio, telling them the war was over. Remember the date I asked you to
34:35keep? August 15 was one of the days the deception had penciled in for the American landing in the
34:41Curials. One year later, to the day, the waiting ended. And not a single American soldier had come ashore.
34:50But the story is not finished. Because something else was already moving toward Shumshu.
34:57To see it, we have to go back five months, to the Alaska peninsula. On March 20, 1945,
35:04a U.S. Navy detachment began operations at Cold Bay, a windswept base most Americans had never heard of.
35:13Its commander was Captain William S. Maxwell. The project was called Hula, and it was secret.
35:20Maxwell's job was to hand ships over to the Soviet Union and to teach Soviet sailors how to fight them,
35:26ahead of the Soviet entry into the war against Japan that Stalin had promised at Yalta.
35:32Picture what that looked like on the ground. American sailors standing on wet decks in the
35:38Alaskan wind beside Soviet crews who spoke little or no English, walking them through radar, sonar,
35:45and engines. At first, there weren't even Russian-language manuals. Soviet staff had to write their own.
35:52Between April 16 and September 4, Maxwell's detachment trained about 12,000 Soviet sailors,
35:59some 750 officers, and more than 11,000 enlisted men. And it handed over 149 ships and craft,
36:0828 patrol frigates, 24 minesweepers, 32 submarine chasers, and 30 large infantry landing craft,
36:18the LCI, the same type that had carried American troops onto beaches across the Pacific and in Europe.
36:24Now set that beside the title. For two years, Japanese commanders and the Kurils had watched for an
36:31American amphibious force coming out of Alaska. In the summer of 1945, one really was being assembled
36:38in Alaska. American-built. American-trained. Only the crews were Soviet. The Soviet Union declared war on
36:48Japan on August 8. On August 18, three days after the Emperor's broadcast, Soviet troops crossed from
36:55Kamchatka and landed on Shumshu. From the southern tip of Kamchatka to Shumshu is only about seven miles.
37:02On a clear day, you can see one from the other. The landing craft ran in toward the beaches,
37:08and the Japanese coastal guns opened up. Five of the former American LCIs,
37:14now carrying the Soviet hall numbers DS-1, DS-5, DS-9, DS-43, and DS-47, were sunk by
37:28Japanese artillery
37:28that day. The fighting on Shumshu went on for days. In the account most often cited, Soviet losses came to
37:36more than 1,500 killed, missing, and wounded, and Japanese losses to about 1,000. Rear Admiral Boris Popov,
37:44who had commanded the Soviet sailors at Cold Bay, later reported that the American landing craft had
37:49played an important role in the Kuril assault. Now look at what those Japanese guns had been built for.
37:56One account of the battle puts it in a single line. The defenses on Shumshu had been built in
38:02anticipation of a war against the United States. There it is. That is the answer to the title,
38:09and every piece we have gathered snaps into place around it. Why did all those Japanese troops wait
38:16for an American fleet? Because for two years, Americans had shown them that fleet from every
38:21angle except the one that mattered. Geography said the shortest road to Japan ran north.
38:28Doolittle and Attu said the Americans would use it.
38:31The bombers that went down over Paramushiro. The Venturas that vanished in the dark. The submarine
38:38that never came out of Matsuwa Harbor. All said the Americans meant it. And Wedlock filled the last
38:46empty space with a fleet. Five divisions and a date. Each layer was believable because the one beneath it was
38:55real. So Japan built for that fleet. Its aircraft flew south when Saipan came. By 1945, by one account, only
39:05around eight outdated planes were left on Shumshu. But the soldiers stayed. And when an invasion finally came,
39:13it came in American-built ships. Against defenses built to stop Americans. Three days after the war was
39:21supposed to be over. And now the number I have been holding back. The figures do not agree. And that
39:28is the
39:29point. The American post-war survey put the Kurdial garrison at about 27,000 in 1945, with more on Hokkaido.
39:38Soviet counts ran far higher. More than 80,000 Japanese troops in the Kurils. And by Soviet figures,
39:46around 50,000 eventually listed as surrendered. So the 80,000 in the title is the Soviet count.
39:53It is the count made by the army that finally came, sailing in ships the United States had given it.
39:58One question is left. The Kurils had swallowed American men too. A Ventura on a Kamchatka slope.
40:07A submarine in a Japanese harbor. A crew that simply disappeared. A gunner in a Tokyo prison camp.
40:16What became of them is the last part of this story. On August 29, 1945, Navy landing craft came across
40:24Tokyo Bay and nosed up to the Omori prison camp. Among the men waiting there was Francis McEwen,
40:30the gunner from Indiana who had been pulled out of the water off Shumshu by a Japanese fishing boat
40:35nearly two years before. The voice on Radio Tokyo that nobody recognized had been his after all.
40:42He went home. He died in September 1981 and is buried in Indianapolis.
40:50In the Kurils, the surrender was signed aboard a Soviet ship in the last days of August.
40:56General Tsutsumi, who had watched his garrison grow for two years against an enemy expected from Alaska,
41:02handed his islands to an enemy who had come from Kamchatka.
41:06Wilder Baker had already received his Navy Cross, pinned on by Admiral Nimitz at Pearl Harbor on May 16,
41:131944, for that February night off Kurabuzaki.
41:17Some of the men in this story never came back at all. The names of Frank Gash's crew are carried
41:23on
41:23the memorials to the missing at the Punchbowl in Honolulu. Hardy Logan's Ventura and the six men
41:29aboard have never been found. The submarine Herring waited longest. For decades, nobody knew exactly where
41:37she lay. Then, a Russian Geographical Society expedition found a wreck off Matua, the island the
41:44Japanese had called Matsua. She was sitting upright on her keel, more than 300 feet down.
41:51On June 1, 2026, 82 years to the day after she was lost, the Naval History and Heritage Command confirmed
41:59it.
42:00Herring. And Walter Whitman's Ventura with its crew from seven states. In 1962, a Soviet geologist named
42:09Mikhail Kotin came across wreckage on the slope of the Mutnovsky volcano west of Petropavlovsk.
42:16Nobody in the United States knew. The site was not reported to the American government until 1992.
42:23And then nothing happened for eight more years. In August 2000, a joint American and Russian team
42:29finally climbed to it. The general leading the American side, Roland LaJoy, described what they
42:35found in six words. The plane was all broken apart. One engine showed damage that may have come from
42:42Japanese anti-aircraft fire. Whatever happened over Shumshu that day, the crew had nursed the plane as far as
42:49Kamchatka, and the mountain had done the rest. In 2002, a recovery team brought back small fragments of bone,
42:58pieces of equipment, and a nickel, dated 1943. On November 20, 2003, the crew of that Ventura was buried
43:07together in Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery. Walter Whitman of Philadelphia.
43:14John Hanlon of Worcester. Donald Lewallen of Omaha. Clarence Fridley of Manhattan, Montana.
43:23Samuel Crown of Columbus. James Palco of Superior. Jack Parlier of Decatur.
43:31Lewallen's daughter had grown up with an empty place where her father should have been.
43:35Asked about those years, she said,
43:37there was always doubt. I always prayed he'd come back.
43:41Now go back with me to the beginning. 2.31 in the morning, February 4th, 1944.
43:49Kurabuzaki. Nine American ships fire into the dark, and Japanese gunners on the shore aim their weapons
43:56at the sky, at airplanes that are not there. That is the whole story in one image.
44:04For two years, Japan fought an enemy in the north who was mostly somewhere else.
44:09And it kept fighting him, because every so often, he really was there.
44:15In a cruiser's gun flash. In a bomber falling into the strait.
44:20In a Ventura over the airfield at 3 in the morning.
44:23In a submarine's torpedo inside a harbor.
44:27So why did tens of thousands of Japanese troops wait for an American fleet that never came?
44:34Because the Americans who did come made a fleet that did not exist impossible to disbelieve.
44:40They never landed in the Kurils. They were never supposed to.
44:44And seven of them, from seven American towns, came home from a volcano on Kamchatka 59 years late,
44:51to lie side-by-side at Arlington.
44:55Thank you for watching this story all the way to the end.
44:59If it gave you something you didn't know about the American airmen, sailors, and submariners who
45:04fought in the North Pacific, please give the video a like. It genuinely helps stories like
45:09this one reach people who will care about them. Subscribe and turn on the bell so you don't miss the
45:14next one.
45:15And tell me in the comments where you're watching from.
45:18If your father, grandfather, or uncle served in the Second World War,
45:22in the Aleutians, or anywhere else, write his name and his unit below. Those names deserve to be read.