All This and Attu

Frederick G. Lyman was a twenty-year-old college student when he enlisted in the Army shortly after Pearl Harbor. He was sent to the Aleutian Islands, a remote chain of Alaskan islands in the Bering Sea, closer to Japan than to the continental United States. Efforts in the Aleutian chain increased after the Japanese attack on Dutch Harbor on June 3-4, 1942. Scholars still debate Japan’s motivation for a raid on these frigid windswept islands but the author writes, “One thing was certain — they didn’t go there for the climate.” Frederick G. Lyman served in the Aleutian Island campaign in 1942 and 1943 with the Army Air Corps, Eleventh Air Force, 73rd Bombardment Squadron. This is his memoir of his Aleutian experience.