Cleaning up the Aleutian Islands

[EQGuy]

In 1974 I spent 6 weeks based at Adak installing a seismograph network around Adak and the surrounding Islands. The Navy flew us around in their big helicopters. I noticed they had several square patches around the outside and if you looked on the inside they were covering up round holes. I talked to the crew chief and he told me that when they got them they had to clean up dried blood from under the floor.

We installed a seismograph on Tananga Island and when we were flying over I notice that there was a WW2 airstrip complete with an aircraft hangar on the island. There were also several old military trucks parked across the runway so it could not be used as a landing strip. Recently I decided to look it up on Google Earth and could not find it so I did a web search. I discovered that the ACOE cleaned up the Island. That must have been quite the undertaking. While on Adak I heard a rumor that some of the Navy guys had been exploring Great Sitkin Island and discovered a case of 1911's still in comosoline in an old warehouse. I remember seeing the shore guns still in place on Great Sitkin while we were flying over it. There was also a crashed Jap plane on the Island. I wonder how much of the debris from WW2 they cleaned up. I remember that Adak was littered with falling down Quonset Huts that had been taken over by the elements and had in some cases become habitat for the critters. I do not have a problem with them cleaning up toxic chemicals and leaking fuel but I would consider the abandoned buildings and such as historical artifacts.

 

[rwsmith]

Wow.....

Somebody cleaned up their mess. That's pretty amazing. I don't understand the part about the squares and holes and blood under the floor though. Google Earth is SO cool. I take trips all over the place.

 

[EQGuy]

The helicopters saw service in SE Asia before coming to Adak.

 

[Jinglebob]

My dad (RIP) served in the 10th Mountain Division and was part of the Kiska invasion. Dad left me many photos of WWII Alaska and some of Dutch Harbor. After Kiska he served the remainder of his time in Italy and once said that nowhere he had been after was as bad a Alaska.

 

[Big Cholla]

I spent part of 1967 and all of 1968 working on Amchitka Island. In that year I was sent back and forth to Anchorage and even to Seattle many times to expedite the building materials we were using on the Amchitka Project. I spent many hours in one type of Reeves Aleutian Airlines airplanes flying up and down the Aleutian Chain. I spent overnight in Shemya, Adak, Cold Bay, Dutch Harbor and even was in one landing at Unimak Island just to pickup a Bird Watcher's group that had spent the day there doing what they do. I spent most of the daylight hours while in those planes watching the various islands go by. I couldn't believe the amount of WW II construction that had taken place. I also was aghast at the amount of debris, old vehicles, fallen-in buildings/Quonset huts and just piles of rusty machinery that was left. Sometime in the mid-70's there was a very expensive but very quiet cleanup project contracted for by the Federal Government supposedly of most of the Aleutian Islands. Many items were salvaged for scrap metal. I know for a fact that two huge (large enough to house 1 ea. B 29) airplane hangers on Amchitka that we had extensively rehabilitated for use during the atomic shot programs, have been leveled. Also most of the Quonset hut remains and debris are now gone. Even the old concrete structures built for large defensive guns were demolished. Also, in the Amchitka harbor was 3/4's of a beached Japanese submarine. It too is gone now. Both of the two huge Man Camps for the Atomic Program are now gone. According to what I can get from Google Earth even the two sewer ponds are gone. And, Amchitka was only one of many islands with huge runway systems for WW II bombing of Japan. Many islands just had communication buildings and navigation aids. Most all of those are gone. If the metal had any value it went to Japan. Probably most everything else was pushed into a hole and covered by bulldozing. Adak Naval Base has now been turned over to a Native Owned Corporation for development purposes as a commercial base for any type of business that think they can make money out there.

Kiska is still a very secret operational base. Reeve Aleutian Airlines had to divert course between Shemya and Amchitka so as to be far away enough that us passengers couldn't get a hint of what was happening there. Shemya is a well known part of the DEW Line and is also a base for our Long Range Military Aircraft Ops. Attu is also still a base for very secret goings on and even though I had a Q Clearance at the time, Reeves could not let me accompany them over to Attu and back to Shemya.

After I finished my tour of construction duty on Amchitka, I was offered a high level engineering/construction management position with a large construction company based in Kodiak specializing in building new and re-habing old harbor facilities up and down the Aleutian Chain. I passed on the job. I had had enough of the Aleutian Chain weather. :-( .............

 

[Big Stick]

As a kid I once got to explore an abandonded Nike AA missile facility in MN.... Was pretty cool. Lots of neat stuff in there, lots of history....

 

[EQGuy]

When I was working up there Reeves had flights 2 or 3 times a week between Adak and Anchorage. One flight I caught continued on from Adak to Shemya and then on to Attu. They refueled the plane at Shemya and while they were refueling they herded all of us into the terminal building and placed armed guards at the entrance so we could not wander around. I believe that they had atomic weapons on this small island. I later worked with people that had been assigned to Attu. They were monitoring atomic weapons testing in the USSR at that time from there. He told me that their excitement of the week was to go out and meet the Reeve plane to try and get a look up the dress of the Stewardess. As I remember the one time I flew out there they just off loaded mail and supplies from the plane and then we turned around and flew non stop to Anchorage. I remember the right side of the Lockheed Electra was non smoking and the left side was the smoking side and that was a long flight.

 

[Big Cholla]

EQGuy: I spent all day on Shemya and since they knew I was an Engineer on the Atomic Program on Amchitka, they let me go alone and wander around. One Tech Sgt. told me not to walk up on the hill as there was a broadcast antenna up there that put out such strong signals that if I spent as much as 10 minutes in front of it I was guaranteed to never have any kids. I spent most of my time down on the shore line looking at the concrete bunkers built to hold defensive guns during WW II. ...................

 

[hoc9sw]

I'm going to have to dig out some pictures to post. I had family on Umnak, then the Kiska landing. I'm amused by the case of 1911's. The rule was that when you left, you took literally nothing, firearms, equipment, even paper and pens for letter-writing - all was left due to the difficulty of getting supplies in.

I did extensive research on this before cancer got the upper hand. A trip out there is on my bucket list, but it won't happen.

I would love to see photos. Jinglebob, PM me if you would share. Was the "Snafu Bird" ever mentioned by your dad?

 

[Marshwheeling]

One Tech Sgt. told me not to walk up on the hill as there was a broadcast antenna up there that put out such strong signals that if I spent as much as 10 minutes in front of it I was guaranteed to never have any kids. ...................

Brings to mind the classic episode in Thomas Pynchon's V wherein Benny Profane saves Pig Bodine's life. The two were serving on a Navy vessel in the Mediterranean. Bodine gambles away his supply of French ticklers, but hears he can sterilize himself by standing in front of the radar mast. Meanwhile, Profane has stolen two pounds of hamburger from the ships mmess, and atashes it on a platform on the mast. Bodine climbs the mast, but is warned off by the smell of meat cooking.

 

[brick]

Jinglebob:

My father (RIP) bombarded Kiska and Attu. He was on the USS St. Louis. This occurred during the Battle of Midway.

 

[EQGuy]

Here is another rumor I heard while working up there. We had a lot of seismographs radio their signals into the various White Alice sites in Alaska and then were put on phone lines to be relayed to Palmer AK. These had huge Troposcatter antennas that bounced radio signals off of the troposphere and were part of the DEW line communications network. I had one technician tell me that he had heard of a case where one of the workers was left alone at the site during the Christmas Holidays and had gotten drunk. He then crawled up into the antenna to get warm and fell asleep. So the story goes when his relief arrived he thought he smelled pork cooking but it was his fellow worker that was being cooked. I will say this, there were a lot of strange people working these sites. If you have watched the Red Green show think Ranger Gord.

 

[EQGuy]

Big Cholla
I was still in the Army when all of the excitement was going on at Amchicka but I later worked with a bunch of guys that were up there setting up recorders to record the blast. One of my supervisors told me how he met Russ. I worked with Russ for several years and he used to spend more time sleeping at his desk then he did working. When my old super arrived Russ was sitting on his hands while sitting on a work bench. This went on for quite some time until he asked Russ what he was supposed to be doing. His reply was I am waiting for my supervisor to tell me what to do. When asked where his supervisor his reply was, Las Vegas.

Also another fellow, Gene, told me that they had heard rumors that they used silver buss bars in the equipment for the blast and he and a couple of others spent some time searching for the silver but that they never found any.

 

[EQGuy]

As a kid I once got to explore an abandonded Nike AA missile facility in MN.... Was pretty cool. Lots of neat stuff in there, lots of history....

Big Stick
An old Nike site in the East Bay Area is now a county park. Painted on the concrete of the old base is this "FLASH TO BANG, DUCK AND COVER". I actually got to see the missiles out at the Nike site at Milgra Ridge above Pacifica in 1972.

 

[wundudnee]

One of my supervisors where I worked was an Army officer on one of the islands in WWll. He said it was so boring you would go crazy. He said he had a friend that was a Navy captain of a small ship in port there. My boss asked his friend what he would take for one of their whale boats to use there off the island for recreation. He said his friend told him they could sure use a Jeep to use when they were in port. He told me they made the trade and within an hour the boat was tied to their dock and the Jeep was on the ship getting a coat of Navy gray paint and numbers.

He said that Jeep was still on his records and he wasn't sure how to correct that. He told me he wrecked that Jeep right there on those record books and salvaged it out for parts.

I believe his story, I don't believe he ever lied to me. He was one of the good guys, RIP.


Talking about WWll stuff. When I was a kid I was exploring the ocean side of Point Loma at SanDiego in 1951 and at that time they still had gun emplacement bunkers dug there.

 

[Big Cholla]

The story about someone finding a case of M 1911s on an uninhabited Aleutian Island is just one more of those BS stories that occurred after WWII. On Amchitka the story was that someone's Dad knew someone that had served in the Army and personally buried a case of M1 Garands. Several guy hooked up to find that case of rifles. They built a steel prod that they could push down into the tundra and spent many many days off tromping around the Quonset hut sites pushing that steel prod into the ground. They never found the mythical case of rifles.

One of my surveyors did find a M 1911 out in the tundra from WW II. It was a solid clump of rust. He knew I was a "Gunny" and he asked me on the q.t. if it could be repaired. I took one look and told him to find a good spot down at the bay and throw it away. Guns, Cameras and recording devices were strictly prohibited on the island and possession of anything like that was cause for being fired and loosing one's Q clearance. He never told me what he actually did with that old relic. ..................

I spent most of my days off exploring (I had an assigned pickup) and beach combing. Found so many glass balls from the offshore fishing driftnets of Japan, Korea, N. Korea and even Russia that my wife asked me to quit bringing them home. I did find the Quonset hut site where my Uncle lived for a few months after the invasion of Kiska except he left before the Quonset hut was finished and he had only a tent buried in a dugout. ........................

 

[shouldazagged]

One of my mother's brothers served in the Aleutian campaign. He would only talk about the appalling weather, nothing more.

 

[Mike McLellan]

When I was clearing my property to build my house (Google Earth 4006 Berry Court; Fairbanks, AK), I found about a dozen orange golf balls. I think they were Japanese golf balls!

 

[hoc9sw]

One of my mother's brothers served in the Aleutian campaign. He would only talk about the appalling weather, nothing more.

For some of the units, there wasn't anything to talk about but the weather. From the diaries and stories I've read, unless you were at Dutch Harbor, or in an island invasion, it was insanely boring.