Lots of Loneliness

Alaska's Delegate in Congress is square-jawed Anthony Joseph Dimond, 60. Last week he bluntly accused both Army and Navy of showing "entirely too much complacency" over the Jap invasion. "If we haven't enough power to drive them out now, how can we expect to do it when they get fully established?" An old Alaska hand, who has prospected for gold and practiced law, Delegafe Dimond declared that there are 25,000 Jap fighters in the Aleutians.* By taking Kiska the Japs are nearer the U.S. Pacific coast--and the Panama Canal--than if they had won Midway. "The Japs knew the size of their own forces, so why wasn't the U.S. public informed of the invading force's size?" asked Tony Dimond.

The answers to his pregnant questions were hinted at by Maine's Republican Senator Ralph Brewster, hornet-mad over the lack of a real unified command on the Arctic front. Said he: "Naval forces in the area are commanded from Seattle, while Army units are commanded from Anchorage, Alaska. That means the two responsible officers are 2,000 miles apart." The highest ranking military man on the Alaskan scene is Major General Simon Bolivar Buckner, who controls Army operations there, but when concurrent Navy sea or air action is needed, orders must come from Vice Admiral Charles Freeman's headquarters in Seattle.

Twenty-five Thousand Alone. Since the Navy reported last month that three more Jap destroyers had been sunk, the only news of the Aleutians has come from the Tokyo radio. A Japanese correspondent on Kiska reported that U.S. bombers were visiting the island two or three times a day, dropping their loads through the fog; that roads were being built across the black, treeless hills; that Japanese troops were unhappy over the prospect of a winter on bleak Kiska. "The loneliness in this remote northern base is hard to imagine back home," complained the writer.

The Japanese might have been happier had he heard the ominous prediction of Congressman John M. Coffee that "there will be an attack on the Alaskan mainland, British Columbia or the Pacific Northwest before the end of summer." By week's end public clamor and military silence had grown so great that the Senate Military Affairs Committee decided to send out its own scouting party, headed by Senator Albert B. ("Happy") Chandler, to find out what was really happening in unhappy Alaska.

*Untrue, said a U.S. Army source, which declared that the Japs' largest installations amounted to 20 or 30 tents. At no time, said he, have enough transports to land 25,000 men been sighted.

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