Advance toward Kiska

Both sides used the winter months to extend feverishly the positions they had set up in the late fall of 1942. It seems that on both sides this has been finished. . . . All in all, Americans in this area have accomplished constructions and are in the midst of their preparations for a general attack against Japmese bases at Attu and Kiska.

So prophesied radio Berlin last week. Two days later, a U.S. Navy communique announced that Army and Navy forces had occupied Amchitka, an island in the Rat group in the Aleutians, only 60 miles from the Japs' main base on Kiska.

Last Jan. 12, U.S. troops went ashore through icy water, stacked supplies in the wind-whipped snow, dug in for shelter of a kind, survived immediate but ineffective Jap bombings, and started work at once on an airfield. By Feb. 16, they had carried ashore tons of steel mats for plane runways, and U.S. P-38 fighter-bombers were sweeping up into gale-swirled fog to paste Kiska. One of the photographs released last week showed air transports in the background; the new position is supplied partly by air.

For news of other moves by Lieut. Gen eral Simon Bolivar Buckner, commander of the Army's Alaskan-Aleutian theatre, or by Brigadier General Lloyd E. Jones, who led the advance to Amchitka, the U.S. had to wait awhile. It was plain that the Japs on Kiska and Attu were in for something more decisive than bombs.

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