Matt Hunter's Sitka World War II site
copyright Sitka Maritime Heritage Society 2006
Aerial photo City and Borough of Sitka, modified by SMHS.
The National Historic Landmark designation is for sites significant to the nation’s history. This Landmark was designated in 1984, and includes the Causeway on the other side of the airport, and the part of Japonski Island from the O’Connell bridge to the old officers housing on the waterfront, including Mt. Edgecumbe School, UAS, and the SEARHC Community Health building.
The World War II Naval Air Base on Japonski Island was protected by the Army coastal defenses on various other islands. There were as many as 10,000 people stationed at Sitka, which at the time had only a few thousand residents.
1900 – Japonski Island had a coaling station for government ships, such as the U.S. Revenue Service Cutters. (The forerunner of the Coast Guard, the Revenue Cutters were often the only law and order in the places they went. They patrolled for illegal seal hunting and liquor trafficking, and on occasion rescued whalers and villagers.) Coast Survey vessels wintered here. One of the original turn-of-the-century coal storage buildings is still standing, known as the old laundry building, now being used for classrooms by MEHS.
The 1930s: the U.S. War Department recognizes the strategic importance of the Pacific
1937: the Navy constructs a station at Sitka for servicing PBY Catalinas, seaplanes.
1939: The base at Sitka is upgraded to a naval air station, and construction begins on naval air stations at Kodiak and Dutch Harbor.
December 7, 1941: Surprise attack by the Japanese on the American military base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii; the United States declares war.
Sitka’s base is the only one operational in Alaska, and is thus a target for Japanese forces. The air stations at Kodiak and Dutch Harbor are completed soon after. There were only ever these three air bases in Alaska during the war.
June 1942: Japanese forces attack Dutch Harbor, and occupy Kiska and Attu Islands in the Aleutian Islands (Alaska), to divert the U.S. from their planned attack at Midway.
June 4-7, 1942: The main Japanese fleet is defeated at the Battle of Midway, near the U.S. base in the mid Pacific. It is the end of Japan’s naval superiority.
Summer 1943: Japanese forces are driven from the Aleutian Islands. The Battle of Attu left nearly 2500 Japanese and 549 American dead. The Japanese were fighting to the death. The Japanese had secretly evacuated Kiska, but friendly fire and booby traps took 313 American lives.
1944: The Sitka naval operating base is decommissioned. Sitka’s base was most important in the first years of World War II, when Japanese attack was a real possibility. Later Sitka was important as a way point between Puget Sound and Kodiak during the Aleutians battles.
1946: the Army and Navy bases turned over to the Department of the Interior. Converted into Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school (Mt. Edgecumbe) and tuberculosis hospital.
1972: The John W. O'Connell Bridge joins Sitka and Japonski Island, and the shore boats are retired.
2006: The BIA school is now operated by the State of Alaska, and the health care facilities by the nonprofit Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium. Japonski also is home to the University of Alaska Southeast Sitka Campus, Sitka’s airport, a U. S. Coast Guard Air Station, and the USCG Cutter Maple.
Detail
from 1948 Photo Shop Studio photo.
The naval air base on Japonski was primarily for seaplanes, the PBY Catalinas, with large ramps and tie-downs on the apron in front of the hangars. The hangars – slightly above and to the right of center in the photo above - now house UAS and the Mt. Edgecumbe school’s gym. The apron in front of the hangars is big enough for wheeled planes capable of landing on an aircraft carrier deck, and it was outfitted with a catapult and arresting gear system.
On the hill above the hangars the buildings that are now Mt. Edgecumbe School were built as, facing north, an administration building, with a communications center and crows nest in the partial third story. (Below it the windowless concrete structure behind the old coal building was a bombproof communications center.) Next, facing town, with the eagle sculpture now, was the recreation center, with a gym and 800-seat theater and bowling alleys. Next to it are two barracks and the mess hall.
The base also included duplexes for married officers (to the right of the hangars in photo above), the Bachelor Officers Quarters (now SEARHC Community Health), and the officers houses, along the waterfront.
The boatshop, visible at left in the photo, is included in the industrial area of the base, which included a bomb-proof power house, still standing, and the old coaling sheds, and many workshops and warehouses.
An excerpt from the Supplement to The Harbor Defense Project Harbor Defenses of Sitka, 1944 (this is from an Army progress report on the construction of the defenses in Sitka):
“The mission of the Harbor Defense is to deny enemy naval vessels access to Sitka Harbor and entrances thereto to the distance of 25,000 yards from the Naval Air Station and destruction of such hostile vessels as may enter these waters and to assist in the local protection of all military, naval, and other vital installations in the vicinity of Sitka against all forms of enemy attack during day or night.”
Japonski and neighboring islands were once separate islands. They were leveled and connected, including an 8,100 foot (mile and a half)-long causeway constructed to Makhnati Island on the other side of the current airport.
Work started on housing in January 1941, and the initial garrison arrived in May 1941 from Fort Chilkoot. Fort Ray was built on Alice and Charcoal Islands. Those islands are where the Shee Atika townhouses are, on out to the airport runway. It was the Army’s headquarters until 1943 when it was attached to Fort Rousseau, at Makhnati Island, at the end of the newly-constructed 8,100 foot causeway.
The defenses included ammunition magazines and gun emplacements and a concrete command headquarters. Some of the wood structures on the causeway were storehouses, a fuse house, motor sheds, officers’ quarters, eight barracks, two mess halls, and a dispensary, which are all gone except for concrete foundations. Most were removed for use by the government elsewhere in Alaska.
Fort Babcock was an unfinished gun battery at Shoals Point on Kruzof Island, and Fort Pierce, also unfinished, on Biorka. Three guns were at Olga Point, and two-gun batteries were on Whale Island and at Watson Point. Many other structures, gun emplacements, and even a radar station on Harbor Mountain have left ruins behind in Sitka.
A brief overview of the Army installations, by Matt Hunter:
Beginning in late 1940, the Army moved quickly to emplace some guns in Sitka. Two “emergency” batteries were rushed into position by 1941 and 42. The Army constructed a six-inch gun battery at Shoals Point, the southeastern tip of Kruzof Island. This battery consisted of two six-inch guns from old Navy battleships. The other emergency battery was a 155mm gun battery on Makhnati Island, which was connected later to Japonski Island via a causeway through seven smaller islands. This battery originally consisted of 4 GPF guns on “Panama Mounts.” In addition to these two emergency batteries, the army also emplaced four 3-inch anti aircraft guns on Sasedni Island, the middle island of the causeway to Makhnati Island.
This building, near the end of the bridge, is a boat haul-out, for working on boats out of the water. At high tide a boat would go into a cradle that would be pulled up the railway track by a large winch and into the building. One side was a workshop and the other side was parts storage. It was used to repair boats for both the Army and the Navy, though it was inadequate for the size and number of boats – about 50 in 1943.
In 1942, there were 26 shipwrights employed by the Navy at the Naval Air Station at Sitka. The SMHS has a copy of a letter written in October 1943 by the Navy’s boat repair foreman to the Public Works Officer. With all the work they had, responsible for around 50 vessels ranging in size from a ship on down, the only shop was the small marine ways building (Japonski Island Boathouse), where they could only haul smaller boats. He complained that they had to do most of their work on the grid or with the boats tied up to a float or dock. They had just done repairs on the tidal grid to two large boats, which had hit the rocks. Because the good tides were at night, they had to carry their tools and materials up and down, at night, in bad weather - under black out conditions. The only shop was at the boathouse, where ten shipwrights shared a 40 by 15 shop. They would have built a larger repair facility, but the end of the war came first.
After WWII the facility was used for repairing the shore boats, ferries between Sitka and the federal government community of Mt. Edgecumbe. The boat repair was done by Robert Modrell for about 30 years. He was a highly skilled shipwright who first came to Sitka to teach boatbuilding at the Bureau of Indian Affairs school. The O’Connell Bridge was built in 1972, the beginning of the end of Mt. Edgecumbe as a separate community from Sitka.