Stepping Stones to Nowhere: The Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and American Military Strategy, 1867-1945 (review)

With the great geopolitical changes of the late nineteenth century - the rise of Japan and the Pacific expansion of the United States were among the most notable of these - the North Pacific's Aleutian Islands took on a critical new significance. Earlier seen mainly in relation to exploration and the development of sealing and whaling, that remote and largely uninhabited archipelago began, indeed, to assume a strategic meaning of quite unprecedented proportions. Viewed as a possible bridge between North America and Asia, it commended itself particularly to the attention of Americans. As, in consequence, the United States carried forward its mid-nineteenth-century drive towards the status of a Pacific power - acquisition of the Oregon territory and California, the establishment of a Hawaiian presence, and the 1853 opening of Japan were the principal steps in the process - attention northward developed and grew.

The implications the United States' 1867 purchase of Alaska had for the Aleutians were not, to be sure, immediately apparent. Still isolated and hard to supply, the islands were left ungarrisoned until the 1880s. As the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 underscored their importance, however, and as Japan's continuing ascendancy focused additional attention on them, they moved steadily into the foreground. With the advent of air power, their potential grew dramatically. American Air Force general Billy Mitchell pronounced the Alaskan region vital - 'he who holds Alaska will rule the world,' as he put it in 1934 - and Japan began to view action in the Aleutians themselves as at least likely to divert attention from initiatives elsewhere and perhaps even as a step to control of Alaskan resources and bases. For United States planners, the islands' openness to use as a gateway to the Kuriles - and, for some, to Japan itself - seemed plain.

Japan's 1942 seizure of the westernmost parts of the chain brought matters to a head. The US rushed to reinforce and supply the area (the tonnage shipped to it would, says Galen Roger Perras, fall not far below that sent to Europe), it became the subject of much agitated debate concerning its place in the overall effort against Japan, and the Japanese themselves devoted attention and energy to reconsidering the point and purpose of their presence there. The successful US campaign of 1943 did not, in consequence, turn attention away from the region. The US continued to see it as a possible base of operations, and even after Japan's defeat the alignment of forces in the North Pacific assured the islands a role in US strategic thinking. They became, in the view of American planners, a forceful reminder to the Soviet Union that the US was a North Pacific power too (use of Amchitka as a 1971 nuclear weapons test site would reinforce that message in a very clear way), and they retained their strategic relevance into the post-Cold War period, a fact underlined by the US decision to place a missile defence system installation on Adak.

This interesting, important, and largely untold story gets the attention it deserves in this carefully detailed book. Some of what the book's readers will see is, assuredly, open to question. Archival and other sources in English have been extensively used, but no Japanese - or Russian - materials (beyond the few in translation) receive examination; more than one statement needs qualification and nuance (the claim, for example, that 'only in the late 1950s ... did Canada agree to wed its security measures more tightly to the United States' is true in only a very restricted sense); and the title itself creates difficulty both in undermining the book's case concerning the islands' importance and in giving a somewhat less than accurate impression of the time frame examined (it's more like 1920-50 than 1867-1945). That said, strengths and significance remain that impress. Bringing a neglected subject into view, examining that subject with thoroughness and general...