Down to the Sea by Bruce Henderson

Japanese garrison of some 2,600 troops was wiped out (hundreds committed suicide with hand grenades rather than surrender). American casualties were 600 dead and 1,200 wounded.
    Following the fall of Attu, Hull joined a destroyer blockade around Kiska, a narrow, 22-mile-long island with an east-facing harbor midway down its length. Hull steamed several miles off the harbor, where most of the Japanese installations were located. Each night around midnight, the destroyer moved closer to shore and fired at least a hundred rounds of 5-inch shells, outbursts which were often met by return artillery fire from ashore. With all deck-gun batteries firing simultaneously, the noise was deafening and “the whole ship vibrated, with dust and debris flying everywhere.” Then Hull turned and steamed out of range, resuming her patrol. This went on until they ran out of ammunition and stores and were relieved by another destroyer, at which point they headed for Dutch Harbor to take on more ammo and supplies before going back out. For weeks, as “fog hung over the island like a shroud ofmystery,” Kiska was shelled by the patrolling destroyers, which regularly faced blinding snowstorms and pea-soup fog that obscured rocks, barrier reefs, and treacherous shallows and made maneuvering hazardous even for ships equipped with radar and sonar. *
    On patrol off Kiska shortly after midnight on June 22, Monaghan ’s radar picked up a contact at a range of 14,000 yards. Steaming to investigate, the destroyer closed to within 2,300 yards. With the night “thicker than coagulated ink,” the target still could not be seen visually. The destroyer’s guns, directed by radar control, opened fire. There was an immediate response from the unseen foe: machine-gun fire raked across Monaghan ’s decks.
    Several slugs missed Seaman 1st Class Joseph Guio’s head “by three feet” as he and his deck-gun crew fired away. “But I guess that’s as good as a mile because I came out of it safe,” Guio later wrote to his younger brother, Bill, back home in West Virginia. “I trembled like a leaf on a frosty morning. Will tell you all about it some day.”
    The blind duel continued for twenty minutes, the destroyer’s salvos lighting the night with blinding flashes and sending booming echoes across the harbor, until a Monaghan lookout reported a “glowing mushroom” on the horizon. Radar reported the target blip was still on the screen but moving toward the enemy-held harbor. The destroyer broke off contact, ending a surface action in which her gunners never once glimpsed their target. Aerial photographs taken later revealed a large enemy transport submarine piled up on the jagged rocks outside the harbor “like a dead whale.” † Monaghan ’s reputation as a sub killer—first earned at Pearl Harbor and enhanced weeks later when thedestroyer attacked and damaged an enemy submarine—went up another notch.
    Based on the stiff enemy resistance at Attu, there was reason to believe that the Kiska invasion would be a costly action. But when D-Day arrived in early August and 35,000 troops landed on Kiska, they found the island abandoned. Under the cover of impenetrable fog, thousands of enemy troops had been evacuated over a period of weeks by surface ships and transport submarines—a “remarkable exploit” that succeeded in spite of the watchful patrols by radar-equipped U.S. warships. For the lack of a fierce fight for Kiska, however, U.S. military strategists were unapologetic. The Japanese were out of the Aleutians for good without the loss of additional American lives.
    Hull and Monaghan, Farragut -class sister ships launched two months apart whose hull designations were separated by only four numbers (350 and 354, respectively), had shared similar experiences since the opening day of war, when they had been moored not more than 200 yards apart at Pearl Harbor.