Seventy years ago today, bombs fell on Dutch Harbor. The
casualties and damage on a remote Aleutian islet amounted to
little more than a blip in the cataclysm of World War II. To
this day, educated Americans are unaware that it happened at
all. But the battle permanently changed Alaska in ways that few
at the time realized. In an essay in the collection "Alaska at
War," historian Stephen Haycox describes Anchorage in 1940 as "a
sleepy little village" with a population of about 3,500. The
summer of 1940 saw the beginning of construction of a military
base on what had hitherto been hay fields and birch forests
north of Government Hill. Uncle Sam had been content to leave
Alaska as an undefended frontier. A military buildup was
reluctantly initiated only when global war began to seem
inevitable. Progress was slow and patchy. But after the bombing
of Pearl Harbor, officials aware of the territory's
vulnerability flew into high gear. Haycox says the next seven
months were "characterized by a great deal of panic. T