Stepping Stones to Nowhere
The Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and American Military Strategy, 1867-1945
Description
The Aleutian Islands, a mostly forgotten portion of the United States
on the southwest coast of Alaska, have often assumed a key role in
American military strategy. But for most Americans, prior to the Second
World War, the bleak and barren islands were of little interest. In
Stepping Stones to Nowhere, Galen Perras shows how that changed with
the Japanese occupation of the western Aleutians, which climaxed in the
horrendous battle for Attu. Perras reveals how this clash in the North
Pacific demonstrated serious problems with the way that American
civilian and military decision makers sought to incite a global
conflict.
Reviews
The result is a comprehensive study which, rather than portraying the Aleutian campaign merely as a quixotic and ultimately inconsequential operation, explores the competing opinions and interests that led to the battles of Attu and Kiska. Stepping Stones to Nowhere succeeds in placing American activities in Alaska and the Aleutians during the Second World War, often dismissed as trivial in the historiography, into a broader context than has hitherto been recognized.
- FDP
Recommended.
- Choice, Vol. 41, No. 03
This interesting, important, and largely untold story gets the attention it deserves in this carefully detailed book.
- Allan Smith
In this insightful, stimulating, and extraordinarily well-researched new book, Galen Roger Perras explores the dimensions of the long-vanished Mercator Projection world before the 1940s, when the northernmost reaches of the planet, and in particular the Aleutian Islands, were still a strategic dead end. Perras look in detail at the evolution of the Aleutian Chain and Alaska in US military thinking during the critical years of the 1930s and 1940s. This book is a wonderful reminder that in war, as in the rest of life, a compelling idea need not have any basis in reality to shape the world in which we live.
- Terence M. Cole, University of Alaska Fairbanks