On this day in 1943, WWII correspondent Robert L. Sherrod (far right in photo) of "Time" magazine accompanied a U.S.-Canadian task force primed to battle the Japanese garrison on Kiska in the Aleutian Islands (Operation Cottage). 
Allied forces, however, discovered that the Japanese had abandoned Kiska under the cover of fog, leaving behind just a few mongrel dogs. “We dropped 100,000 propaganda leaflets on Kiska, but those dogs couldn’t read,” said an American pilot.
Sherrod traveled to Kiska with the invasion fleet, which consisted of more than a hundred warships, on the USS Pennsylvania. After a diversionary landing on Gertrude Cove at the island’s southern edge, plans called for the main landings to be on a beach at the far western end.
Major General Holland “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, an expert on amphibious warfare who had helped train the Seventh Division for its landing on Attu, was convinced that there were no Japanese on Kiska, and had called for a patrol to be sent prior to the invasion to see if he was right.
En route to the island, said Sherrod, Smith had kept “grumbling that the whole operation would turn out to be a farce because the Japanese had escaped. Else why didn’t they shoot at our B-25s [bombers] and PBYs [Consolidated PBY Catalinas] when they went over to bomb the island?”
In spite of persistent fog, some 7,000 Allied troops—supported by five battleships and 262 land-based aircraft—were established on Kiska by the end of the operation’s first day. The only thing missing was someone to fight; Smith had been right—the Japanese were gone.
Sherrod reported that Allied forces found "gun emplacements, ammunition, living quarters and other evidence" that indicated that at one time nearly 10,000 Japanese had been on Kiska. Soldiers also discovered numerous caches of food.
What Sherrod and U.S. military officials learned only later was that Japanese destroyers and cruisers had evacuated the bulk of the Kiska garrison on July 28.
How had such an operation been conducted so successfully and without any notice by American planes or ships? According to Morison, the Kiska evacuation had been achieved through a combination of “Japanese savvy, American bungling, Aleutian weather and good fortune."
In his article on the Kiska campaign, Sherrod was able to laugh off the embarrassment felt by Allied forces at not finding any Japanese on the island, noting that among “the echoing cliffs of Kiska a new word was born: JANFU (“Joint Army-Navy foul-up”).”
He also reported that the enemy left behind land mines and booby-traps. Although most of the booby-traps were “crude, such as a floorboard obviously raised to accommodate a detonator, and not at all up to the fictional standard of Japanese cunning,” a few men had been killed.
Censors, however, refused to allow Sherrod to mention in his dispatches the far larger number of troops, about twenty-five, who were “slain by our own trigger-happy soldiers,” while another thirty-one were wounded by friendly fire.
Months after the Kiska landing, Sherrod, through conversations with surgeons on a transport that had taken care of some of those wounded by friendly fire (soldiers of the 87th Infantry Regiment), had patched together a report on what had happened.
The weather on Kiska had been the “foggiest I have ever seen,” Sherrod said, “and I had been through some honeys in the three months I had spent in the Aleutians. Actually, it was impossible to see ten feet.”
Still expecting heavy enemy opposition, the troops who had landed on Kiska had fanned out in every direction, “dashing up mountains, down gulleys, through fog, and every man had his finger on the trigger," waiting for the first shot at the first enemy they saw.
A marine observer, who before the war had worked for the New York Times, told Sherrod that the soldiers were trigger happy and “didn’t give a damn what they hit. I had a half a dozen bullets fly right by my ears.”
An outfit Sherrod had known on Attu, the Third Battalion of the Seventeenth Infantry Regiment, had been in the middle of the firing, between two patrols of the Eighty-Seventh, but had miraculously escaped with no casualties.
“Not one of my men fired a shot,” the Seventeenth’s battalion commander said to Sherrod. “They had been in action before.”
Sherrod wrote a paragraph about the Eighty-Seventh soldiers killed by their own men for his Time story about the invasion, but censors cut it out, and he believed they were right to do so at the time.
Sherrod noted that the censor for Kiska had been Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, commander of the North Pacific Force, who “insisted on reading every line of copy” and had been a “liberal censor,” pondering over, but passing for publication, the reporter’s JANFU comment.
Months later, Sherrod could not understand why military officials in Washington, D.C., were still refusing to release any information about the friendly fire incident. “It’s part of the facts of battle,” said Sherrod, “and I think we might as well face these facts."
