The Thousand-Mile War: World War II in Alaska and the Aleutians

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The Thousand-Mile War is Brian Garfield's masterful history of the blind war fought in the wind and fog of the Aleutians in 1942-1943. Since its first printing in 1969, The Thousan d-Mile War has been acclaimed as one of the great accounts of World War II. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, it is the first independent study ever written about the only campaign of World War II fought on North American soil. The war in the Aleutians was fought in some of the worst climatic conditions on earth for men, ships, and airplanes. The sea was rough, the islands craggy and unwelcoming, and enemy number one was always the weather: the savage wind, fog, and rain of the Aleutian chain. The fog seemed to reach even into the minds of the military commanders on both sides, as they directed men into situations that often had tragic results. Author Brian Garfield studied the official records as well as the personal stories, letters, and diaries of the participants. The result follows the fifteen-month course of the campaign chronologically, tracing the events that eventually combined to dash Japanese hopes of a quick victory while a surprised America was still reeling from the disaster at Pearl Harbor. Frustrating, befuddling, and still the subject of debates, the Aleutian campaign still marks a turning point in the war in favor of the United States. Brian Garfield is a novelist and Hollywood screenwriter whose works have sold over 20 million copies. He found the accounts of the brave men who had served in the Aleutians so compelling and so little known to the public that he wrote this first full-length history of the Aleutian campaign. Show more