A‘forgotten' story of World War II? More than seven decades on, it doesn't seem possible, until one recalls that the war was fought on five continents. Normandy and Stalingrad may be familiar, but Kranji and Sidi Barrani less so. To a list of the war's more obscure battlegrounds may be added another—the island at the center of “The Storm on Our Shores.” Mark Obmascik, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, learned of it, he says, while working on a book about bird watching. He notes that people know the name as a crossword-puzzle answer—as in “westernmost USA pt” in four letters. That would be “Attu.”
The Battle of Attu, in the spring of 1943—“the forgotten battle of World War II,” as Mr. Obmascik's subtitle has it—saw the highest casualty rates in the Pacific Theater to that point: Only those who fought at Iwo Jima, two years later, would face a higher risk of injury or death. For the first time in well over a century, an enemy would take U.S. territory—at the western tail of Alaska's Aleutian archipelago.
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