For much of my life I have been interested in WWII – my grandpa Myers was in the Navy in the Pacific theater on a mine sweeper. My dad read extensively on the war, largely because of his father, and passed along an interest in military history  – the navy in particular – and intriguing stories of battles that rarely get headlines. Everyone knows about Pearl Harbor, D-Day, Guadalcanal, Midway, George Patton, Chester Nimitz, Eisenhower, The Desert Fox, etc etc.
But not many people realize that the Japanese did, in fact, attack American-owned soil beyond just Pearl Harbor: they launched balloon bombs at the Pacific Northwest, there is a large (though never completed) gun emplacement above San Francisco to guard the Golden Gate, the Japanese developed carrier subs to try to attack the Panama Canal, and there was a relatively long naval, ground, and air war around, in, and over the Aleutian Islands in Alaska – wherin the Japanese even occupied American soil for part of the war.
One weather report given during that campaign indicated that all aircraft were to be grounded because the crosswinds were near 100mph – and fog made visibility too low to takeoff, navigate, and land (fwiw, I don’t know how you get fog and 100mph winds – but it happens in the Bering Sea)!
Samantha Seiple’s book Ghosts in the Fog spends a little under 200 pages addressing the history of that story in a readily-accessible format (aimed dominantly at the pre-teen/teen market). Characterized by an approachable and engaging series of narratives, it well describes this second ‘forgotten war’ in American history (some would say that the Spanish-American War was the first, and that the Korean War (third on my list) was “The Forgotten War” – but this aspect of WWII is certainly not well-enough known). Covering a spectrum of intelligence, operations, and geographical data, Ms Seiple gives a solid showing in this work.
The Japanese first bombed Dutch Harbor – more commonly-known in current pop culture as the base from which crabbing boats operate on Discovery’s Deadliest Catch – which surprised the theater commander who believed that cryptographic intercepts supplied to him were intentionally-false messages on the part of the Japanese trying to lure him away from their real destination. Unfortunately for Admiral Theobald, and the natives and soldiers who called that part of the world home, the intelligence provided which indicated the Japanese were aiming at Dutch Harbor was correct – and he was hundreds of miles east and south of the region when they struck.
I hope more people become aware of this ‘forgotten’ aspect of World War II, as the lives of the airmen, sailors, and soldiers who fought and died (on both sides) should be remembered.