Stepping Stones to Nowhere: The Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and American Military Strategy, 1867-1945 - Softcover

Perras, Galen

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Softcover

ISBN 10: 0774809906 ISBN 13: 9780774809900

Publisher: Univ of British Columbia Pr, 2004

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The Aleutian Islands, a mostly forgotten portion of the United States off the southwest coast of Alaska, have often assumed a key role in American military strategy. W. H. Seward, the US secretary of state who brokered the purchase of Alaska in 1867, believed that the acquisition would permit the United States to dominate the Pacific. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton attempted to install an American ballistic missile defence system on the islands. 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. Efforts to make the area a major theatre of war rivalling Europe or the south Pacific foundered, but certainly not for lack of effort. The campaign was unique in its involvement of Britain, the Soviet Union, and Canada. 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.
Thoroughly researched and accessible, this book will be invaluable to military and naval historians as well as those with a general interest in the history of the Second World War.

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About the Author

Galen Perras is an archivist at the National Archives of Canada and the author of Franklin Roosevelt and the Origins of the Canadian-American Security Alliance, 1933-1945.

Review

Recommended. (Choice, Vol. 41, No. 03 2003-11-01)

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 The International History Review 2005-06-01)

This interesting, important, and largely untold story gets the attention it deserves in this carefully detailed book. (Allan Smith University of Toronto Quarterly, Winter 2004/05)

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 Canadian Military History, Book Review Supplement, Summer 2005)

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. W.H. Seward, the US secretary of state who brokered the purchase of Alaska, believed that the acquisition would permit the United States to dominate the Pacific. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton attempted to install an American ballistic missile defence system on the islands. But for most Americans, prior to the Second World War, the bleak and barren islands were of far less interest than the Philippines.

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. Efforts to make the area a major theatre of war rivalling Europe or the South Pacific foundered, but certainly not for lack of effort. The campaign was unique in its involvement of Britain, the Soviet Union, and Canada. 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.

Thoroughly researched and accessible, this book will be invaluable to military and naval historians as well as those with a general interest in the history of the Second World War.

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