Island War by Patricia Reilly Giff

Island War opens in 1941. Europe is at war with Nazi Germany while Japan is preparing to attack the United States as well as several Asian countries.

In a small town in Connecticut, Isabel (Izzy) is busy packing her suitcase to travel to an island off the coast of Alaska. However, her mother, a bird watcher, isn't keen to go despite the fact that Izzy's father had made the plans and gotten their tickets. A little over two months ago, Izzy's father was killed in a car accident. Now Izzy is keen for a change of scene, to go to the island, to watch the birds and for the snow and the wind. Her Gram convinces Izzy's mother to travel to the island that Izzy's father spent so much time on.

Fourteen-year-old Matt loves rowing out on Long Island Sound. One day Matt learns from his father that the two of them will be travelling to an island that is part of the Aleutians, an island chain off the coast of Alaska. Matt's father feels they need some time together, but Matt doesn't want to go. He's not close to his father who is always away and who always seems annoyed when he comes home.

Izzy and Matt first run into one another on the boat taking them to the island. Izzy, running around on deck, trips over Matt who is sitting against the railing. Izzy recognizes Matt as a boy from school who is a few grades ahead of her. But their interaction is not friendly. On the island, Izzy and her mother live in a wooden cottage with three rooms. Izzy and her mother are welcomed by the women on the island. Izzy makes friends with a girl named Maria. Remembering her father's stories about a cave where he could watch kittiwakes and cormorants, Izzy asks Maria if she knows where the cave might be located. Maria tells her there are many caves on the island. Instead she's more interested in whether Izzy brought books with her. But unknown to Maria, Izzy finds reading difficult.

Izzy finds herself attending a school with only five students including Matt. Their teacher Mrs. Weio tells them about the legends associated with the island. However, outside of school the students are more interested in the threat of war coming to the islands which belong to the United States. Japan lies only a thousand miles to the southwest.

Meanwhile Matt is preoccupied with thoughts about home. An older boy, Michael shows Matt a baidarka, a single person kayak with a sea lion skin stretched across the frame. Matt's first try in the kayak is scary as he struggles to learn how to use it and it overturns. However Matt soon masters the kayak, travelling along the coast and also how to right himself. But one day Matt's father tells him he cannot go out in the kayak. Japan has bombed Hawaii and sunk half the American fleet. The day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Izzy and the other islanders learn that America has declared war on Japan. While Mrs. Weio believes they will all be evacuated before war comes to their island, others are not so sure.

Winter passes in to the spring of 1942. One day an unknown ship appears on the horizon. Some believe it might the American navy but after church, Izzy and others discover that Japanese soldiers have arrived on the island. The soldiers force everyone into the church while they go through the village looting and damaging the homes. Eventually Izzy and her mother along with the other residents are allowed back into their damaged homes. The next morning Matt, his father and the other men are ordered to fish while everyone else remains in the village. Every day the men bring home fish which is divided up. The Japanese soldiers also string a wire fence around the village homes, making them prisoners.

In September, Matt figures out a way to get past the wire fence and get to his kayak hidden in a little cove. Each night he goes out to the cove and paddles his kayak. It is Maria, who is recovering from scarlet fever who clues Izzy into what Matt is doing. Watching one night, Izzy sees him and tries to follow but is caught by a guard. Then later in the week, Matt's father reveals that he knows about Matt's nightly trips to the kayak but also that he has learned that they are to be taken to a prison camp on the Japanese mainland either that night or in the morning. Matt's father wants him to leave tonight for his kayak and that he will meet him later on with a two man kayak that he has hidden in the back of the shed. He also tells Matt that he really does love him and that he is proud of his resourcefulness.

However things do not go as planned. Matt leaves for the hidden kayak as planned but Izzy also manages to get out of the camp. On Thor Hill she sees a line of people boarding a ship, one of whom looks like Matt's father. Izzy loses her glasses but makes it back to the village only to discover that her mother and everyone else in the village have left. Her mother's note tells her she has been taken to Japan. Matt too discovers the villagers gone. Each at first believe they are alone until they discover they are the only ones left on the island and must work together if they are to survive the coming winter.

Discussion

Reilly Giff uses an unnamed Aleutian island as the setting for a remarkable survival story set during World War II. In A Note at the back of her novel, Reilly Giff indicates that her "story is loosely based on the island of Attu, the farthest west in the chain of the Aleutian Islands..." The Aleutians are an island chain stretching some 1900 km into the Pacific Ocean, partly belonging to the United States with some islands also part of Russia.  War came to the Aleuts on June 3, 1942 when two islands, Attu and Kiska were occupied by Japanese troops. They were considered strategically important by both the United States and Japan in the war as they would allow either country a route of attack on enemy territory. The Americans did offer to evacuate the residents of Attu prior to the Japanese invasion, but they refused. They were eventually deported to the a prison camp in Japan.

The occupation of an unknown Aleutian island becomes the backdrop for a story about survival and  working together with someone you don't like. Izzy and Matt are two young people who find themselves visiting the Aleutians and then thrust into the war. The two main characters, who tell the story in alternating chapters, are a study in contrasts. Izzy had come eagerly to the island with her mother who observes birds, while Matt has come reluctantly with his father who has some unknown job. While Izzy is close to her mother, Matt feels distant from his father, who appears critical of his young teenage son.

Initially both Izzy and Matt believe they are alone on the island but soon discover they share the fate of being abandoned with the one person they least like. Their mutual dislike stems from a misunderstanding on the boat coming to the island, when Izzy tripped over Matt's legs. Each believes the other deliberately did something to them.

Izzy, least prepared to survive, is willing to work with Matt but Matt wants nothing to do with her. When he discovers Izzy is also left behind, Matt's first reaction is "You!....In my house! Eating our food. I should have known."  He accuses her of being a thief and then tells her that she has to fend for herself, that he doesn't ever want to see her around his house again.  Matt continues to be mean towards Izzy even when she warns him that there are four enemy soldiers still on the island.

Despite being older than Izzy, Matt is immature. After he's injured, he wonders, "How had this happened to me? Did I feel sorry for myself? I did. And why not." He ungraciously complains about the bandages being pink, not recognizing Izzy's huge sacrifice for him. After all she has done for him, Matt appears to intend to abandon Izzy, only to lose his beloved kayak. Eventually though Matt does realize that he owes a debt to Izzy, "I thought of all she had done these long months. How could I have made it without her?"

Izzy is a resourceful, intelligent character who recognizes that in order to survive she and Matt must work together. Izzy shows herself to be patient and optimistic in the face of adversity. In this regard she is portrayed as the very opposite of Matt. She is motivated by the words of the teacher she never liked back home in Connecticut, "You could do anything, Izzy, if only you set your mind to it." 
Izzy finds Matt mean and self-absorbed. "How could one person think he was so perfect? And he'd gotten most of it wrong anyway." Despite Matt treating Izzy badly, she tells him about a cave that might be safer than staying in the abandoned village and she cares for him when he injures his knee. She is able to sacrifice something that she loves dearly, her pink velvet party dress, to use for bandages for Matt's injured knee.

Ultimately, Matt and Izzy do become friends, apologizing to one another for their misinterpreting of each other's actions. It is a friendship forged in adversity that appears to outlast their experiences on the island. Both characters learn about themselves; Izzy that she can achieve what she sets her mind to and that she has an inner strength, Matt that he is very much like the father he struggles to understand.

Island War  with its unique setting, believable characters and many themes, will be enjoyed by younger readers who have an interest in survival fiction.

Book Details:

Island War by Patricia Reilly Giff
New York: Holiday House    2018
203 p

Kiska by John Smelcer

In early June, 1942, thirteen-year-old Kiska, only a few days from her fourteenth birthday, watches as the hunters in their baidarkas (kayaks) return home from seal hunting. Kiska has been collecting sea gull eggs on the high cliffs above her village and when she sees the boats,  races down to the beach to meet her father and uncle. They both return with seals tethered to their boats. Kiska and her older sister Donia watch as their father and uncle skin the seals and cut the meat into pieces. Donia is nineteen-years-old and both a mother and a widow. Her husband never returned from a seal hunt, leaving her to care for their three-month-old daughter Mary. Donia became so depressed, she stopped eating but Kiska encouraged her to go on living for Mary's sake.

When they hear rumbling coming from the direction of Dutch Harbor, Kiska's father and uncle believe a storm is coming. But the storm that comes is unlike any they or their people have ever endured.

Discussion

Kiska attempts to tackle the difficult subject of the forced internment of the indigenous people, the Aleuts of the Aleutian Islands during World War II. The Aleutian Islands which were part of the Alaska Territory in 1942 were considered an important strategic location, offering whoever controlled them, domination over the Pacific. If they were captured by the Japanese, the Aleutians would provide a base for attacking the West Coast of North America.

On June 3, 1942, the Japanese bombed Dutch Harbor, where the Americans had a military installation. returning on June 4 to continue more successful bombing of the town. The Japanese then invaded the islands of Kiska on June 6 and Attu on June 7. There was little resistance from the indigenous Aleuts. In light of the invasion of Kiska the U.S. government offered to evacuate the Aleuts from Attu but they declined. When the Japanese invaded the Aleuts were imprisoned and eventually transported to an internment camp in Japan for the duration of the war.

Fearing that the rest of the Aleutian Islands would be invaded the United States ordered the evacuation of the remaining Aleutian and Pribilof Islands. A total of 885 Aleuts were removed. They had little time to gather personal possessions nor clean and lock up their homes. Although the U.S. Government had begun discussions to plan for the evacuation, it happened suddenly, leaving the government struggling to find locations to house the Aleut. The Aleut were eventually placed in abandoned canneries and warehouses at five locations including Funter Bay as mentioned in the novel.

Conditions in the U.S. internment camps were horrible. Like their indigenous brothers and sisters throughout the North American continent, the Aleuts had little resistance to European diseases such a measles and small pox. Unsanitary living conditions, subpar housing and poor food contributed to the deaths of many young and elderly Aleutians.

Unfortunately, what could have been a very informative novel, in fact contains some serious historical errors. The main character, now a grandmother is relating what happened long ago, to her granddaughter. She tells her after boarding the ship, the U.S.Army Transport Delarof,  "Over the next week or longer, we stopped at seven more Aleut villages, including St. George and St. Paul on the Pribilof Islands...In all there were 881 of us from nine different villages crowded into the ship's dingy hold. " In fact, the Delarof did not transport all of the Aleut evacuees in one trip; the Delarof evacuated on residents of St. George and St. Paul before sailing to Dutch Harbor where villagers from Atka also boarded.And one hundred and ninety Aleuts from St. George were sent to Funter Bay.

World War II Aleutian Islands Resettlement Routes from Charles M. Mobley

According to a blog post by Melissa Green there are many further historical inaccuracies in this novel including the false proclamation read at each of the stops, villagers being held at gunpoint, the burning of three villages,  the main cause of deaths at Funter Bay being due to measles, the naming of the character Agafon as a shaman,  the presence of soldiers at Funter Bay and the relative passivity of the Aleuts during their internment to name a few. Readers are directed to the post in American Indians In Children's Literature (see link below) for a more in-depth treatment of the inaccuracies that are strewn throughout this novel and which make its use as a teaching tool highly questionable.Such blatant inaccuracies in Smelcer's account call into question any of the other historical details he provides in the novel. If an author is going to write about an important historical event such as the internment of indigenous peoples during World War II, his/her research ought to be accurate and rigorous, especially if the goal is to educate young readers. There is no excuse for this in the digital age.

American Indians in Children's Literature:

https://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/2017/11/kiska-by-john-smelcer-historical.html

map image: https://www.nps.gov/aleu/learn/historyculture/removal-maps.htm which is from the National Parks Aleutian Islands World War II: Understanding Forcible Removal Through Maps: Aleutian Islands.

Readers may find the following resources useful:

World War II Aleut Relocation Camps in Southeast Alaska by Charles M. Mobley:

https://www.nps.gov/articles/series.htm?id=730CA036-1DD8-B71B-0BEFB9A92FB52305 
  
Chapter 2 Funter Bay Cannery from Mobley's publication:

https://www.nps.gov/articles/aleu-mobley-ch-2-pt-1.htm
:
Alaskaweb.org also has a detailed article on what happened to the Aleut people during World War II:

http://alaskaweb.org/military/ww2aleutintern.html

Book Details:

Kiska by John Smelcer
Fredonia, New York: Leapfrog Press    2017
180 pp.