As Veterans Day approaches, Alaska will honor veterans from across the generations. But for the first time, none will come from the ranks of the Alaska Territorial Guard. Buddy Bendixen died on October 26 at his home in King Cove, a small community on the Alaska Peninsula. He was 101 and the last known member of the ATG. His passing marks the final chapter in the story of the men and women who defended Alaska during World War II.
An Alaskan treasure
Even well into his nineties, Bendixen could be seen walking from his home to the boat harbor. He still was an avid fisherman. His family says he credited his longevity to long walks, eating lots of salmon and daily steam baths.
“Buddy is an Alaskan treasure, if you will,” said Verdie Bowen, director of the Alaska Office of Veterans Affairs.
Recognition, decades later
Bowen met Bendixen in 2018, during a discharge ceremony formally marking the end of his service.
“He was a firecracker,” Bowen said. “That gentleman was very energetic, very much alive. I’ve seen people younger than him that did not have as much spunk and mental acuity as he did.”
Bendixen was 93 when he received his formal discharge papers. ATG members needed them to qualify for medical care and other federal benefits, which Congress did not make available until 2000 —nearly six decades after their wartime service.
Bendixen and other Territorial Guard members were tasked with patrolling the coastline for Japanese invaders, but they were strictly volunteers and received no pay. World War I surplus gear and guns were the only things the government provided. They also got an Alaska Territorial Guard patch to sew on their clothing.
“We owe them a debt that we really can't pay, because when they volunteered to take on the Japanese, they did it with limited training and limited resources,” Bowen said. “They knew they were virtually alone. They knew there wasn’t a big military behind them at that time.”
Bowen said Bendixen was always so busy fishing that it took years to arrange the formal discharge ceremony. But with help from Michael Livingston, then with the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association, the ceremony finally took place at a summer culture camp for Unangax̂ students.
“It was a good fit,” Livingston said. “It’s part of Unangax̂ culture to honor our warriors, to do what we can to make sure they are not forgotten.”
Alaska under attack
At the ceremony, Bendixen recalled the panic that swept through King Cove when an unknown aircraft appeared overhead. Those who spotted it feared it was Japanese, but the plane was American.
Livingston says the threat of a Japanese invasion was very real to coastal communities such as King Cove.
“The Unangax̂ people were definitely part of that war,” Livingston said. “The Japanese Imperial Navy bombed Dutch Harbor for two days. Our land was invaded.”
Most of the Territorial Guard recruits were either too old or too young for the draft, but they were among the few who were left to defend their communities. Buddy was 17 when he joined the ATG in October 1942, four months after Japanese forces attacked Dutch Harbor and occupied the islands of Kiska and Attu.
A legacy of service and family
Historians believe the ATG’s presence prevented the Japanese from pushing further into Alaska. Their subsistence lifestyle gave them the fortitude to work in punishing weather that other troops, unaccustomed to Alaska’s extremes, struggled to withstand.
Buddy’s grandson, Calvin Hoblet, says his grandfather developed that stamina early in life. To trap foxes and wolverines, Buddy and his father often trekked across 50 miles of grueling terrain – sometimes more.
“As he was growing up in King Cove, they had expansive trap lines that they would walk, basically from King Cove to Nelson Lagoon and back, walking in a big circle.”
That staying power was legendary among the Alaska Natives who served in the Territorial Guard. Mike Haller learned about it during his career in the Alaska National Guard, where he came to know many former ATG members who later went on to join the National Guard.
“They had a full measure of blind faith that what they did mattered,” Haller said, “and that it would be part of the fabric of the defense of the territory and of the nation.”
Haller says volunteers such as Buddy Bendixen became leaders in their communities and helped to shape a brand-new state.
“Buddy and his generation were 100% givers, and they remain even now in their passing as beacons for us of positivity and of selflessness,” Haller said.
Buddy served in the ATG from 1942–1944 and then joined the U.S. Army. Afterwards he returned home to King Cove, where he sat on the city council and later became mayor.
“He wasn't, to me, an ATG member. To me, he wasn’t a patriot or an army veteran, even though he obviously was,” said his grandson, Calvin Hoblet. “I looked at him as an open book into a whole different lifetime and a whole different era.”
To Calvin, Buddy was his grandfather – a man with encyclopedic knowledge of fishing boats and hunting and fishing traditions. Hoblet says Buddy proudly carried a picture in his wallet of a whale he had caught – one that fed the whole village.
Above all there was his family. Buddy and his late wife, Xenia, raised nine children. Their family grew to include 27 grandchildren, 51 great-grandchildren and 10 great-great-grandchildren.
A final farewell in King Cove
After a final memorial service in King Cove, Hoblet and some other family members took a boat ride into the bay. They stopped at a spot where they could see Buddy’s home along the shore. Despite the rough seas, wind and rain, they scattered his ashes into the waves – and with them went the last living link to the Alaska Territorial Guard.