Ken Lawson served as a United States Army chaplain for 34 years — a career that took him all over the world. Now he’s retired and working on a book called “Within Reach of the Enemy: US Army Chaplains in Alaska and Hawaii During World War II.” It’s slated for publication next year.
In a conversation with KUCB’s Andy Lusk, Lawson talks about finding under-researched parts of Army history and visiting the former gravesites of U.S. soldiers stationed in Unalaska.
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Ken Lawson: I am visiting Alaska on a research project. I am a retired Army chaplain — served in the Army for 34 years all over the world — unfortunately, never stationed in Alaska.
The reason that I’m here visiting Alaska is to work on a book project in coordination with the 250th anniversary of the Army Chaplain Corps, which is next year. With the anniversary coming up, the Chaplain Corps is looking at its history, and one of the gaps of knowledge is U.S. Army chaplains serving in Alaska during World War II.
I have completed almost all of my research on that project. It’s about 250 or so pages, but I’m here to do boots on the ground research, talk to local experts and take a bunch of photographs of the remains of World War II sites here in the Unalaska area.
Andy Lusk: How did you find this gap?
Lawson: The Army Chaplain Corps has a multi-volume set of books on its own history. Because I’m not only a chaplain, but also a historian, I’m very familiar with these books. The World War II Army chaplain history has several hundred pages in it, but not one page on Alaska. Nothing. Alaska is not mentioned at all. I began this project to try and fill in that gap.
It turns out that there were tens of thousands of soldiers stationed all throughout Alaska during the war and several hundred Army chaplains stationed in Alaska. Those chaplains lived and ate and slept and marched and drilled and trained alongside the other soldiers. But no one’s recorded that history. For example, there was an Army chaplain in the Battle of Attu that was killed in combat. There was another Army chaplain that froze to death up by Nome. He was disorientated in a snowstorm going from one tent to another, one Quonset hut to another, and he perished about 75 feet from his tent because he was completely disorientated. It was below zero. The snow was blinding, and he died.
Hundreds of others were doing funerals, memorial services, counseling, suicide prevention, performing weddings and basically trying to befriend soldiers stationed far away from home, far away from their families, in what they thought was a miserable climate. The reports I’ve read show that the chaplains really had a hard time with it. They struggled with homesickness, they struggled with the dark winters, they struggled with the weather, and yet they had to remain resilient and positive and refreshing to the troops who were also struggling with those same issues.
Lusk: Well, let’s talk a little bit about Unalaska specifically. So what brings you to our community for this book?
Lawson: In Unalaska, as Unalaskans know, there was quite a large military presence. Unfortunately, in the lower 48, that military presence condensed here is unknown. The curious thing is that Alaska [was] attacked twice in World War II: once in the Battle of Attu, the second at the bombing of Dutch Harbor Fort Mears area here in Unalaska.
I wanted to research the chaplains that were here in Unalaska. What did they experience during the battle? What were their ministries to the injured, wounded and dying? What memorial services and funerals did they have to conduct? What was their counseling load related to these soldiers so far away from home in a remote area and then are traumatized by an attack? That brought me here to do on the ground research to find if there were any chapels, if there were cemeteries, if there was any physical evidence of the U.S. military here in the Unalaska community.
Lusk: How long have you been in town and what have you found so far?
Lawson: My wife and I have been in town for almost a week. We have found a lot of information. Actually, the building we’re sitting in is the Burma Road chapel. And so this was a military chapel during World War Two service men came here to worship and to pray and to seek counsel and just to sometimes, maybe just to get out of the cold and to sit in a warm building.
I’ve been to cemeteries. The Memorial Park here in the Unalaska area has a Russian Orthodox graveyard. But after the attack in June of 1942 on the Dutch Harbor Fort Mears area, there were three or four dozen men that were killed, and those men were temporarily interred in the Russian cemetery. The U.S. military did not have a military cemetery here — the closest one was in Fairbanks — and so they just buried them with permission from the Russian Orthodox Church. They temporarily buried them on this hillside, and it’s still barren. There were temporary grave markers, and after the war, they were disinterred and brought back to the mainland so that the deceased could be buried in the grave or the cemetery of the family’s choice.
If you’re staring at the George Fox grave, it’s to the right, and when you look to the right, there’s two or three small rolling hills, and that is part of the cemetery, but there are no graves there. That’s the exact footprint of where the U.S. troops were buried.
