Coast Guard Helps Look for Buried Japanese Soldiers

[wackychick]

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — The searchers dug for days, ignoring blisters and sore muscles to look for remains of Japanese soldiers buried in m*** graves on the Aleutian island of Attu following a bloody battle of World War II.

But old bullets and bits of barbed wire were all that emerged from beneath the gr***y tundra — until the end of the two-week mission by U.S. and Japanese representatives who traveled to the remote resting place of nearly 2,500 soldiers.

On May 23, searchers struck their shovels on decaying wood boxes and found the well-preserved bones of two Japanese soldiers likely buried by their comrades during the 1943 Battle of Attu.

"I was very happy and satisfied that everybody's effort finally resulted in something that we all appreciate," Hiroshi Sato with Japan's Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare said Wednesday through an interpreter in a telephone interview from the Coast Guard station at Attu, located at the Aleutians' western tip about 1,500 miles southwest of Anchorage.

Sato's office is working with U.S. officials to excavate the remains of the Japanese soldiers and take them home for reburial. Attu's forbidding weather and terrain proved a challenge when participants arrived to icy rain in mid-May.

Subsequent days were better, but the six m*** graves — where the great majority of the dead are buried — lie in roadless areas on the east end of the mountainous island. To reach the sites, searchers traveled in a tracked vehicle that was flown in.

The Coast Guard has excavation equipment on the island, but deep snow in places prevented its use. Participants had to use shovels and pickaxes to explore the three m*** graves still not laden with snow.

"We were at a disadvantage because we were digging with hand tools and the graves were originally dug with bulldozers," said Lt. Col. Matt Kristoff with the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office at the Pentagon. "The bottom line is, in order to excavate these m*** graves, we'll need to have heavy equipment."

The searchers also tried mightily with low-tech tools, digging 15 feet deep at one site, according to U.S. Army Capt. Kurtis Schaaf, who led an eight-member team from Fort Richardson near Anchorage to ***ist. Many Attu-based Coast Guard members also helped during their time off.

A Navy ordnance spe******t came up from San Diego because of concerns that unexploded ordnance might be hidden in the spongy ground, but no explosives were discovered, Schaaf said.

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[Laumumpigiono]

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