Introduction
1 One of Our Great Strategic Points: Alaskan Defence, 1867-1934
2 He Who Holds Alaska Will Hold the World: Alaskan Security,1934-41
3 Entirely Open to Attack: Aleutian Defence, December 1941 to June1942
4 All commanders on minor fronts regard their own actions as highlyimportant: July 1942 to January 1943
5 Total Destruction Is the Only Answer: Westward to Attu
6 A Strong Alaska Means a Foot-Loose Fleet: Kiska’sCapture
7 We Have Opened the Door to Tokyo: Plans to Take the KurileIslands, 1943-5
8 Stepping Stones to Nowhere
Notes
Bibliography
Index
The book is well written, well argued, and an astonishingly interesting read. -- A.M. Jack Hyatt, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Western Ontario This is something of an international history, drawing on materials from Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and the United States. It will be a major contribution to the field ... truly impressive research. -- Brian McAllister Linn, author of Guardians of Empire: The U.S. Army and the Pacific, 1902-1940
Galen Roger Perras is the author of Franklin Roosevelt and the Origins of the Canadian-American Security Alliance, 1933-1945.
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.
*Canadian Military History, Book Review Supplement, Summer
2005*
Recommended.
*Choice, Vol. 41, No. 03*
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.
*The International History Review*
This interesting, important, and largely untold story gets the
attention it deserves in this carefully detailed book.
*University of Toronto Quarterly, Winter 2004/05*
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