FAIRBANKS - On June 7, 1942, a Japanese infantry battalion landed on Attu Island at the western end of the Aleutians, took the small population hostage and claimed the island as their own. A day earlier, Japanese forces had also taken neighboring Kiska Island, which was unpopulated save for a small U.S. Navy weather station.

The seizure of the islands, the only takeover of American soil during World War II, prompted a long standoff in the region between the United States and Japan, aerial bombardments of other parts of the archipelago, the forced removal of indigenous residents, and one of the fiercest battles of the entire war.

Despite having occurred on U.S. territory, this portion of the war has often been overlooked by historians. Many American schoolchildren remain unaware of it. Seeking to rectify the situation, Samantha Seiple offers up “Ghosts in the Fog: The Untold Story of Alaska’s WWII Invasion,” a brief but informative account aimed at young adult readers.

Getting children interested in history can be difficult. Piling too many dates and incidents into a text can quickly cause their eyes to gloss over, but opting for oversimplification can result in young readers failing to grasp an event in its larger context.

Historical episodes also invariably contain controversial incidents, and in attempting to explain these to youngsters, it can be tempting for authors to inject their own political spin rather than offer the facts while allowing readers to draw their own conclusions.

Seiple quite handily dodges these pitfalls. Her narrative presents a coherent overview of how and why the islands were taken, as well as the impact their seizure and subsequent liberation had on the Pacific War. At the same time she draws on memoirs and reminiscences of survivors to personalize the conflict in a compelling fashion. She recounts the experiences of U.S. and Japanese military members in ways that show the motivations and fears found on both sides of the battle lines. She looks at how the Aleut culture was impacted and forever changed by being caught in the crossfire. Best of all, she does this in an engaging style that holds the reader’s attention to the final page.

Seiple opens her book with a brief chapter that tells how the American and Japanese militaries played a game of cat and mouse in the Pacific. Today’s readers might need reminding that this was long before the age of satellite monitoring, and guessing what navies were doing at any given time involved a mixture of radio interceptions, code breaking, chance sightings and blind luck. For these reasons, plans for the invasion of Attu were misinterpreted, fatally delaying the U.S. response.

From here, Seiple moves to the islands themselves. In her buildup to the attack, she gives readers brief sketches of the geography and climate of the Aleutians, describes a bit of the subsistence practices of the inhabitants, and provides a peek into daily village life.

Japanese forces took Attu unopposed and set the people to work for three months, fishing and providing for their occupiers, before shipping them off to Japan for the remainder of the war.

On Kiska, the Japanese were met only with a naval weather crew that destroyed all records and briefly fled before surrendering. The one holdout was aerographer Charlie House, who escaped and lived off the land for 69 days before finally turning himself over to the enemy. During his time alone he weathered the region’s frequent and violent storms, managed to remain out of sight despite the absence of trees or other heavy foliage, and withered away to just 80 pounds. Seiple devotes a number of pages to his adventures, both before and after his capture, over the course of two chapters.

During the Japanese occupation of Attu and Kiska, Dutch Harbor was bombed, the village on Adak was burned to the ground by U.S. forces, and the two sides engaged in repeated air skirmishes.

When the time finally came for American troops to liberate Attu, the generals in charge underestimated both the climate and the time it would take to drive the Japanese out. The troops sent in were trained for desert warfare and were severely underdressed for the cold, subarctic conditions of the Aleutians. Frostbite and trench foot hobbled hundreds. Food supplies were short. Meanwhile, the Japanese refused to surrender, fighting virtually to the last man.

A campaign that was intended to be over in a couple of days lasted 15, leaving 549 Americans and 2,650 Japanese dead.

The freeing of Kiska was heartbreaking in an entirely different way. The liberation force landed and suffered a handful of casualties before realizing the island was abandoned. The Japanese had stealthily withdrawn; 21 Americans and Canadians were killed by friendly fire.

The most difficult part of the story is the handling of the Aleut population, which was evacuated and left in squalor in Southeast Alaska. Removing them from the islands was a necessity, given the uncertainty of Japanese plans, but they were housed in conditions that made POW camps seem luxuriant. Seiple explores this shameful incident thoughtfully, including a follow up on the restitutions that were paid in the 1980s.

“Ghosts in the Fog” is a well-written history that is aimed at teens but that will interest adults as well. The story, contrary to the book’s subtitle, isn’t untold, but it’s certainly under-told. Seiple hasn’t gone into detail here, but she’s accomplished her purpose of introducing the events to young readers, some of whom will doubtless want to learn more after reading her excellent account. And that, after all, is the way to get kids interested in history.

Freelance writer David A. James lives in Fairbanks.

Ghosts in the Fog: The Untold Story of Alaska’s WWII Invasion

By Samantha Seiple

Scholastic • 224 pages

2011 • $17.99