Air Force colonel tries to give Alaska veterans their due

MIKE PETERS

November 06, 2008 at 1:39PM AKST

As a crowd filled the auditorium at the Anchorage Museum last month to see an exhibition she’d worked months to pull together, Col. Suellyn Novak had no thoughts of “mission accomplished.”

For this retired Air Force officer, putting up the year-long museum show titled “Castner’s Cutthroats” was the beginning, not the end.

Novak is now putting the finishing touches on a similar display about the “Aleutian Tigers,” a similarly celebrated squad of airmen, at the Alaska Aviation Heritage Museum that will be ready to view soon after Veterans Day. But her ultimate mission is to create the Alaska Veterans Memorial Museum, an institution that exists on paper but has no building or permanent displays. As president of the nascent museum, Novak is collecting oral histories to preserve the stories of their military lives, especially from survivors of World War II who are now in their 80s and even 90s.

Those tales — so far more than 65 narratives of sacrifice, courage, fear and a fair amount of tedium in brutally cold weather — will become the backbone of the museum’s archives and exhibits if her dream is realized.

“We need this kind of museum so that the Alaskans who defended our country will never be forgotten,” Novak said. “People from rural communities have always been a very high percentage of the military in Alaska,” she said. “The distances involved make those stories harder to collect, but they are important stories we need to preserve.”

Novak told the crowd that the Alaska Veterans Memorial Museum, which has been seeking a site and additional funding, might open as early as 2011 in partnership with a National Guard Museum at Kulis Air Force Base in Anchorage, which is scheduled to be closed.

“We’re very optimistic that we can team up with the National Guard to create a dynamic memorial that serves us both,” she said.

Tale of the Scouts
The hardy outfit of Alaska Scouts was the genesis of the oral history project, Novak said. Those Alaska Natives, trappers and prospectors — recruited by U.S. Army intelligence when Alaska was still a territory — knew how to live off the land as they monitored remote islands of the Aleutians that were occupied by the Japanese.

The hardiness and derring-do of these men, and their unconventional mix of Army and backwoods garb, led to the unit’s gritty nickname Castner’s Cutthroats. And when Novak learned that Buck Delkette, a Scout who died recently, had made recordings of his experiences, she began to look for more accounts from the men who had served with Delkette.

The Scouts’ story is well-known in Alaska, most recently packaged in a book of “faction” by Jim Rearden, who interviewed survivors for years before weaving the facts of their service into a fictional narrative. Though none of the Scouts liked their other nickname, the book “inevitably” got the exciting title of “Castner’s Cutthroats,” said Rearden.

“A band of woodmen fighters like this hasn’t been seen since the Alamo, and probably will never be seen again,” he said at the museum show’s opening.

Starting with Delkette’s recollections, Novak recorded the memories of three surviving Scouts, or more formally members of the 1st Combat Intelligence Platoon (Provisional). The three came together at the Anchorage Museum last month, the first time in decades that Earl Acuff, Ed Walker and William “Billy” Buck were all under the same roof. The exhibit, which will continue until September 2009, salutes the three survivors, Delketty and 62 other men who monitored enemy activity in the Aleutians and planned the retaking of Attu and Kiska.

The men, most Alaska Natives like Buck, were recruited by the Army for their outdoors skills after it became likely that Japanese forces would invade the Aleutians. The islands were remote and scattered in a wide area; the climate was often harsh.

The unit was the brainchild of Col. Lawrence V. Castner.

“Most people don’t realize that Castner was physically crippled,” says Earl Acuff, now a retired brigadier general who served in Korea and Vietnam after his Alaska Scout days. “But he knew the kind of men it would take to get the job done out there.” He said Castner wanted men who knew the terrain, had unusual skills and were stealthy.

At the beginning of the war, Acuff was sent out to a remote Aleutian island to be a lookout for enemy activity. After sending regular radio reports for a while, the Army told Acuff to go silent, but then forgot that order and began to worry that something had happened to him.

“So we go out there to find him – recover his body is what we’re really thinking,” says Walker. “And as we approach the shore, this guy comes running down this huge mountain like it was nothing. By the time he got to us, he wasn’t ever breathing heavy.”

So much for the “deceased” Acuff, who promptly hauled the group’s gear over the mountain to their quarters. Walker watched in amazement the next day as Acuff collected a crab dinner for his guests.

“I asked where his crab traps were and he looked at me like I was crazy,” Walker said. “He just stripped off and dived out of the boat. We watched him on the bottom, picking up crabs, setting them aside, picking up others. Then he came shooting up to the surface and dropped two big ones in the bottom of the boat.”

“‘That enough?’” He asked. “We assured him it was. I’d never seen anything like it.”

But he’d see a lot more like it, as the men spent years building their own boats and dogsleds, hunting and fishing to feed themselves, and getting on and off islands where Japanese soldiers might be waiting.

Outdoorsmen at war
“The Army had us build a dogsled for freighting,” said Buck. “They needed guys who knew how to tie rawhide. We made the sleds out of birch, because they would be durable and light. Then they took our model to a factory in the Midwest and made 10 copies out of hickory.” He shook his head. “It was nice and strong wood, but too brittle in cold weather.”

Speaking of his fellow Scouts who were Native, Acuff said, “I think we learned more from them than they did from us because they had all this experience in Alaska." Acuff, 90, a regular Army officer who had been stationed in Montana and Idaho before coming to Alaska, said: "The scouts were all very talented outdoorsmen. They could live and operate anywhere."

Much of the Scouts work involved airstrips: Looking for the enemy’s, of course, but also finding suitable sites for planes to use on islands near those occupied or threatened by the Japanese.

Buck said his best memories involved rescue work.

“I remember when a B-17 bomber crashed out there with six crew members — 29 miles from Cold Bay. I led the party to find them. They’d been out five days, and the leader said they wouldn’t have survived another night.

“There was a wounded man with a head cut – he wouldn’t allow any anesthesia. So the medics applied alcohol and gave him six stitches in his head.

“Then we had to repair the plane to fly it out of there by stretching tarps over the wing, which was in tatters,” he said. “I don’t know how it worked, but it did.”

But Buck also remembers some good times, from the camaraderie of the Scouts to a visit by film star Olivia de Havilland, whom he personally escorted.

The Scouts sometimes engaged the Japanese, especially when the island of Attu was retaken. One Scout died in that campaign, which claimed 550 American and 2,350 Japanese soldiers’ lives.

Walker remembers being in the first rubber boat that landed on the second major island held by the Japanese: Kiska. “But they had all gone by the time we landed,” he said.

Later, the men returned to Fort Richardson and helped survey western Alaska – “we were loaned to the Navy for that,” said Buck. The unit was deactivated in 1946.

Buck, now 87, and his two 90-year-old colleagues were awarded medals for their service at the museum event. Buck now lives in Glennallen; Walker came from Palmer and Acuff from Virginia.

The next steps
Novak is finishing up a similar display about the “Aleutian Tigers,” a celebrated squad of airmen who countered the Japanese attack at Dutch Harbor in June 1942. The exhibition will be ready for public viewing at the Alaska Aviation Museum beginning Nov. 11.

Meanwhile, she is collecting donated military artifacts and more stories for the veterans’ museum, from individual veterans as well as Native corporations, museums and other institutions that may have preserved such narratives for their own collections.

The Alaska Veterans Memorial Museum is also signing up members: individual adults ($30), veterans or seniors ($25), Active, Reserve, Guard ($20), students ($15); group members ($300); and corporate members, red ($1,000), white ($2,500), blue ($5,000), gold ($10,000) and platinum ($25,000).

Novak can be reached at her Eagle River office, 907-696-4904.

Mike Peters can be reached at mpeters@alaskanewspapers.com or 907-348-2433 or 800-770-9830, ext. 433.