Word: alaska
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., after 37 years of soldiering, was content with his first taste of major battle. Until now, fate had teased him. He had learned to fly in World War I, then had been denied overseas service. At the start of World War II, commanding in Alaska, he was sitting in a strategic hot spot, seemingly destined for speedy, decisive action; but the war, lightly singeing his area, had swirled southward, leaving him in the quiet northern shadows...
Impatiently Buckner had stamped over the tundra, tended Alaska's defenses and watched the war. He played no part when U.S. forces cleared the lower Solomons. He and his men stood aside while troops and ships put out from California to drive the Japanese off Kiska and Attu islands, in his own front yard...
Buckner was still in Alaska, still watching, when Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz launched the drive across the Central Pacific that was to cut a fiery path through Tarawa, Makin, Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Saipan, Tinian, Guam, Peleliu, Angaur, Iwo Jima. Battles were fought with companies, regiments, divisions. That march was still in progress last June, when Buckner at last got the word to go to Washington, then to Hawaii to organize a full-fledged army...
...rush, he never lost his ingrained concern for the welfare of his troops. When two types of Arctic boot were sent to Alaska, he put a boot of one type on his right foot, the other on his left, and went for long hikes in rock and ice to see for himself which was better for the men. When two kinds of sleeping bags were ready for issue, he tried each for a night outdoors, in 60-below-zero weather...
Buckner was a colonel in 1940, serving as chief of staff to the 6th Division, when he got his orders to Alaska. There was an immediate promotion to brigadier general in the assignment, and a task no good officer could have faced with overconfidence. Commanding a force that was never to go above 14,000 men until after Pearl Harbor, he had to fortify and guard a sparsely populated region one-fifth the size of the U.S., with a coastline nearly twice as long...