Char­lie Groth has just been draft­ed into the US Army’s 7th Infantry as a lit­ter bear­er in Octo­ber 1942 when he boards a ship bound for remote parts of Alas­ka. Japan­ese forces have invad­ed mere months after their dead­ly attack on Pearl Har­bor and are occu­py­ing two of the Aleut­ian islands. Yet Char­lie and his fel­low sol­diers have been assured it’s bound to be an easy fight and a quick vic­to­ry. The boys will be home with their fam­i­lies for the holidays.

It will be three years before Char­lie sees his fam­i­ly again.

Paul Nobuo Tat­sug­uchi is a physi­cian in the Impe­r­i­al Japan­ese Armed Forces with a pen­chant for jour­nal­ing, a way to dis­tract him­self from how much he miss­es his wife and young daugh­ters. As Char­lie and his troops make their way to Attu Island, Paul and his troops con­struct fox­holes, field hos­pi­tals, and trench­es in prepa­ra­tion for the vicious bat­tle to come.

When the two armies meet amid the fog and freez­ing rain, nei­ther side is ready for the des­per­ate fight that will become the sec­ond blood­i­est bat­tle in the Pacif­ic after Iwo Jima. And nei­ther is pre­pared for the price that patri­o­tism and loy­al­ty will demand.

Fol­low­ing two par­al­lel sto­ries from oppo­site sides of the con­flict and cap­tur­ing the war through first-per­son accounts and archival pho­tographs, acclaimed author Can­dace Flem­ing brings this his­to­ry to life with a thrilling, mov­ing­ly per­son­al, and fast-paced exam­i­na­tion of the lit­tle-known World War II cam­paign that unfold­ed on Amer­i­can soil and wound up play­ing an essen­tial role in the ulti­mate defeat of the Japan­ese Admi­ral­ty in the Pacific.