09/07/2026
In September 1941, the Third Battalion, 201st Coastal Artillery Infantry Regiment began offloading troops and supplies at a strategic island port on the Alaskan coast, called Sitka, famed as the former center of the Russian fur trade, but for millennia home to the Tlingit people. Sitka was well into its transformation as a major military installation focused on a potential Japanese threat. Coastal guns were sited on islands in Sitka Sound, a Naval Air Station mounted patrols far into the Gulf of Alaska, and a modest little National Park Service unit overlooking the harbor, Sitka National Monument, was slowly being converted into an Army defensive position.
One of the soldiers disembarking at Sitka that September was a 25-year-old buck private named Charles Kidd, drafted the previous April. His company was assigned to guard Army gun sites being set into the grounds of the Monument, which faced west to the Pacific Ocean. The Navy began dredging Indian River, which bisected the Monument, and its tidelands, to supply raw material for other Army installations. Eight emplacements for .50 caliber and larger guns were dug in the soft moss and volcanic ash among hemlock, spruce and alder trees facing the ocean.
For security reasons the grounds, now designated Sitka National Historical Park, were closed to the public. The only known civilians to visit, in January 1944, were two USO entertainers, the comedian Joe E. Brown and the actress Ingrid Bergman.
Invaders had come before. Sitka National Monument in 1910 was set aside to commemorate the seven-day battle of 1804 between the Tlingit Kiksadi clan under the warrior Katlian and invading Russian forces under Alexander Baranof and Yuri Lisianski. The Tlingit repulsed an invasion on the first day but ultimately devastating Russian naval gunfire forced their withdrawal to the north end of the island.
The Monument also served as a permanent display for more than a dozen historic totem poles returned from the Alaska pavilion at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis and bordering the park’s trail. For the 8,000 or so servicemen stationed at Sitka, the war duty was “rather unexciting,” Kidd remembered many years later -- “guarding a gravel dump” in the Monument (he was assigned to guard the area where dredges were taking gravel out of the river and out of the tidelands), and endless physical training (PT), marching, weapons practice and the absolutely deadening task of carrying a r***e while walking post, day and night in the rain, along the totem trail (“Lover’s Lane” to locals). Off-duty, the soldiers also took hikes, skied, hunted, and played bridge with local hosts.
There are only faint traces of the wartime at Sitka National Historical Park today: deep tideland pools where millions of tons of gravel were dredged, and the faint outlines of gun pits in the moss under the evergreen trees. Until a few years ago, you could still see the remains of a ceramic insulator screwed to the tree – all that remained of a network of communications wire strung between the guns. Like so many traces of past wars, it has since disappeared.
-Former Ranger Dusty Kidd, Army Corporal Charles Kidd's son
Photos provided by Dusty of his farther during his time serving in Sitka
