Ed Walker (American veteran)

Walker was born on August 28, 1917, in San Juan Bautista, California.^[1] He enlisted in the United States Army in 1937 and was stationed for three years in the Territory of Hawaii. He soon became interested in Alaska through reading a library book about the territory and an article published in The Saturday Evening Post. He reenlisted in the Army with the specific goal of being transferred to Alaska.^[1]

Walker was stationed with the Army infantry at Chilkoot Barracks (also known as Fort William H. Seward), which was the only U.S. military base in the Territory of Alaska at the time he arrived.^[1] Walker submitted several applications, before finally being transferred to Fort Richardson (now a part of Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson).^[1] There he joined a group of elite Alaskan Scouts called Castner's Cutthroats, named after Col. Lawrence V. Castner, an Army intelligence officer who formed the regiment.^[1] Walker trained with Castner's Cutthroats, who carried their provisions and lived off what they could find in the Alaskan wilderness, such as seafood.^[1] Walker was trained in surveying and Morse code. The sixty-five men served in reconnaissance throughout the Aleutian Islands during World War II, including the Battle of the Aleutian Islands.^[2]

The Japanese forces occupied the islands of Attu and Kiska the day before Walker's 25th birthday in 1942, beginning the Aleutian Islands Campaign.^[3] Walker and thirty-six of the scouts were stationed in Anchorage at the time, when they received erroneous reports of a Japanese attack on the city.^[3] The next morning, the members of Castner's Cutthroats sailed on a yacht from Anchorage to the Aleutian Islands. However, the United States Navy commandeered the yacht at Kodiak.^[3] Walker and twenty-one other Alaskan Scouts then boarded a submarine, which they used to make their first landing at Adak Island. He was armed with a Browning Automatic Rifle, which meant that he was among the first of the Cutthroats to make landfall at Adak and secure the surrounding beach.^[3] However, a two-man American boat next to their submarine exploded just offshore from Adak. Walker recalled the accident in a 2008 interview, "We got about 200 yards from the submarine, and the boat blew up. It put both of us in the drink...The boat was about to go to the bottom, and we didn't want to go with it. We managed to stay afloat, and luckily the submarine, rather than turning to the left and going back into the Pacific, it turned inland," Walker continued, explaining a line was thrown to the scouts as it passed because the submarine was unable to stop. I hung on to that, and of course we were at the fantail of the sub, and there's a series of welded pipes that protect the propeller and we each got a hold of one of them, and every time we went through a wave, we just stopped breathing and closed our eyes and came back up...They sent a man out, and they had to crawl because everything on the submarine was slippery. They crawled out and helped us to get our gear, because we still had our packs and we went on in to the sub."^[3]