Ed Helms

And finally, the truth starts to sink in.

There are no Japanese soldiers on this island at all.

The enemy had vanished weeks earlier, and all they left behind were a few booby traps, some wrecked equipment, and graffiti in their abandoned bunkers mocking FDR and Churchill.

30,000 troops had stormed an empty island.

This one feels colossal, like like I'm sure that this is happening on a smaller scale, like every day in a war.

What is clear is that the fog of war is incredibly real and present all the time, whether or not there's literal fog.

Yeah.

You're an even better co-pilot for this story than I possibly imagined.

You're so well prepared for this.

All told, the U.S.

and Canadian forces lost 313 men, sending 30,000 men into an empty island.

As a failure of intelligence, the invasion of Kiska was a massive embarrassment, and overall...

It's just an all-too-perfect example of the fog of war.

So what actually happened?

Well, remember the Battle of the Pips?

It turns out – and we actually know a lot about this because after the war, there were a lot of interviews with Japanese naval officers and –

And so we actually got a very detailed account of the Japanese side of this.

It turns out the night of the Battle of the Pips was the night that the Japanese Navy was evacuating all their troops off of Kiska.

Some historians think those radar pips were probably Japanese submarines that had popped up

as a diversion and then dove again to draw attention away from the rest of the fleet.