Unalaska, AK – Sunday and today mark the 65th anniversary of the Japanese bombing of Dutch Harbor, the incident that transformed what was then a tiny island community of a few hundred people into a flashpoint in the biggest geopolitical conflict of the 20th Century.

Governor Sarah Palin ordered flags lowered to half-staff across the state on Sunday to commemorate the World War II bombing, in which about 50 American soldiers were killed. In Unalaska, local historian and high school history teacher Jeff Dickrell will be giving a talk and slideshow on the bombing tonight. He'll be showing unpublished photos he's recently found in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and telling the stories he's gathered from veterans.

Dickrell said that the task of unearthing Unalaska's military past has actually gotten easier in recent years. Computers have made it simpler to sort through mountains of photographs and documents, and as veterans of the Aleutian campaign near the end of their lives, more and more of them are putting down their experiences on paper.

"A lot of them are starting to write down their stories for their kids, and they're getting to that point where they're reminiscing and they want to get that down," he said. "So there's a whole slew of veterans' books in the past few years."

It was about 5:30 in the morning of June 3, 1942 when Japanese planes first appeared in the sky over Dutch Harbor. The attack wasn't unexpected, but it came well after first light, when bombing raids usually happened, and many soldiers were caught unprepared.

"A lot of the Navy guys I've talked to were in the showers when the bombs started actually falling," Dickrell said. "They took off all lathered up into the shelter."

But the most severe attack came the following morning, on June 4. That was when Japanese bombs destroyed a major fuel dock and sunk the steamship Northwestern, filling the sky with black smoke.

"Those two things made it look like the apocalypse had just come," Dickrell said. "And of course, the Japanese had been invading country after country in the hundred days prior to that and had never lost a battle. Everybody [in Unalaska] was convinced they were going to get invaded within a day."

The military importance of Unalaska and Dutch Harbor was short-lived. Fighting in the Aleutians soon shifted elsewhere, and without an airfield Unalaska was of far less use to the military than nearby bases like Fort Glenn on Umnak Island and Cold Bay on the Alaska Peninsula.

In fact, the biggest impact of the war on Unalaska's culture was only an indirect result of the bombing: the military's ill-fated decision to relocate Unalaska's Native Unangan inhabitants to Southeast Alaska for the duration of the war.

Jeff Dickrell's talk on the bombing of Dutch Harbor will be at 7:30 p.m. tonight in the high school auditorium.