Seventy years ago today, bombs fell on Dutch Harbor. The casualties and damage on a remote Aleutian islet amounted to little more than a blip in the cataclysm of World War II. To this day, educated Americans are unaware that it happened at all.

But the battle permanently changed Alaska in ways that few at the time realized.

In an essay in the collection "Alaska at War," historian Stephen Haycox describes Anchorage in 1940 as "a sleepy little village" with a population of about 3,500.

The summer of 1940 saw the beginning of construction of a military base on what had hitherto been hay fields and birch forests north of Government Hill....