Bill Castner

Bill Castner was a career military officer, who was in Army intelligence. In World War II he had the innovative idea to use native Alaskans, including Aleuts and Eskimos, to spy on and harass the Japanese who had taken the Alaskan islands of Attu and Kiska. The official name of the group was the 1st Alaskan Combat Intelligence Platoon, but they were known as the Alaskan Scouts, or more commonly, as Castner’s Cutthroats. The group was instrumental in scouting out locations for the US to invade and re-take the islands. As there was no suitable area for a landing strip, the Cutthroats damned a lagoon, and drained it, to use the lake bottom for plane landings.

Castner retired from the military as a colonel at the end of World War II. He remained in Alaska, spending one year as a vice-president of the nascent Alaska Airlines. He also founded a cold storage and wholesaling business in Anchorage. A street in Anchorage was named in his honor.