The Aleutian Islands in 1943 are the setting for one of the least glamorous fronts of the Pacific war: a scatter of fog-bound outposts the Japanese have seized and the US Army now has to take back. John Huston, filming for the Army Signal Corps, spends six months with the men stationed on Adak, watching them fight boredom and weather as much as the enemy while they wait to move against Japanese-held Kiska. He narrates the film himself, with his father Walter Huston reading additional lines, over color footage of mechanics, cooks, and gun crews keeping an isolated base running. The film builds toward its centerpiece: Huston and his crew join a bombing run over Kiska, filming from inside the aircraft as it comes under fire, an operation he barely survives. The combat footage from that run gives the film its tension, since nothing in the preceding scenes guarantees anyone comes home. It won the Academy Award for its portrait of a campaign most Americans never heard much about.