The name Attu is the Unangan language (Aleut) name for the island. Research of the large number of archaeological sites on the island suggests an estimated precontact population ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 Unangan (Aleut).
Attu, being the nearest of the Aleutian Islands to Kamchatka, was the first of the islands exploited by Russian traders. Russian explorer Aleksei Chirikov called the island Saint Theodore in 1742. Russians stayed on the island several years at a stretch to hunt sea otters. The Russians often clashed with the local Unangan people. After the initial wave of traders, European ships largely overlooked Attu.
The Aleuts were the primary inhabitants of the island prior to World War II. On June 7, 1942, six months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the 301st Independent Infantry Battalion of the Japanese Northern Army landed on the island without opposition, one day after landing on nearby Kiska to the east, which made Attu the second of the only two invasion sites on territory belonging to the United States soil during the war.
American authorities had previously evacuated about 880 Aleuts from villages elsewhere in the Aleutian Islands to the Alaska Panhandle, where about 75 of them died of various infectious diseases over two years. Attu Village had not yet been evacuated when the Japanese invaded. At the time, the population consisted of 45 native Aleuts and two white Americans, Charles Foster Jones (1879–1942), a radio technician, originally from St. Paris, Ohio, and his wife Etta (1879–1965), a schoolteacher, originally from Vineland, New Jersey. The village consisted of several houses around Chichagof Harbor. The 41 Attu inhabitants who survived the Japanese invasion were taken to a prison camp near Otaru, Hokkaidō. Twenty-two of them died while they were imprisoned. Mr. Jones, 63, was killed by the Japanese forces almost immediately after the invasion. Mrs. Jones, 63, was subsequently taken to the Bund Hotel in Yokohama, Japan, which also housed Australian prisoners of war from the 1942 Battle of Rabaul in Papua New Guinea. Later, Mrs. Jones and the Australian prisoners were held at the Yokohama Yacht Club from 1942 to 1944, and then at the Totsuka prisoner of war camp until their release in August 1945. Mrs. Jones died in December 1965 at age 86 in Bradenton, Florida.