A crow flying a straight path would have flown 4,415 miles to get from Eglin Field in South Florida to Valdez, Alaska—assuming a crow would have wanted to do such a thing. Thad Bryson’s 97th Engineering Regiment took a significantly more round about path from trucks to trains to a troopship and finally to just walking.
Link to another story “Port of Valdez in 1942”
Thad and the segregated 97th built the northernmost and most difficult portion of the Alaska Highway during the spring, summer and fall of 1942. In later years when Thad shared his memories, his son remembers that the word ‘cold” came up a lot.
Thad grew up in Old Fort, North Carolina complaining about sharing a tiny cold bedroom in a two-room farmhouse, but in his Alaska tent at 70 below, he would have “given anything to be back in that despised bedroom”.
In 1942 in a segregated Army, young white officers led the young black soldiers to the road. Young white men and young black men in the 1930’s grew up in two different Americas; shared the same physical space but little else. And their Army experience did not change much about relations between them.
But exceptions occurred as good men shared a difficult, dangerous task deep in the woods. Some got past their assumptions and actually got to know one another.
Off the road but still in Alaska in early 1943, a white gas kitchen stove blew up in Thad’s face; seriously burned him and threatened his eyesight. From his cot in the hospital tent he told his company commander he wanted to stay with the regiment, but Captain Forrestal would have none of it.
The captain faced off with reluctant Army doctors, insisted that they send Thad back to Walter Reed hospital for treatment, treatment that almost certainly saved his sight.