ALSIB (Alaska Siberia) Route

ALSIB, the Alaska Siberia Route, offered a brutal passage for pilots taking airplanes from factories in Montana to the Russian Front in Europe. But in 1943, with millions of German soldiers retreating on the Russian Front, the entire Allied war effort hinged on the Soviets.

If the Soviets needed warplanes, their allies would damned well see that they got them.

Heavy Trucks on a Road

The pilots, American and Soviet, who flew the ALSIB did battle with a vicious enemy—the weather. The planes flew through thick fog and sleet and freezing rain coated their wings with ice. Too much ice, too much extra weight, could send a plane plummeting from the sky. The planes flew into williwaws—hundred mile an hour winds that literally flapped a B-17’s wings.

An unknown writer on the website airforcelodge.com/history tells this story. “One American pilot—flying blind and guessing his way back to shore in fog… spotted a duck flying ahead of him in the mist, ‘I knew that duck wouldn’t fly into a cliff,’ he said later, ‘so I just got behind it and flew formation on it until we got in.’”

American pilots found flying over this country by instrument difficult, and the brand-new Alaska Highway gave them their most important navigation aid—fly low and follow the road.

The American side of the ALSIB took eighty pilot’s lives. Across the Bering Strait, Siberia killed one hundred nine soviet pilots.

A website called airspacemag.com tells the story of Lt. Walter T. Kent. In October 1943 a Yukon snowstorm disoriented the young pilot who flew right into the ground. In 1965 a Royal Canadian Air Force Helicopter discovered the wreckage in 1965. “Researchers discovered a high school ring inscribed with his name.

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