Thousand-mile Arc A sucker punch with many moving parts, the Japanese plan for June 1942 aimed simultaneously at Midway Island in the South Pacific and at the Aleutians in the North Pacific. The Japanese hoped to ambush the American carrier fleet at Midway, and they wanted a foothold in the Aleutians. In Alaska they would …
Category Archives: Alaska in WWII
The Squad led by Sergeant Heard
The squad, Sergeant Heard’s ten young soldiers, had, like nearly all the men in the 97th Engineering Regiment, grown to manhood in the hot and humid southern United States. Over the last two years, the Army had hauled them over a bewildering path from Florida, to Alaska, and, finally, to the Big Gerstle River. James …
Twenty-something Mary, the Legend Continues
Twenty-something Mary moved to Alaska and never looked back. That doesn’t mean everything went smoothly. Legendary Alaskan, Mary Hanson In the early 1930’s Mary got pregnant; had a miscarriage; took herself to Nenana for medical treatment. Not by any means the Mayo clinic, whatever medical facilities Nenana had to offer did the trick. Twenty-something Mary …
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The Scottish Lady
The lady, The Scottish Lady, began her life a graceful clipper ship, ended it a barge in the Gulf of Alaska. With her graceful female figurehead out front, the proud Lady plied the seven seas for decades. Dismasted in a typhoon out of Manilla in 1871, she recovered (with help from shipyards, of course) …
War Machine Makes it Real
The war machine, the Japanese advance across the Pacific inspired the Alaska Highway Project. But the soldiers and civilians who went north to build the Highway, left the rolling catastrophe behind, struggled to keep up with news of the war. If few understood the complex geography of the Pacific, in early 1942 everybody understood …
Bad Guys Came to Skagway Too
The good soldiers of the 93rd Bad guys came to Skagway sprinkled in among the 1200 good soldiers of the 93rd. Bad guys came sprinkled among the good soldiers of the white regiments on the Alaska Highway Project too. But a bad black soldier got a lot more attention from the Army. In white regiments …
Defending Skagway
Defending Skagway, Alaska from the marauding Japanese posed more problems than you might think. Luckily, to one young Lieutenant’s eternal relief, it turned out that Skagway didn’t need defending. In June 1942 Lt. Darrel M. Schumacher of the 340th Engineering Regiment cooled his heels in Skagway. He and his men would walk to the Teslin …
WWII killed women too.
WWII killed women, especially nurses, right along with men—an equal opportunity disaster. The War killed Ruth Gardiner. Ruth entered the world in 1914 in Calgary, Alberta; came with her parents to Eastport, Idaho at age three. The Gardiners wandered a bit through the lower 48—Noyes, Minnesota then Pennsylvania. Twenty-three old Ruth trained as a …
Tanana Crossing
Crossing the Tanana remained vivid in Lt. Walter Mason’s memory of his time on the Alaska Highway in 1942. Mason’s regiment had built road through the Alaskan wilderness since spring. But they hadn’t been building the Alaska Highway, they had been building a road to get themselves to the Alaska Highway. Once across the Tanana, …
From the Subarctic North to Burma and India
Gouging a Road through Yukon Clyde S. Deal came to te subarctic north to join the 93rd Engineering Regiment in Yukon in April 1942. Through the summer he helped build the supply road from Carcross to Johnson’s Crossing on the Teslin River, learned to deal with muskeg and airplane sized mosquitoes. Through the late summer …
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