Vaccinating thousands of young soldiers at a frantic pace before shipping them overseas, the army screwed up. During March 1942, a batch of contaminated yellow fever vaccine made its way into the system. Initially ignorant of the contamination, medics vaccinated several thousand young men from that batch. Two months later, in May, soldiers all around …
Category Archives: Black Soldier
After the War
After the war, black men like Thad Bryson came home changed. Black men had more choices than Thad had dreamed. But back in Old Fort the War and the Army had changed nothing except Thad. Jim Crow still dominated his life and the life of his family. Link to Another story “Young Black Officers” …
Young Black Officers
Video About Tuskegee Airmen Thad grew up knowing little beyond his black community in Old Fort, North Carolina. He lived in a two-room house on a small farm. Nobody in North Carolina expected much from a young black man, and it did not occur to young Thad to expect much from himself. He vaguely knew …
Disaster Loomed
Disaster loomed in the back of a 2 ½ ton truck parked at the Headquarters Company camp at Big Gerstle, Alaska. A young lieutenant proposed to haul ten soldiers, Sgt James Heard and his squad, 130 miles in the back of the unheated truck. The day’s extremely low temperature, combined with the wind chill effect …
Mutiny?
Link to another story “Send Food or Send Coffins” Mutiny, the Army’s most serious crime, visited the 97th at Big Gerstle, Alaska in March 1943. Or did it? The answer depends on your perspective and how you define mutiny. In March at Big Gerstle, Headquarters Company commander Lt. Dewitt Howell received a routine order to …
Problem with No Solution
Problem with no solution? When the soldiers of the 18th found themselves trying to build road over permafrost–a lake of ice covered by a thin layer of decayed vegation—it looked like they had encountered one. But on the Alaska Highway Project in 1942 the Corps of Engineers could not allow a problem with no …
Twelve Hundred Black Soldiers
Twelve hundred black soldiers jammed the hold as the David Branch pulled into frigid Valdez Harbor on April 29, 1942. The next morning when the ship tied up to the dock and dropped its gangplank, they waited to get off the ship and find somewhere to eat and sleep. To complicate things, strict orders …
Winter Still Gripped Valdez
Winter in Valdez, Alaska lasts well past April. The David Branch carried 1200 unsuspecting young soldiers 1,600 nautical miles north from springtime Seattle into a vastly different world. Valdez connected the rugged northern interior of Alaska to the oceans of the world. A long wooden dock traversed the mud flats at the edge of Valdez …
Leaving Florida for Subarctic Alaska
Leaving Florida, the white officers of the segregated 97th Engineering Regiment knew they headed from the Sunshine State to extended duty in subarctic Alaska. Few of the 1200 young black soldiers who worked for them knew their destination or what lay in store. For them a transcontinental train ride meant exciting adventure. At Eglin Field …
Blues and the Highway Project
Blues came to Yukon in the blood and marrow of soldiers from the Mississippi Delta—the soldiers of the 93rd Engineering Regiment. After all, the blues were born in the Delta too. On a wall in the Carcross Depot today hangs a photo of a large group of black soldiers in front of the 1942 depot. …