A sad comment appeared on one of my posts last night. Aaron OrKaden wrote “Hey folks. Sadly, this great man just passed a few days ago. I’m honored to be one of his grandkids. He will be sadly missed.” The sad comment appeared on the following post about Aron’s grandpa, Marl Brown. Everyone who has …
Category Archives: Heavy Equipment
Midnight Sun
Midnight sun meant that by mid-summer machines and vehicles ran nearly 24/7 along the emerging Alaska Highway. They took a serious beating. Truck drivers carried spare parts, scavenged from broken equipment abandoned by other drivers along the road–tires, axles, anything useable. A driver who left a truck unattended might well return to find a stripped …
Essential but Not Enough
Essential soldiers in a stream of trucks arrived at the Slana sand hills. And now equally essential heavy equipment, especially bulldozers began unloading at the Valdez dock. Before the soldiers could start building road, that equipment had to get to Slana. To men operating bulldozers, the trip from Valdez out to Slana presented a whole …
Caterpillar Dozers
Caterpillar dozers did jobs on the Alcan project that Caterpillar never imagined. One night a sergeant of the 18th Engineers, working his D8 into and through the trees, acquired a determined grizzly bear guide and companion. He swerved toward the giant bear and it ran away, but as soon as he returned to his work, …
Too Heavy for Muskeg—And the Statute of Limitations
Too heavy, almost any piece of equipment could sink into British Columbia muskeg. After the war Chester Russel made a living during summers as a commercial fisherman, but in winter he returned to catskinnning. Over the years as technology changed and new tractors and dozers came available, he often thought about how the new equipment …
Continue reading “Too Heavy for Muskeg—And the Statute of Limitations”
Young Lieutenants
Young lieutenants often need, in addition to formal Army training, serious training from their enlisted subordinates. Chester Russell’s memory yielded a story for interviewers Brown and Bridgeman that describes how that training happens. Enlisted Soldiers like Chester Earl Brown asked how many miles a day they built; did they have a quota? No quota, but …
Enlisted Soldiers like Chester
Enlisted soldiers like Chester fought the mud, mountains, cold and mosquitoes; did the actual work of building the Alaska Highway in 1942. The stories that pour from Chester Russell’s memory tell us what it felt like to actually do the epic job. The Most Colorful Soldier Speaking of Chester Russel In the last episode, Chester …
Private Russel at Ft. Nelson
Private Russel and his fellows at Ft. Nelson not only struggled to find food to eat, they also struggled to fix the trucks and tractors that their winter road trip up from Fort St. John had all but destroyed. Ft. Nelson, Chester Russell’s Passage The army rushed mechanics from Union Tractor Company in from Edmonton …
Charlie Lake
Charlie Lake saw the deadly consequences of an enormous gamble. In March General Hoge had ordered Colonel Robert Ingalls to race his 35th Engineers over the ice road to Fort Nelson. The road thawed to rivers and gumbo right behind them. The General had gambled that Colonel Joe Lane’s 341st Engineers could build an …
Cameron Cox
Cameron Cox came up by train from Fort Ord, California and detrained with the rest of the 35th Engineers into bitter cold at the Dawson Creek depot. They travelled to Fort St John and started building road northwest from there. Cameron remembered moving constantly, taking down pyramidal tents, moving a few miles, setting them up …