A box of rough planks, lined with Army blankets, carried Clyde Hudson home from Yukon Territory in 1943. He had come north, along with thousands of other civilians, because, at the end of 1942, the Alaska Highway, at best a rough draft, needed a lot of improving. When, in the spring of 1943, the baton …
Category Archives: Heavy Equipment
The Race to the International Border
The international border, the border between Canada and Alaska, had everybody’s attention at the end of the summer of 1942. The soldiers of the 18th and those of the 97th would meet there and complete the Alaska Highway. The 18th Combat Engineers–more on the champs Just as the race to the border heated up, permafrost …
What Extreme Cold Does to Equipment—and Beer
Extreme cold does things to equipment that the soldiers of the 97th and 18th Engineers never imagined. As the last two regiments working on the Alaska Highway, in October and November 1942, working in northernmost Yukon Territory, they became experts on the subject. The 18th Combat Engineers Young Black Soldiers of the 97th Even in …
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Pushing Over a Tree
Pushing a tree over isn’t a skill most of us need to acquire. But then most of us aren’t working as “catskinners” on the Alaska Highway Project in 1942. If you know which levers to pull and which pedals to stomp, you just line the big cat up with its blade out front, pile in …
Spare Parts
Spare parts became precious. The Alaska Highway that spooled out behind the soldiers with their dozers and carryalls and hand tools in 1942 swarmed with smaller vehicles, especially deuce and a half trucks. The equipment plowing through the woods required more than mountains of 55-gallon drums of fuel. Mud pulled hoses loose, tracks and rollers …
Fuel for the Monster Dozers
Fuel, the bulldozers plowing through the North Country wilderness in 1942 had an enormous appetite for it. If supporting the men in the woods and their furious labor meant, first and foremost, getting supplies to them, getting fuel to the big dozers posed the single biggest supply challenge. More on getting supplies into the woods …
D8 A Bucket of Olive Drab
“A Bucket of Olive Drab,’ the Caterpillar Company called the D8 Bulldozer they shipped to the Army. They also called it the “indispensable, all-purpose weapon of the Engineers”. The big crawlers made the Alaska Highway Project possible in 1942. The Big Machines Could be Delicate Too The D8 weighed in at twenty- three tons. Its …
Malevolent Mentasta
A vaguely malevolent sounding name, “Mentasta”. It describes a precisely malevolent stretch of road through the mountains of the Alaska Range. Through late June and early July, the black soldiers of the 97th Engineers had finally begun to build road. The men of Company B forged out front clearing a rough right of way. The …
Army Trash in the North Country
Trash worried no one. In the summer of 1942 seven regiments powered through the North Country woods. Equipment broke. The regiments chewed through axles, rollers and tracks. One cat broke down, then another, parts from one fixed the other and the cannibalized tractor sat at the side of the road. A truck sunk in the …
Delicate Heavy Equipment
Progress on the Alaska Highway in the summer of 1942 depended not only on the soldiers but also on their heavy equipment. The problem of keeping the big machines running plagued the line companies and put motor pool mechanics at the heart of every regiment’s operations. Heavy Equipment Breaks With the “midnight sun” shining …