Flight nurses in WWII, took frightful risks and all too often paid for it with their lives. When flight nurse Ruth Gardiner’s plane “mushed” and plowed into the ground on Unmak Island, it exploded and Ruth died. WWII, an equal opportunity disaster, killed women as well as men. Link to another story “Marauding Japanese Forces” …
Category Archives: Injuries
A Crow, Flying a Straight Path
A crow flying a straight path would have flown 4,415 miles to get from Eglin Field in South Florida to Valdez, Alaska—assuming a crow would have wanted to do such a thing. Thad Bryson’s 97th Engineering Regiment took a significantly more round about path from trucks to trains to a troopship and finally to just …
Danger Followed
Danger followed the soldiers on the Alaska Highway. They drove vehicles with cannibalized parts, sometimes without brakes. They patched broken tools together with wire, tape and ingenuity. They worked brutal hours swinging axes, felling trees, slewing vehicles through mud and along steep mountainsides. Soldiers at war, they got sick, they got wounded and, in the …
KV Nelson Froze to Death
KV Nelson served with the 97th Engineering Regiment on the Alaska Highway in Alaska—until February 5, 1943. On that day he died. He and a fellow soldier named Smith, driving a truck on the icy highway back to camp from the little settlement at Station Creek, slid off the road into a ditch. The truck …
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 …
Monte’s Legs
The story of Monte’s legs has Alaska all over it. Another unique Alaskan Life there is like nowhere else on the planet. It takes a unique kind of person to live there and love it. A few months ago, researching our work in progress, my partner and researcher, Chris, ran across a story that ran …
Thad Bryson Winter
Thad Bryson, a young black man from Old Fort, North Carolina met the Tuskegee Airmen. Shortly after that his regiment, the 97th Engineering Regiment quite suddenly left Florida—for Alaska! Thad Bryson meets the Tuskegee Airmen Thad’s son Fred shared with us his dad’s stories. Like a lot of veterans, Thad didn’t talk about it much; …
Bonner and Bess and the Memorial Cairns
Bonner and Bess Cooley live at the heart of Teslin, Yukon. They may, in fact, be the heart of Teslin, Yukon. More on Teslin Today A few years ago, we travelled through Yukon researching the book we would title, We Fought the Road, and in Teslin we met Bess and Bonner They helped us, taught …
They lose Private Banks Remains
How do you lose the remains of an honorably buried soldier? It’s not easy. Last night I posted about Private Major Banks who, along with thousands of other soldiers, received a contaminated yellow fever vaccine in March 1942. In June Private Banks contracted serum hepatitis and at the end of June he passed away in …
Keeping Them Healthy
Keeping the engineers healthy was no mean trick. Thousands of men worked through the remote wilderness of Northern Canada and Alaska in 1942. North America desperately needed a land route to Alaska and the soldiers worked desperately hard to get her one. They worked incredibly hard in cold and then heat and in incessant …