Work on the culvert at Boyd Grand Canyon began on July 11 when the young black soldiers of Boyd’s Company C crossed the Teslin River and moved three miles south and east to the north wall. More on culverts This canyon needed a very long culvert and a very deep fill. In his memoir, …
Category Archives: Construction of the Alaska Highway
The Humble Culvert
The humble culvert—everywhere in our lives—serves an essential function. It carries water from where we don’t want it to where we do. You drive city streets, you walk city sidewalks… You drive or walk over culverts you don’t even noice. More on the Road Through Yukon Not remotely humble, culverts sprouted everywhere on the Alaska …
Teslin Post
Teslin Post never saw it coming. In July the 93rd Engineers came out of the woods, and the sleepy frontier village with about 130 inhabitants, mostly Tlingit First Nations, found itself dead center in the action. They didn’t know quite what to make of it. Excited by the sudden appearance of a hundreds of …
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 …
Food on the Highway
Food topped the list of sources of unrelieved misery on the Highway in 1942. Other things on the list From day one, everybody, officers and enlisted, white and black, everybody ate C-rations. Gray boxes, C-rations had contents that resembled food you might have had before, strange things that looked sort of like chocolate, olive …
Daylight Lasted Forever
Daylight lasted forever in July, and the North Country continuing to fight back, revealed a new arsenal. The wet heat of summer replaced the wet cold of spring. Morley Bay averaged highs of 90 degrees, Whitehorse 82. And it stayed wet. According to WP&YT railroad records total rainfall in the week of July 5 broke …
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 …
Military Support Network
A vast support network came to the far north in early 1942, right behind the seven engineering regiments. By July the regiments worked in the wilderness building road. The support network had mushroomed, and its parts and pieces worked all around the engineers. Topo Engineers surveyed routes through every kind of terrain the path …
Mentasta
At Mentasta Pass the black soldiers of the 97th met their toughest, most dangerous problems; met them and solved them. Back in March, Generals Sturdevant and Hoge hurriedly planning their assault on the North Country wilderness, ordered the 97th from Florida to Valdez, Alaska. From Valdez they directed them up the Richardson Highway to Slana, …