KP’s, soldiers on what the army called Kitchen police duty, discovered the catastrophe looming ahead of the 18th Engineers first. KP’s had to dig garbage pits, and, as the regiment moved north past the Big Duke River and on toward the Donjek River, they found themselves digging in a vastly different kind of ground. They …
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The last obstacle, the Tanana River. The soldiers of the 97th had to build access road to it and cross it before they could turn south and finally start building Alaska Highway. At the beginning of August 1942, a new commander launched a fired-up regiment into the Tanana valley with sixty miles to go to …
Little Tok river doesn’t amount to much. But it meant a lot to the soldiers of the 97th Engineers in August 1942. Their assigned portion of the Alaska Highway lay on the north bank of the Tanana River, 266 miles from where they left the ship that brought them to Alaska. Over the last eighty …
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 …
Going about their business the 130 citizens of Teslin Post heard strange noises in the woods, noises that grew louder, and then soldiers and trucks and bulldozers poured and roared down along the river out of the woods. Little Dolly Porter hid in panic from the massive machines pitching trees in every direction through …
Every bit of the Alaska Highway ran through as rugged a wilderness as exists anywhere. Through the spring and early summer of 1942 over 8,000 soldiers of the Corps of Engineers struggled against overwhelming odds to get themselves and their machines into that wilderness to the path of the Highway. Right behind the soldiers came …
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 …
Steamboat mountain quite suddenly took the relatively flat British Columbia terrain and swept it into the sky. Soldiers had dealt with muskeg and rivers and forests of pine and spruce. Now Steamboat Mountain, towering three thousand feet above the surrounding valleys, introduced them to the Muskwa mountain range and the Northern Rockies. Did the terrain …
Kiskatinaw Bridge, one of the true engineering marvels of the Alaska Highway did not get built until the Army had moved on. A river just a few miles out of Dawson Creek, Kiskatinaw may have given the soldiers one of their first clues in 1942 that the north country would fight back. But with the …
Keeping clean isn’t easy when you live and work deep in the wilderness of the far north. Soldiers building the Alaska Highway tried keeping clean. They did not always (more accurately, they did not often) succeed. ‘Big John’ Erklouts of the 340th dealt with icy cold rivers and streams by washing half of his body …