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 …
Category Archives: Alaska Highway
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, …
The Pass opened on May 20.
Up to the Pass, the soldiers of Company D convoyed between towering cliffs of piled snow, rode benches on either side of a bouncing and sliding canvas covered truck bed, out into the valley beyond the Pass and on 50 miles to Tonsina. Six days later the soldiers of Company C followed them through the …
Young Black Soldiers of the 97th
Young black soldiers from the Carolinas and Georgia who came to Valdez, Alaska with the 97th Engineering Regiment weathered the shock of an Alaska winter. They worked between the snowbanks on Alaska Avenue out to tent cities, bivouacs, thirteen miles out of town on the Richardson Highway and near the crumbling ruins of Wortman’s Roadhouse …
Slims River Bridge
Slims River threatened to stop the soldiers of the 18th cold in July 1942. At the southern end of Kluane Lake, Slims River feeds it with melt water from the Kaskawulsh Glacier. The road the soldiers built rounded the southern end of the lake, eight miles of deep muskeg and mud, to the mouth of …
Kluane Lake
Kluane Lake lay in the path of the 18th Engineers, working north from Whitehorse, and when they reached the southern tip of Kluane in July 1942, their relatively easy going came to an abrupt halt. The Slims River brings glacial melt water to feed the lake there, and some men of the 18th stopped to …
Challenge in Series
Challenge one for the epic Alaska Highway Project in 1942 had been to mobilize thousands of men, acquire their equipment and move everybody and everything over vast distances to the Far North. More on Challenge 1 Meeting that challenge had immediately created challenge two. Thousands of men and massive stocks of equipment and supplies jammed …