Relations between Canada and its tightly coupled neighbor to the South, generally but not always good, influenced the Alaska Highway Project in 1942. Even today, the things we get up to down here don’t always leave Canadians, our oldest and best international friends, with a warm fuzzy feeling. And the things we get up to …
Category Archives: Alaska Highway
Stuff, Mountains of Stuff
Stuff, simple stuff but mountains of it, caused enormous problems for Alaska Highway builders in 1942. Swarming over the mountains and through the woods carving out the Highway, thousands of soldiers consumed mountains of rations. And thousands of soldiers needed underwear, boots, coats, sleeping bags, and toilet paper and an untold number of other things …
Roy’s Eyes
Roy’s eyes focused and the image of the biggest black bear he had ever seen emerged from the darkness, two feet in front of his face. We can excuse a rude bear. They don’t, after all, attend finishing school. Roy Lee of the 140th Quartermaster Truck company would beg to disagree. Roy had spent a …
New Equipment Gets Old
New equipment came to the Alaska Highway Project in 1942, but the project aged new equipment quickly. Some of it went with the army when the soldiers moved on at the end of the project. A lot of it they just abandoned in place. On one of my stories the other night, Wayne Olstad wrote …
Deep Woods
Deep woods in subarctic Canada and Alaska not only provided a unique place for the Alaska Highway builders to work through 1942. Deep woods also provided a unique place to live. Canvas, humble, vaguely malodorous, supported life in bivouac. Canvas tents provided barracks, mess halls, repair shops and offices. Inside the tents some lucky soldiers …
Routine, Not Easy
Routine settled in on the Alaska Highway Project in August, but no amount of routine could make it easy. The details of daily living and working—eating; sleeping; recreating (or lack thereof) and, above all, gouging a highway out of the forbidding wilderness, one mile at a time—had fallen into a pattern that applied to all …
Vaccinating
Vaccinating thousands of young soldiers at a frantic pace before shipping them overseas, the army screwed up. During March 1942, a batch of contaminated yellow fever vaccine made its way into the system. Initially ignorant of the contamination, medics vaccinated several thousand young men from that batch. Two months later, in May, soldiers all around …
Frank Hinkel’s Adventure
Frank Hinkel, T4 bulldozer operator, pushing dirt over the wall of a canyon, got too close to the edge. His dozer followed the dirt over. Hinkel tried to jump but banged his head and sat back down; rode his steel mount down to the floor of the canyon. Luckily, the dozer landed on its tracks. …
Tiny Teslin Post
Tiny Teslin Post never saw it coming. In July 1942, the soldiers of the 93rd Engineers, with their bulldozers and trucks and graders suddenly roared out of the woods beside Teslin Lake. The soldiers bulldozed at and around the tiny village and its 130 citizens, dropping trees in every direction. Link to another post …
Seven Regiments Trashed the New Alaska Highway
Seven regiments powered through the wilds of the North Country in the summer of 1942, gouging the Alaska Highway out of the wilderness. 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 …
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