Caterpillar dozers did jobs on the Alcan project that Caterpillar never imagined. One night a sergeant of the 18th Engineers, working his D8 into and through the trees, acquired a determined grizzly bear guide and companion. He swerved toward the giant bear and it ran away, but as soon as he returned to his work, the bear returned. The sergeant finally turned decisively and gunned through the woods after the racing bear, raising and lowering the D8’s massive blade. The bear gave up and left.
Caterpillar built the Alaska Highway right alongside the soldiers. The D8 weighed in at twenty- three tons. Its six-cylinder, air cooled, diesel engine moved it over the ground at 5.8 miles per hour. Each regiment had twenty D8’s and an assembly of smaller tractors-D4’s, D6’s and D7’s.
The dozers forded small streams, ferried over rivers. But mostly they lumbered, often in tandem, through the woods. and my God could the massive dozers chew through the mud and the trees.
As proud catskinners worked the levers, D8 engines roared, spewing black smoke, and giant tracks ground through dirt and mud, alternately spinning and catching. Out front, giant blades pushed down trees; gouged out dirt and stumps. From his platform the catskinner couldn’t see over the engine and the giant blade to the ground immediately in front. Stories of commanders’ jeeps squashed and buried by marauding D8’s fill the annals of the Road.
The D8’s had no cabs. As a tree went down, its top could break and fall back toward the dozer. Leonard Cox, catskinner, with the 340th, watched “the top 10 to 12 feet of the tree.” And sometimes he hurriedly bailed off. “It was very dangerous.”
A soldier in the 340th watched a catskinner stand to back up his dozer. He failed to notice a long sapling caught on the blade. When the sapling broke loose and sprung back, the very tip of it caught one of his testicles and “flicked it out as clean as if a surgical knife had been used.”
D8 cats are not and were not air cooled
Don that’s an important mistake on my part. I’m going to check the source I had for that and then contact you if you don’t mind.
If you are right, I need to post a correction.
Don, I’ve checked my source for the “air cooled” business… A Captain named Cassell described it that way in a lecture at the Army War College that we found in their archives. It’s entirely possible that he knew very little about tractors, and you sound like you know a lot.
Accordingly, I apologize for the error and I’m going to do a post right now correcting it. Since you are anonymous, I can only attribute the correction to a reader named “Don”. If you’d like to talk further, message me your email address at dennismcclure111@gmail.com. I would love to have your obvious expertise available when I write about these things.