What Extreme Cold Does to Equipment—and Beer
Cold posed the greatest threat to soldiers on the Alaska Highway Project. And the coldest winter ever recorded across northwest Canada and Alaska commenced in earnest in October 1942. Soldiers working on the Alaska Highway headed into a whole new experience. By December and January, the temperature routinely dropped to sixty below zero—a stupefying cold that none of the troops had ever experienced. Everybody suffered. A few died.
Neuberger in his “Yukon Adventure” remembered that they, “opened eggs only to find crystals of ice in the shell. Potatoes were ribbed with frozen strips that looked like Italian marble.” Placed in a pot to boil, iron hard potatoes took longer to thaw than to cook. Returned laundry arrived in a solid chunk that had to rest beside the stove for days before underwear or a sock could be pried loose. Private Francis, of the 93rd, tossed a frozen egg against a tree—only the shell cracked.
Soldiers in the field wore down filled parkas 24-7. Climbing into his ‘double mummy’ sleeping bag—down filled sleeping bag plus two blankets and a comforter—at night, a soldier wore arctic underwear, gloves, a sweater and socks. Once he brought his body, the only source of heat, to his nest, it took a half an hour or more for it to warm. He slept with his boots to keep them warm and pliable in the morning. And, in the end, none of this really protected him from the bone cracking cold.
Black soldiers, from semi-tropical Louisiana and Mississippi, suffered the most. A crane operator in the 97th remembered, “We wore three pairs of socks with galoshes instead of shoes because leather would freeze.” Those with fur mukluks or fabric galoshes stuffed them with layers of socks. A few used evergreen needles for insulating stuffing. And shoes had to be big because “tight shoes meant frozen feet”.
What it’s like to live in the far north