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 most dramatic cases, they died.
On August 9th 1st Lt. Small of the 18th wrecked his jeep. His men found his body under the jeep—back broken. Two soldiers in the 35th died when they rolled their grader over a bank. A cook in the 340th torched himself by pouring gas on a lit stove burner; died on route to the hospital. Tech Sgt. Max Richardson of the 340th died in his wrecked truck.
Link to a story “Bonner and Bess and the Memorial Cairns”
And an unknown officer, probably a second lieutenant, training his men to field strip a machine gun, accidentally shot Staff Sgt. Whitfield of the 340th. Danger from a totally unexpected source.
The greatest danger came from brutal cold. Travelling the winding, twisting, often single lane, road, drivers faced constant blind curves; preferred to drive at night when oncoming lights would reveal the presence of opposing traffic. But at night, temperatures fell. And a truck that failed its driver in the dark put him in serious jeopardy.
A black truck driver, serving with the 97th, broke down at the Slana Cutoff in Alaska. He gathered brush and built himself a fire; but, with the surrounding air at sixty-six degrees below zero, the fire didn’t help much. Abandoning the fire, he tried to walk the fourteen miles to camp. He didn’t make it.
On the way to Ft. Nelson, PRA trucker, Oscar Albanati ran into a convoy of Army trucks stopped along the road. He approached a stalled truck.
“There was a black swamper in the cab. I thought he was sleeping.The other [black soldier] had the hood up and was leaning against a fender peering into the engine. I tapped the boy on the shoulder and he fell over. He was dead, frozen stiff. He was trying to repair something. The man inside was so cold he couldn’t move, but he wasn’t dead.”
Soldiers didn’t always die. Sometimes they just got injured. The dangerous work lacerated skin and fractured bones on a regular basis. And, given the working conditions, the food, the standard of personal care and the sanitation, it should come as no surprise that illness remained a problem in the field. Soldiers exchanged germs with the local population and, more often, with one another. Everybody experienced dysentery.
A Link to a post on Outdoor Medicine Today
This is probably a bad thing to think about but you you mentioned dysentery n I thought how hard their lives really were. The other comment about -60 degrees n being frozen standing up is unthinkable. I can’t even imagine living 24 hours a day in cold like that. Trying to sleep in a tent with those temperatures is nearly impossible. I doubt if any of their military gear was rated for this weather.
Your comment is as thoughtful and eloquent as it is true. Thank you.
I thank ever one of them – I wish they could see it now. I spent 2 tears in and out of Antarctica, & one winter in Siberia. So cold I know and don’t want any now. Such sacrifice like most people will ever know.
Zane, that’s fantastic experience to have had. As a writer, I envy it.