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 slept on folding canvas cots. Others, less lucky, slept in sleeping bags on the ground.
Link to another story “Stoves in Tents”
Canvas “lister bags” stored treated drinking water. And canvas enclosures not only served as repair shops, but they also provided other work areas that needed to be out of the elements. In canvas enclosures, creative soldiers transformed empty fuel drums into stoves, showers and even bathtubs.
Hand tools—axes, picks, shovels—continued to serve, but sawmills came to the deep woods to supplement two-man hand saws and axes; pneumatic shovels and jack hammers came to supplement picks and shovels. To power the tools and air compressors, troop units dragged generators with them through the woods. The generators, in turn, charged batteries and lighted the bivouac at night.
Video on how they would keep clean today
Life in the woods rendered simple things, like keeping clean, complex and difficult. ‘Big John’ Erklouts of the 340th dealt with icy cold rivers and streams by washing half of his body at a time – “quickly wash the top half of yourself, put on some clothes, then wash the bottom half.”
Norman Bush of the 341st gave up bathing altogether. And, if he didn’t bathe, it made no sense to change clothes, so he didn’t do that either. After four months he itched, and the soles of his boots disintegrated.
A bivouac at Little Rancheria River sported a gasoline operated washing machine to clean clothes. Collecting clean clothes, men forced themselves into the cold river.
FASCINATING story !!
I was fascinated too m