Ghosts would surround us at Morley Bay, but first we had to find them. In late summer 1942 the 93rd Engineering Regiment maintained a motor pool and a supply dump at Morley Bay, Yukon. On a lazy afternoon in 2013 we had come to find it—and the ghosts of the hundreds of men who worked there.
The 340th Gets Started–from Morley Bay
In 1942 the regiment strung out across hundreds of miles of Yukon Territory, Bulldozers plowing through trees and mud burned through thousands of gallons of fuel. Deuce and a Half trucks carried the fuel in 55-gallon drums, and they burned more fuel doing that.
The bulldozers in rough service broke—a lot. The trucks travelling endlessly over the rough road broke—a lot. The mechanics had to go to the vehicles, not the other way around.
The soldiers working in, on and around the vehicles required food and other supplies.
The scattered regiment centered, roughly, on Morley Bay. The rough pioneer road they had built connected the line companies to Morely Bay. Lake Teslin connected Morley Bay back over miles of river and rough road to the port of entry at Skagway/Carcross.
Deuce and a half trucks, wreckers, jeeps and repair vehicles moved constantly to and away from Morely Bay, up and down the primitive highway.
On today’s Alaska Highway you crest a mountain, ready to start down a long, steep slope to the Nisutlin Bay Bridge and the village of Teslin. If you know to, you look left through the woods, but you don’t see Morley Bay—too far away. You certainly see no sign of the facility or the hundreds of men who labored along its shore.
With old maps and photos and an eye on the odometer, we re-crossed the big bridge and climbed back up the steep grade. Just beyond the crest a driveway offered on the right. We turned and it led us to the shore of the Bay and two houses, surrounded by woods., quiet and empty in the dappled sunlight.
With an old photo in hand we lined up a mountain in the background with the outline of the Bay and maneuvered to the spot where the photographer had stood. We got close. Standing there we could just make out a path of smaller trees where the 1942 road had cut through the woods.
Woods. Two houses down near the water. Soldiers’ ghosts were everywhere.