Heat Meant Fire

Heat, on the Alcan Project, came from fire. And God knows, the soldiers needed heat. But the soldiers lived in canvas tents. An escaped live coal smolders on canvas and then ignites it with obvious consequences.

Link to another story “Bivouac in the Woods”

From a company bivouac, soldiers ‘commuted’ daily to their work on the road.  The company mess followed them with portable kitchens on log sleds towed by a bulldozer.  But they built road fast, and every three or four days a company of soldiers had to pack up their bivouac and move.

Tents came down and went into the back of trucks along with soldiers’ sleeping bags and barracks bags. Most of the soldiers had “private boxes” with family photos, letters, and other treasures. In their tents they slept in sleeping bags on the floor or on canvas cots without the luxury of mattresses or pillows.

Each tent had a stove and the heat quickly thawed a dirt floor into slimy mud.  Soldiers festooned their tents with strings, ropes and rigging from which hung clothing, rifles, photos–anything the soldier did not want on the ground.  Less valuable gear they jammed under the cots.  Boots got the most precious storage spot in the tent–tucked into sleeping bags to keep warm.

For heat the army supplied kerosene heaters, but a chronic shortage of kerosene inspired creativity.  Soldiers pulled out the kerosene heater and threw it away; kept the top half of the stove with its fittings for stovepipe. From an empty fifty-five-gallon fuel drum they fashioned a replacement for the bottom half and in the converted drum they burned wood.

Company commanders created permanent three-man firewood details, rotating the duty weekly. The detail wielded crosscut saws, axes, and machetes to make stove wood out of the detritus of the road, stacking it next to or inside each tent.

To vent smoke from the stoves, the soldiers penetrated the canvas with stovepipe, installing a spark arrester on top of the ‘chimney’.  Live coals, though, escaped the arrester all too easily.  B Company of the 93^rd lost over half their tents in one spark fire.

Spark Arrestor

The most important guard duty on the highway was the fire guard mounted at every bivouac.