Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 then launched coordinated and successful assaults all over the Pacific. The suddenness and sheer scale of disaster set America’s leadership back on its heels, scrambling to plan a response. FDR, his cabinet and his generals saw terrifying vulnerability in Alaska and the Aleutians and ordered the Corps of Engineers to address that vulnerability by building a land route to the exposed outpost.
The Corps leaped into action.
The Corps exists to build things fast. They don’t necessarily build efficiently, they don’t build at the lowest cost, they don’t even necessarily build with high quality. But in a military crisis the Corps gets it done.
General Sturdevant had submitted a plan on two days’ notice, knowing as he did so that it was at best a vague outline; and, even as he wrote, he was setting the machinery of the Corps in motion. He met with Colonel William Hoge, his choice to command the project, on February 12, and Hoge departed for Dawson Creek immediately.
In Dawson Creek Hoge went looking for men who knew what he needed to know about the North Country, and he found Knox McCusker.
A few nights ago, I posted about McCusker—one of the toughest and most effective of the men who had worked to create and improve trails through the Canadian Rockies. I left him anticipating the need for a land route to Alaska, thinking about the route and waiting to meet the man who would build it.
That man arrived in February 1942.