Keeping clean isn’t easy when you live and work deep in the wilderness of the far north. Soldiers building the Alaska Highway tried keeping clean. They did not always (more accurately, they did not often) succeed. ‘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 took a simpler approach. He 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. When they washed their clothes at least some of the soldiers forced themselves to plunge into the cold river to wash themselves.
In his history of the 18th Engineers, Fred Rust explained that a bivouac for a full company tended to stay in place for a relatively long time. In those camps the soldiers built showers. They lashed together a wooden tower, set two or three empty gasoline drums on it and filled them with water. A homemade stove under the tower heated the water—sort of. Gravity carried it to shower nozzles in a shower tent.
In the more usual smaller camps, the men took what Rust called “Pail-Baths.” He reported that they “eventually developed skillful, acrobatic bathing techniques.”
And they tried occasionally to wash their clothes in the same pails.