KP’s, soldiers on what the army called Kitchen police duty, discovered the catastrophe looming ahead of the 18th Engineers first. KP’s had to dig garbage pits, and, as the regiment moved north past the Big Duke River and on toward the Donjek River, they found themselves digging in a vastly different kind of ground. They would dig through a few inches of soil and hit pure, solid ice.
To the north of the 18th, the officers and men of the 97th Engineers worked south through Alaska in September, expecting to meet the soldiers of the 18th and complete the Alaska Highway at the international border. They hoped to be out of Alaska for Christmas. But the Kitchen police discovery down in Yukon changed everything.
A link to another story “Path to the Border”
The undisputed mileage champions of the seven regiments on the Alaska Highway project, the 18th Engineers worked north through Yukon toward the border in September. They crossed the Big Duke River and built on toward the Donjek River, and the character of the woods around them changed. Fred Rust of the 18th said it looked like a “burnt over swamp.”
The woods hadn’t been burnt over. They looked stunted and scraggly because they grew out of permafrost. Their roots encountered the same problem as the KP’s. The had a few inches of rotted vegetation and then solid ice. In effect they grew from a vast underground lake, solid, looking like normal dirt, only because it remained frozen solid.
All the way up from Whitehorse, the soldiers of Company A had led the 18th, clearing a path. The other companies followed to turn the path into a road. The permafrost rendered Company A’s path useless. Clearing a path exposed the ice to sunlight and it promptly melted.
Fred Rust remembered, “Trucks simply took off through the woods on either side of Company A’s useless path… The ground was so soft that one truck could not follow in another’s tracks without bogging down. Sometimes you would see a D-8 hauling a “train” of three or four trucks, dragging them through the gumbo.
In time the soldiers of the 18th devised a permafrost strategy. But the new strategy slowed their progress to a crawl.
The men of the 97th had expected to complete their road when they met the men of the 18th at the international border. As permafrost slowed the 18th, that expectation went away. On September 28 Captain Parsons wrote to his wife Abbie, “We should meet the 18th in about two weeks. Looks like we’ll beat them to the border and in their own end of the field.”
What’s happening to permafrost today