A true hero of the Alaska Highway Project, Lt. Mike Miletich has managed to fade into anonymity.
Not fair.
The ‘go to’ guy for the 35th Combat Engineering Regiment, Lt. Miletich turned up at every challenging point in their work on the Highway.
He led, for example, the advance party to Dawson Creek in March and then preceded the regiment up the frozen winter trail to Ft. St John and on to Ft Nelson.
The first troops to Dawson Creek
His biggest exploit, though, came later in the summer.
The regiment moved on from Ft Nelson, fought and conquered Steamboat Mountain. And after Steamboat they had relatively easy going. The lead elements of the regiment came to Muncho Lake, curved their road along the shore of the beautiful aquamarine lake, hugging the steep cliffs that border it… Until the shore disappeared.
Suddenly the sheer cliff simply dropped from high above straight into the depths of the lake.
The catskinners worked dozers around and up the backside of the mountain and brought them to the top of the cliff. There they cranked up the power, dropped their steel blades and rumbled at the cliff, pushing dirt and rocks over the edge to cascade down and splash into the water far below. At some point, they expected, the debris would accumulate from the bottom up the cliffside and provide an artificial shore, a ledge for their road.
The dozers rumbled and pushed for days and ton after ton of dirt and rock splashed into the lake. And after days, everything they pushed over splashed mightily and then simply disappeared into the depths.
Regimental Commander Colonel Robert recorded Mike Miletich’s solution to the problem.
On the roadbed where it stopped in the face of the sheer cliff, the lieutenant sent a man scrambling up to tie a rope to a projecting rock. Miletich tied a noose in the other end of the rope, stripped off his clothes, slipped the noose under his arms, and jumped into the frigid water. Even in summer, water turned to ice just a few feet below the surface, but Miletich found holes in the ice layer.
Up on the roadbed he took the lid off a box of TNT and removed one stick of explosive. Leaving that stick on the shore, he jumped back in, carried the nearly full box of explosive to and through the hole in the ice and inserted it into a niche in the rock cliff with the opened side out.
He swam back up, inserted a blasting cap and a waterproof fuse into the stick he had removed, and lit the fuse. Carrying the stick and its sputtering fuse in his teeth, he swam back through the hole in the ice, placed the stick and fuse in the open box and swam as fast as he could to safety.
The explosion of a full box of TNT blasted rock out of the cliff leaving the beginnings of a ledge. Carefully choosing his locations along the cliffside, Miletich repeated this incredible sequence several times until he had managed to blast a narrow ledge out of the cliff, enough of a ledge to catch debris from above and provide a roadbed for the highway.
