The 341st moved much too slowly.
In March, when he ordered the 35th to rush to Fort Nelson before the winter road thawed to impassable, General Hoge bet that Colonel Joe Lane’s 341st Engineers could create a road across the rivers and through the gumbo to Fort Nelson before the 35th’s supplies ran out.
No pressure!
The men of the 341st came across the platform at Dawson Creek on May 1, and they struggled. They pushed a few miles through the gumbo to Fort St John and on to Charlie Lake, but they pushed much too slowly. Up north at Ft Nelson the soldiers of the 35th suffered from serum hepatitis, and they got hungry.
The Soldiers of the 35th Went Hungry
Increasingly desperate, Lane explored the path through the sucking mud. Twelve miles out of Fort St. John he climbed a tree to get a better look at his surroundings, and he realized that the upper end of Charlie Lake lay but two miles away. The lake, twelve miles long and about a mile and a half wide, paralleled the muddy supply road—and offered a bypass!
Lane would leave half his men to corduroy Muskeg Flats, but he would move the other half, his 2nd Battalion, to the upper end of the lake, use the lake to transport its equipment, and start them working north from there.
To get things started, he ordered Company E to march to the head of the lake and begin work with hand tools. Two days after they moved, Lane came up to inspect their progress. Company E had completed three miles of road. And Lt. Strain had shot a bear—had its meat barbecued on an outdoor pit. Relatively happy soldiers—and a happy regimental commander feasted on fresh bear meat.
To Colonel Lane placid Charlie Lake offered easy passage for the rest of 2nd Battalion. The 74th Pontoon Company built him a broad, flat raft, equipped with several 22 horsepower outboard motors, riding on three pontoons. And on May 14, loaded with a radio car, a small angle dozer, two officers and fifteen enlisted men, the ungainly craft motored out onto the lake and headed north.
The North Country was about to teach Colonel Lane and the rest of the American commanders on the project an important lesson. What they didn’t know posed difficult problems. What they didn’t know they didn’t know could lead to catastrophe.