Oil Cans scattered everywhere along the length of the emerging Alaska highway gave it its best nickname. But the Corps, rushing to finish, left more than oil cans. The soldiers didn’t concern themselves much with any kind of cleanup.
By spring and early summer, all along the road, every steep hill or canyon featured a debris scatter at its bottom. Broken down and wrecked trucks lay everywhere—over banks, in ditches. Ten-ton wreckers could not keep up with demand for their services and the motor pools didn’t waste time on junk. Lumber, cement, and, of course, empty fuel barrels scattered among the vehicles.
Link to another story “Heavy Trucks on a Road”
One soldier told Cyril Griffith, a PRA trucker, as they careened down a steep hill, “Don’t worry boss, Uncle Sam has lots more trucks.”
Adding to the mess, every bivouac site left garbage behind. The troops on KP (kitchen police) buried it, of course. But bears immediately dug it back up. According to Captain Boyd of Company C of the 93rd, “they could paw through four feet of dirt, topped with rocks.”
The soldiers despised their food, but they ate it. And men who eat, to put it somewhat delicately, eliminate. Companies in the field had to get rid of garbage and “eliminations”.
. Chester Russell of the 35th described the problem this way. “You’ve got a regiment of men… no water, no toilet facilities.” The soldiers needed to create garbage pits and latrines every time they moved to a new camp. “…you’ve got to dig through this ice… you hit that old ice with a pick and it just bounced…” When they moved away from a camp they filled the pits and “put a sign up, saying whether it was garbage pit or latrine.”
Bob Lowe, a civilian contractor on the project described toilet facilities at a camp on the Tanana River in November rather less delicately. “Our outside toilet facilities consisted only of a 2X4 board, nailed between two trees. You’d lean against the 2X4 doing your business.” He went on to explain that your problem did not end when you finished and rushed inside to get warm.
“Needless to say, the pile accumulated… before you could do your job you had to break the frozen pile down or risk being stabbed.” He summed it up this way. “These outside toilet facilities definitely discouraged reading a magazine.”
Link to more information about the Oil Can HIghway
Enjoy your posts, I have built road in the Yukon and can definitely can relate to the hard work and conditions. Your stories are very accurate, thank you.
Tim, Thank you. That’s a heck of a compliment. From a man with real experience
Thanks for tell about the road building
No sweat. I enjoy doing it.
Building fire guard on Permafrost on the Yukon border- always 3 dozers-first one got stuck-second one got stuck pulling first one, third one rescued them both
Sounds about right.