The SS David Branch, carrying the segregated 97th Engineering Regiment to the Alaska Highway dropped anchor in Valdez Harbor on April 29, 1942. Valdez offered one ramshackle dock and no harbor pilots. On April 30 her captain, forced to an unassisted docking, managed to ram her bow into and through the end of the dock. The grinding crash brought the citizens of Valdez running. No matter, Pubic Roads Administration (PRA) contractors would rebuild the dock later. The Branch tied up to its remains.
Three feet of snow covered the ground. The citizens had shoveled and plowed all winter, piling snow from sidewalks on one side and streets on the other into a massive wall between them. Wood smoke and coal soot had stained the crusted snow brown and black. From the sidewalk, one could hear street traffic but couldn’t see it.
From the deck of the David Branch, when a soldier got out of the hold and up to the deck, he saw the crumpled dock, a warehouse with a big sign. “Valdez,” the sign proclaimed. “Terminus of a Great Scenic Road, The Richardson Highway.” From the warehouse the dock stretched across dirty, oiled water to the town, a cluster of frame buildings. The Valdez glacier towered behind the buildings.
Haywood Oubre grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana and brought an utterly unique personal history to the 97th. He graduated from Dillard University, their first art major. He went on to graduate school in art at Atlanta University, did “creative touches” for a new student union at Tuskeegee Institute. Oubre’s draft board got in touch in April 1941, “they told me I’d be jailed if I didn’t show up in New Orleans the next day.”
When he made it to the deck of the David Branch, looked out across the tiny town of Valdez at the massive Valdez Glacier, Oubre thought this. “When you first behold the beauty and nature in Alaska, you are overwhelmed. It was in April. The snow was on the ground. I had my parka on, and I said, ‘Praise God, I’ve never seen a landscape so beautiful.’”
The frigid temperature and the snow that covered Valdez and the massive glacier impressed most of Oubre’s fellows more than the scenic beauty. Staff Sergeant Clifton Monk grew up in Newton Grove, North Carolina, learned to operate heavy equipment at Eglin Field in Florida. He reacted differently to the snow at Valdez, “It looked like hell on earth.”