Writing our book, We Fought the Road, started Christine and I on the story telling adventure that led to this blog. Many of you have asked abou the book and where to get it. You’ll find the it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and in your local bookstore.
In early 1942 the rampaging Empire of Japan threatened to advance on America through the Aleutian Islands and Alaska. America couldn’t get enough men and material to Alaska to defend it without a land route from the lower 48. Eight thousand soldiers struggled, suffered and even died gouging that route out of the vast subarctic wilderness, over mountains through deep forest over muskeg and permafrost, in summer heat and bitter winter cold… Sixteen hundred miles they gouged—in just eight months.
They had just got started when the Japanese ramped up the pressure; made their threat reality by assaulting the Aleutians.
We knew much of the story had been told before. But the books and articles and films offered the generals and colonels, their plans and strategies. Few of them offered the privates and sergeants who fought to implement those plans and strategies and who suffered when they went tragically wrong.
We wrote about the men, not the colonels and generals. We wrote about how it felt to be them in that time and that place. We wrote about their misery, their fear, their patriotism and their triumph. We wanted our readers to live the adventure of these ordinary men who stepped up and built the extraordinary Alaska Highway.
Nearly half of those men served in segregated regiments, black men. The Army determined to keep them in the deep woods away from the civilian population. The black soldiers lived and worked in isolation. The Army expected little of them, but the Army got as expert a crew of determined catskinners and road builders as ever existed.
All the men who worked on the Alcan were heroes, but the black men worked in isolation. Reporters, photographers and newsreel cameras followed the white regiments, the black soldiers became ghosts in history, gave their all for a country that couldn’t bring itself to thank them or even remember them.
We especially wanted our readers to share the experience of those soldiers, and to feel what they felt.