STORIES FROM NORTHERN CANADA AND ALASKA.

Inexperience and Consequences

Inexperience can have consequences. The fuel tank exploding under his bottom shouldn’t have surprised Pvt. Hall, but it did. Inexperience…

Donald L. Hall drove trucks in convoy out of Dawson Creek in 1942. He negotiated the Alaska Highway at the rear of the convoy, piloting a truck full of spare parts and tools. When trucks broke, the relatively inexperienced mechanic fixed them. Many years after the fact he told Donna Blasor-Bernhardt this story for her book, Pioneer Road.

When the gas tank on a 6 X 6 truck sprung a leak, Donald removed it. He knew he should fill it with water before working on it. But he had no water. He did have a portable air compressor, so he blew the tank out with air and hoped that would make it safe to work on.

Link to another story about fire “Stoves in Tents”

He tried to solder the leak, and he got away with that, but it didn’t work. The solder refused to flow where he needed it. So he broke out the blow torch. Straddling the end of the tank away from the leak, concentrating, he barely noticed the fellow standing in front of him.

Donald remembered a “terrific boom” and a blast of flame. He remembered going airborne for a time before he landed on his rump and slid for a few feet. The man in front of him lost his eyebrows and some hair from his neck. Solder decorated the bill of Donald’s cap and the red bumps on his face looked like a case of measles.

The gas tank, of course, had reached the end of its useful life. One end blew out completely and the “shape of my legs were on the sides of it.” Donald joked in later years that he had been the first astronaut.

Should my gas tank develop a leak, I believe I’ll find someone a bit older and wiser than Donald, to fix it.

Link to how the job might be done today

Stuff, Mountains of Stuff

Stuff, simple stuff but mountains of it, caused enormous problems for Alaska Highway builders in 1942. Swarming over the mountains and through the woods carving out the Highway, thousands of soldiers consumed mountains of rations. And thousands of soldiers needed underwear, boots, coats, sleeping bags, and toilet paper and an untold number of other things we don’t usually think much about.

Every headquarters, and there were a lot of those, used tables, chairs, filing cabinets, pens, pencils and typewriters.

Every kitchen needed stoves and gas, cookware, seasonings. Medics needed bandages and drugs, dental supplies and tools, surgical tools, intravenous fluids… Swarming soldiers don’t always get everything they need, but they need at least a bare minimum.

Link to another story “Chow”

To make matters more difficult, back in Washington in August the senior commanders decided to speed up progress by bringing civilian contractors in ahead of schedule. Thousands of civilian road builders joined thousands of soldiers in the deep woods, swarmed all around them. Demand for sustenance, along with demand for parts and fuel, increased exponentially.

Eventually five management contractors and forty-seven construction contractors—a total of 7,500 civilians—worked on the road. The civilians supplied themselves, but they did it over the same routes and through the same bottlenecks as the soldiers. Logistical and supply problems increased exponentially.

The contractors found the Corps’ cumbersome supply system intensely frustrating—no surprise, the soldiers in the field felt much the same way. All too often, using the system meant circumventing it; and, if everybody circumvented the system, that made the system even more cumbersome and difficult.

Roy’s Eyes

Roy’s eyes focused and the image of the biggest black bear he had ever seen emerged from the darkness, two feet in front of his face. We can excuse a rude bear. They don’t, after all, attend finishing school. Roy Lee of the 140^th Quartermaster Truck company would beg to disagree.

Roy had spent a long July day driving a deuce-and-a-half in convoy up the rough new Alaska Highway from Dawson Creek to Summit Lake. The rough road and the long hours left him exhausted. At the end of the day he rolled into his sleeping bag Roy’s eyes closed and immediately he fell fast asleep.

Link to another story “Bears on the Alaska Highway”

Someone shook him. Groggy and more than a bit resentful, Roy roused himself and looked but in the darkness he couldn’t see the culprit. He spoke to the shaker and profanity might have been involved. His tormentor backed off. The shaking stopped and with a final expletive or two, Roy drifted off again.

The shaking resumed, more determined and far more forceful. Roy literally came part way out of the bag into the chilly night air. He sat up, shouting, turning the air blue and trying to make out his new enemy’s features in the darkness. That’s when the image of the big black bear swam into focus, two feet in front of his face.

Roy doesn’t remember the trip from his sleeping bag to top of the tall tree. He knows he made the trip because he remembers spending a long night trying to remember how well and how far bears can climb. It really didn’t matter to the bear. Disgusted, he wandered away into the woods.

At daybreak, perched high in the crotch of an old pine tree, Lee inspected, found himself in good shape except for a stray scrape hear and there. A bit chilly, clad in just a pair of GI boxers, he shivered a bit. He remembered the four-foot trunk with its lowest branch twenty-six feet from the ground and had no idea how he’d managed to scale it. If his buddies laughed while they rescued him, he didn’t remember that.

Twenty-six feet may be a bit exaggerated. And Roy’s memory certainly left out crucial details.

I, for one, forgive him.

You Tube with Bear and Tent

Flight Nurses

Flight nurses in WWII, took frightful risks and all too often paid for it with their lives. When flight nurse Ruth Gardiner’s plane “mushed” and plowed into the ground on Unmak Island, it exploded and Ruth died. WWII, an equal opportunity disaster, killed women as well as men.

Link to another story “Marauding Japanese Forces”

Ruth entered the world in 1914 in Calgary, Alberta. She lived in Calgary for three years before her parents moved to Eastport, Idaho. From Eastport the Gardiner’s wandered a bit to Minnesota and then on to Pennsylvania. Twenty-three-year-old Ruth trained as a nurse at Philadelphia General Hospital.

When, at the end of 1941, Japan yanked the United States into WWII at Pearl Harbor, the Army and Navy found themselves struggling to cope with thousands of injured soldiers and sailors. They needed nurses as much as they needed warriors. Female recruits rushed to the flag and Ruth Gardiner rushed among them.

Then, as increasingly gruesome battlefields sprouted all over the Pacific and North Africa, the problems facing the Nurse Corps multiplied. Torn and mutilated bodies littered battlefields, and they couldn’t be repaired there. Trucks, trains and ships could carry some of them to hospitals. But often they didn’t have train tracks, roads, or navigable water. And trucks, trains and ships travelled slowly.

The Army and Navy turned to airplanes; would use them as air ambulances. And they would train brave volunteer nurses as flight nurses to tend to the wounded in the air. Lt. Ruth Gardiner stepped up and became one of those flight nurses.

Evacuation planes flew to rough, hurriedly constructed airstrips. Corpsmen carried up to eighteen patients into the cavernous planes, delivered them to the care of the Flight Nurses who tended to them while the planes flew them hundreds of miles to hospitals. Ignoring the danger, flight nurses kept the men alive in the air.

Of the places flight nurses flew, none proved more hazardous than the Aleutians. When the 805 Medical Air Evacuation Service came to Alaska, Ruth Gardiner came with them.

On July 27, 1943, Lt Gardiner’s plane flew to Dutch Harbor on Unmak Island to pick up casualties. A mountain loomed, the pilot pulled up but the plane stalled, and plowed into the ground. There at the northwest end of Bristol Bay, wreckage and cargo piled onto young Lt. Gardiner, pinned her. The plane exploded.

Ruth died for her country.

New Equipment Gets Old

Wayne and his dad worked it as hard as the soldiers

New equipment came to the Alaska Highway Project in 1942, but the project aged new equipment quickly. Some of it went with the army when the soldiers moved on at the end of the project. A lot of it they just abandoned in place.

On one of my stories the other night, Wayne Olstad wrote a lengthy comment that I found fascinating. I’ve edited it just a little bit, but basically this is a guest post by Wayne. He has a good story, he tells it well.

Link to another old dozer story “Marl Brown, At the Heart of the Alaska Highway”

Thank you for these stories Chris and Dennis. I love reading about the building of the Alaska Highway.

I was a teenager in the early 1960’s when my father bought a D-8, 8R (or maybe it was a 1H). Parts seemed to be interchangeable. That Cat had been salvaged from equipment left behind and abandoned by the US Army Corps of Engineers. At the end of the rush, with the road complete, they shipped the good machines back to the US. The rest they gave to Canada by the simple expedient of leaving them behind wherever they last stopped moving. Enterprising equipment scavengers made money extracting and selling machines left behind.

Three of them–don’t know about the extra

The old D-8 dad bought, the army had definitely used—a very long way from new equipment. I cannot believe that they built the highway with equipment similar to that old Cat. Far from easy to operate, it left us performing many “in the bush” repairs. All and all, though, I grew to love that old machine. Dad was happy to run it, while I got to run the newer 2U.

I still jump at the chance to hop up and onto the seat of those old workhorses. And I will tell you that the people who accomplished an almost impossible, monumentally difficult job in the 40’s were one tough and brave bunch.

I admire them all.

There it is, right out of Wayne’s minds eye

The next night I got a follow up message from Wayne.

“Hello. I commented on one of your Alaska Highway blogs about my experience as a teenage and a D8 from the construction of the Alaska WWII highway. Here are pictures I have that you are free to use as you wish. They have never been shared before.”

Wayne, they are shared now. And thank you.

Salvage on the Highway

Greyhound on the Alaska Highway

The Bus Keeps Rolling–Photo from Explore North

Greyhound buses actually drove the Alaska Highway in its infancy, while it remained a rough draft of a Highway. Who knew?

Link to another story “Rough Draft of a Highway”

In a comment on one of my stories, Tom Lymbery wrote, “…12 Canadian Greyhound coaches driven and serviced entirely by Canadians… set up regular service between Dawson Creek and Fairbanks in spite of a trail under construction 1942-1944.”

I’ve done a bit of research and ExploreNorth , Murray Lundberg’s excellent website on the North Country, included a terrific article about the Greyhound’s on the Highway. The page explains that the article is from an “unknown source”. On December 23, 1942 the United States Government signed a contract with Western Canadian Greyhound to provide service on the barely completed Alaska Highway from Dawson Creek to Fairbanks.

Explore North Article on Greyhound Canada and the Highway

The rough, dangerous road posed a challenge—especially through the winter. Drivers out of fuel actually stopped and sucked what they could get out of abandoned fuel drums along the way.

The dregs from empty fuel drums–photo from Explore North

Richard Neuberger wrote an article about his bus trip up the Highway that Representative Homer Angell read into the congressional record in 1944.

I followed Explore North to that portion of the Congressional Record and I’m posting a photo of a portion of it with this blog. I’ll also post a link if you would like to read the whole article.

Neuberger’s Article

Deep Woods

They didn’t do laundry a lot, but they did it.

Deep woods in subarctic Canada and Alaska not only provided a unique place for the Alaska Highway builders to work through 1942. Deep woods also provided a unique place to live.

Canvas, humble, vaguely malodorous, supported life in bivouac. Canvas tents provided barracks, mess halls, repair shops and offices. Inside the tents some lucky soldiers slept on folding canvas cots. Others, less lucky, slept in sleeping bags on the ground.

Link to another story “Stoves in Tents”

Canvas “lister bags” stored treated drinking water. And canvas enclosures not only served as repair shops, but they also provided other work areas that needed to be out of the elements. In canvas enclosures, creative soldiers transformed empty fuel drums into stoves, showers and even bathtubs.

Hand tools—axes, picks, shovels—continued to serve, but sawmills came to the deep woods to supplement two-man hand saws and axes; pneumatic shovels and jack hammers came to supplement picks and shovels. To power the tools and air compressors, troop units dragged generators with them through the woods. The generators, in turn, charged batteries and lighted the bivouac at night.

Video on how they would keep clean today

Life in the woods rendered simple things, like keeping clean, complex and difficult. ‘Big John’ Erklouts of the 340^th dealt with icy cold rivers and streams by washing half of his body at a time – “quickly wash the top half of yourself, put on some clothes, then wash the bottom half.”

Norman Bush of the 341^st gave up bathing altogether. And, if he didn’t bathe, it made no sense to change clothes, so he didn’t do that either. After four months he itched, and the soles of his boots disintegrated.

A bivouac at Little Rancheria River sported a gasoline operated washing machine to clean clothes. Collecting clean clothes, men forced themselves into the cold river.

Routine, Not Easy

It may not be on a map today, but it was Loblolly Swamp to them.

Routine settled in on the Alaska Highway Project in August, but no amount of routine could make it easy.

The details of daily living and working—eating; sleeping; recreating (or lack thereof) and, above all, gouging a highway out of the forbidding wilderness, one mile at a time—had fallen into a pattern that applied to all seven regiments. The road emerged, threading its way through the vast wilderness; and everybody focused on completing it.

Link to another August Story “Little Tok River”

The soldiers relief when the mosquitoes disappeared in August didn’t last long. The North Country had more creatures than one up its sleeve. Swarming Gnats, accompanied by “no-see-ums”, replaced the mosquitoes; made the mosquitoes seem almost gentle by comparison. Small, built for speed, a gnat used its tiny mandibles to attack and eat a man’s flesh, leaving behind a swollen, itching clot of blood. Gnats especially favored ears. But they weren’t picky. One surveyor, eyes swollen and ears bloody, found six more gnats in his navel. Clothing offered virtually no protection.

The North Country finally dried out in August, but that, too, offered the troops only temporary relief. The endless mud dried into endless red dust that swirled to cover duffle bags, pack the creases in fatigues and abrade vital machine parts. Soldiers of the 93^rd, convoyed by truck to Teslin Post, arrived unrecognizable, their faces totally obscured by red dust.

Vaccinating

The relevant section is over to the right behind the trees

Vaccinating thousands of young soldiers at a frantic pace before shipping them overseas, the army screwed up. During March 1942, a batch of contaminated yellow fever vaccine made its way into the system. Initially ignorant of the contamination, medics vaccinated several thousand young men from that batch. Two months later, in May, soldiers all around the world came down with serum hepatitis.

The army had vaccinated most of the men of the 97^th with good vaccine long before March. But, in March, getting ready to send the 97th to Alaska, the Army hurriedly expanded the regiment, added new soldiers.

Link to another story “Rafting the Little Tok”

Major Banks (not a rank but the name his mama gave him) entered the army from New Canton, Virginia in January and in March he transferred to the 97^th at Eglin Field in Florida. Banks got his vaccination from the contaminated batch.

In Alaska on May 20 Private Banks reported for sick call. The medics sent him to the little hospital in Valdez, Alaska. Word of the contaminated vaccine and the fact that it caused serum hepatitis had got to army doctors, but not to the civilian doctor in Valdez.

He diagnosed Banks with jaundice, progressive, acute atrophy of liver, and the hepatitis went untreated. Banks lingered for several weeks, getting progressively worse, until, on the last day of June he died.

On June 30 Captain Walter Parsons wrote to his wife Abbie from Valdez. “One of the colored boys died early this morning and things are in quite a stir about this little camp.”

Parsons determined that Pvt. Banks deserved the honor of a military funeral and set out to get him one. The citizens of Valdez objected; didn’t want a black man buried in their cemetery. Parsons would have none of that. In the end they designated a piece of ground just across the creek from the cemetery as a ‘negro’ section.

Parsons arranged for “a truck load of boys [to come] down to bury the chap… We fixed him all up in a casket we got off of a boat… Had a firing squad, bugler, military escort and everything plus about ten officers and twenty-five or thirty white soldiers from a nearby camp.”

Frank Hinkel’s Adventure

Frank Hinkel, T4 bulldozer operator, pushing dirt over the wall of a canyon, got too close to the edge. His dozer followed the dirt over. Hinkel tried to jump but banged his head and sat back down; rode his steel mount down to the floor of the canyon. Luckily, the dozer landed on its tracks.

Link to another story “The Humble Culvert”

Hinkel worked on what Captain Boyd in his memoir, Me and Company C, called “Boyd’s Grand Canyon”. Over millennia a tiny stream had cut its way deeper and deeper into Yukon dirt, creating a canyon squarely across the path of the Alaska Highway. The stream required a small but long culvert, and once the soldiers had installed it, they had to fill the canyon with dirt.

Down on the timber culvert, the men ran out of the metal spikes they used to pin the timbers together. They resorted to drilling holes through the logs with a compressed air drill and shaping wooden spikes to drive in through the holes.

With the culvert in place, the men had a deep canyon to fill and a lot of dirt to push over its walls. To speed things along, the 73^rd Pontoon Company ferried a bulldozer down adjacent Teslin Lake and unloaded it past the canyon. Catskinner Hinkle drove it back up to the south wall of the canyon, and bulldozers pushed dirt into the canyon from both sides.

Northern Sector commander, General Hoge, and his boss from Washington, Major General Sturdevant, in Yukon Territory on an inspection tour, planned a visit to Company C at Boyd’s Canyon. With all but perfect timing, Hinkle had his adventure an hour and a half before the VIP’s arrived.

Clambering down from his side of the canyon, Boyd found Hinkel shook up with a bump on his head.

“Who told you to drive that dozer over the edge of the bank?”

“Nobody, Sir.”

“Then what are you doing down here?”

“I really don’t know, sir.”

Boyd ordered Hinkel and his dozer back to work and when the Generals arrived they found a busy, normal work site.

Culverts install easier today