STORIES FROM NORTHERN CANADA AND ALASKA.

Tiny Teslin Post

Tiny Teslin Post never saw it coming. In July 1942, the soldiers of the 93^rd Engineers, with their bulldozers and trucks and graders suddenly roared out of the woods beside Teslin Lake. The soldiers bulldozed at and around the tiny village and its 130 citizens, dropping trees in every direction.

Link to another post “Climax at the Teslin River”

The soldiers had built Alaska Highway south along the east shore of Teslin Lake to where the Nisutlin River forms into a bay that runs into the lake—at Teslin Post. The soldiers would build their Highway right through tiny Teslin, ferry across Nisutlin Bay and keep going.

The citizens of Teslin didn’t know what to make of it. Excited by the sudden appearance of hundreds of soldiers bulldozing at and around them through the woods, they marveled at the transformed landscape. But Captain Boyd of the 93^rd in his memoir Me and Company C, recalled that they also recoiled from “hordes of men, overturned trees, mud strips and massive machinery churning through bush land…”

When the bulldozers pushed through to Fox Point and roared into Teslin, little Dolly Porter hid in panic from the massive machines pitching trees in every direction through her world. Tom (Bosum) Smith remembered that the rumbling power of the dozers disturbed and upset the adults in his village.

All the same, a few curious, and brave, Teslin people tried to walk the road or even hitch rides. The Army had issued strict orders to the black soldiers not to mingle, but they couldn’t keep the citizens from gathering in their boats along the lake to keep an eye on progress.

Captain Boyd of Company C remembered a white Scot named McGregor who ran the trading post. He also remembered two officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who lived at the “Mountie Station”. McGregor welcomed the black men to his store. Not as accommodating, the RCMP Sergeant ordered him to keep his black soldiers out of the settlement altogether. Boyd complied and instructed his Non-Commissioned officers to keep the citizens away from their bivouac. But he, “was sure there was some commingling of the soldiers and the Indian belles.”

A meal in the woods–away from the citizens

The engineers pressed local river boats into service wherever feasible. The sternwheelers and barges steamed constantly up Teslin Lake delivering equipment, and some villagers in small boats or canoes, traveled down Teslin Lake, to monitor the action.

Just one of the barges that streamed up the lake

Teslin, Yukon today

Seven Regiments Trashed the New Alaska Highway

Seven regiments powered through the wilds of the North Country in the summer of 1942, gouging the Alaska Highway out of the wilderness. Equipment broke. The regiments chewed through axles, rollers and tracks. One cat broke down, then another, parts from one fixed the other and the cannibalized tractor sat at the side of the road. A truck sunk in the mud, sunk deep, would take too long to dig out?

Trash worried no one. Leave it where it stands; keep going.

Link to another story “Army Trash in the North Country”

Truck drivers and cat skinners scavenged parts from abandoned vehicles, carried them as spares–tires, axles, tracks, anything useable. A driver who left even a useable truck unattended might well return to find a stripped hulk.

The United States and its Army at war didn’t do environmental impact statements, didn’t have an EPA to deal with (or an OSHA, for that matter). The Corps didn’t concern itself much with 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 couldn’t keep up with demand for their services and the motor pools didn’t waste time on junk. Scattered, along with the wrecks, lumber; cement; and, especially, empty fuel barrels gave the road one of its best nicknames. It became the “Oil Can Highway”. 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 included a latrine. Hastily covered over when the bivouac moved. They tended to stay covered. But every bivouac also included a garbage dump. Soldiers on kitchen police (KP) buried it too, of course, But bears immediately dug it back up. They could paw through four feet of dirt, topped with rocks.

Apparently they are still abandoning vehicles.

Thousands Worked Incredibly Hard

This was the most sophisticated source of care on the route.

Thousands Worked Incredibly Hard

Thousands of men worked incredibly hard in cold and then heat and in incessant rain to build the Alaska Highway. They powered over mountains, through and across streams, through deep woods with bulldozers, trucks, saws, axes… They got injured. A lot.

They lived in close quarters, especially when the weather turned cold. Illnesses ranging from flu and pneumonia to measles, if they got a foothold, spread quickly. Some contracted tuberculosis which was endemic among the natives.

Link to another story “Communicable Disease and Canadian Natives”

God knows, mental stress was constant.

Almost certainly, the black troops were especially susceptible. The Deep South hadn’t offered black men health exams and screenings for conditions such as asthma, diabetes, hypertension, colitis, sickle cell anemia or chronic skin conditions. And the rapidly expanding army hadn’t gone out of its way to screen new recruits. Diseases and conditions came with some of the soldiers to the North Country; showed up only after they got there.

Doctors and dentists roamed through the field companies, spending a few days with one and then the next. Medics served more permanently with each company; first responders. The Army built a hospital in Whitehorse.

The village of Carcross housed a small field hospital and dispensary. A medic working out of there toted a “large band aid box” with pain pills. He would clean and tape cuts and bruises, but he tended to miss more serious issues. A problem like appendicitis might require three trips to the medic—along with forceful yelling or screaming and loud cursing to attract his attention.

Correction and Apology to a true hero, Bad Whiskey Red

I try hard to make my stories interesting and I also try very hard to make them accurate. Occasionally I make a mistake and in a recent post I made one I deeply regret.

On January 23 I posted a story about “Castner’s Cutthroats” a special force organized to do battle in the Aleutians. Among other things they led the Army ashore on Attu when they took it back from the Japanese.

In that story I included this sentence. “The Japanese shot one cutthroat, Bad Whiskey Red, through the heart while the others dove for cover.”

Yesterday two comments appeared on that post.

Matthew says:

February 4, 2021 at 11:07 pm

My Grandfather, Alfred Brattain ( aka Bad Whiskey Red ) survived WW2. In fact he lived a long life afterwards to the ripe old age of 93. He was a great man! A man’s man! He had many memories and stories of that time in his life.

Bruce G Brattain says:

February 4, 2021 at 11:04 pm

Bad Wisky Red was my father, Alfred A Brattain. He was not shot through the heart or I would not be here. Nor would my two sisters. Bruce Brattain

I sincerely apologize for the error and I have removed the offending sentence from the story.

Menace of Mentasta

Menace confronted the soldiers building the Alaska Highway at every turn. But the black soldiers of the 97^th had to conquer the most fearful menace of them all—Mentasta Pass.

At the turn of the century the Army had built a pack trail from Valdez to Eagle. Alaskans found the trail dangerous, impossible to maintain and they quickly abandoned it. Unfortunately, it still showed as a line on maps the generals used to plan their assault on the northernmost portion of the Highway.

Link to another story “Trail to Alaska’s Interior.”

The soldiers of the 97^th Engineers would make their way to the point where the old trail had been abandoned. From there they would upgrade seventy miles of it just enough to get their trucks and dozers through to their portion of the Highway on the Tanana River.

On June 7 the young soldiers of the 97^th reached their starting point and started turning the Valdez-Eagle Trail into a road. Reality didn’t fit the Generals’ maps. The soldiers not only climbed abruptly into yet another mountain range, but they found that glaciers fronted these mountains. Mountains present rock cliffs. Glaciers present cliffs of glacial moraine—in plain English, sand.

Their cats started a side hill cut on what one officer called the Slana sand hill, and the operators were still getting the feel of their dozers and graders and carryalls when their road arrived at Lake Mentasta.

Massive mountains loomed out front. They would have to build up the side of a steep cliff to get to Mentasta Pass. At the lake, the young soldiers faced the menace; turned their dozers and carryalls east and started trying to gouge a road out the sand. Forward progress slowed abruptly.

The old pack horse trail had twisted and turned, hugging the side of the cliff, barely wide enough to pass a single file string of pack horses The soldiers had to build a trail to pass bulldozers and trucks.

Another Take on Mentasta Pass

They pulled it off, and they learned unique skills in the process. Threading bulldozer tracks back onto their sprockets while the dozer hung over a precipice turned out to be a skill not everyone could master. One sergeant explained in an interview years later that the operator “…got to know how to drop that blade to keep from tumbling down the mountain.”

Suddenly Climbing

Suddenly climbing into Keystone Canyon, a truck driver found himself working his clutch, hurriedly shifting down through the gears to the lowest one. Driving from the Port of Valdez toward the interior of Alaska he had just covered about 15 miles of rough, muddy, but misleadingly flat road. Now as his truck struggled up into Keystone, towering rock cliffs punctuated at intervals by cascading waterfalls, Bridal Veil and Horsetail, closed in on him from both sides.

Link to anothe story “The Richardson Highway”

His skinny dirt passage, cut into the cliff on his left, climbed; and, as he climbed with it, the cliff fell away on his right. At its bottom, the cascading water of the falls found the Lowe River and rushed back toward Valdez and the ocean.

The road wound along the cliffside. The canyon on his right got deeper. Periodic ruts and washouts narrowed the road to barely more than the width of his vehicle and his right-side tires rolled over crumbling dirt right at the edge of a precipitous drop that went, as he climbed, from hundreds of feet to thousands of feet.

One Highway—the Richardson–leads from the Port of Valdez into the interior of Alaska. Keystone commences the highway’s climb into the towering mountains and glaciers of the Alaska Range. And at the top of this first dramatic climb the truck rumbled into Thompson Pass.

In the 1940’s so much snow accumulated in Thompson Pass that the Alaska Road Commission had to close it for the winter. In 1942 with help from some soldiers of the 97^th Engineers, they had gouged a path through Thompson and opened it in May. Snow still towered four stories high on both sides of the road.

The first soldiers through the pass convoyed between the towering cliffs of snow, rode benches on either side of a bouncing and sliding canvas covered truck bed, out into the valley beyond the Pass. Their trucks slewed and rumbled 163 miles, all the way to Slana, the end of one road; the beginning of the one they had come to build.

The Million Dollar Valley

The million-dollar valley collected a million dollars from the US Army Air Corps in January 1942—collected it in the form of 3 B-26 Marauders at Greyling Creek near the British Columbia, Yukon border.

Link to Another Story “Lend Lease and Canada’s Northwest Staging Route”

In the run up to war Canada had installed the Northwest Staging Route, a string of airfields from Canada north to Alaska. In case of hostilities with Japan the military could fly men and material to Alaska. A month after Pearl Harbor, the US Army Air Corps tried to use it. On January 5, 1942 a flight of fourteen B-26 Marauder bombers took off from Boise, Idaho and flew north to Edmonton without incident. Flying north from Edmonton would provide a vastly different experience.

Flying over mountainous, subarctic country required a unique skill set. But the Air Corps didn’t know that, and nobody thought to ask the bush pilots who did know. They were, after all, the Air Corps and the bush pilots were, after all, just bush pilots. On the 16^th the marauders took off and headed for the airstrip at Whitehorse, Yukon.

The pilots carried pencil drawn maps. They had no access to navigation aids. They had plenty of access to British Columbia winter. And they had no idea what they were getting into. Miraculously, eleven of the Marauders made it to Whitehorse. But three got lost.

By evening, low on gas, with no idea which way to go, forced to low altitude by blowing snow, they decided to crash land; began looking for a suitable location. British Columbia graciously offered a mountain ringed valley, broad, fairly flat, covered with snow. The pilots gratefully accepted. And turned the valley into the “Million Dollar Valley.” Two of the pilots dealt with the snow by keeping their landing gear up, coasted onto the valley floor like monster toboggans. The third pilot, worried about landing speed, put his wheels down to dig into the snow.

The wheels did, indeed, dig into the snow—too deep and too quickly. The marauder flipped up onto its nose in a spectacular crash, injuring the pilot and copilot, leaving the rest of the crew merely shaken up.

A search the next morning failed to find the marauders, but the next day a flight of P-40E fighters, also headed to Alaska, spotted the three planes. Bush pilot, Russ Baker, as grizzled and North Country experienced as Bush Pilots come, flew in with his Fokker, landed on skis and flew the injured men out to Watson Lake. It took three more days to get the rest of the men out.

Explore North on the Million Dollar Valley

Mike Gay’s Dad and Kiska in August

Mike Gay’s dad landed on Kiska at night. His First Special Service Force unit found plenty of misery—but no Japanese soldiers.

Link to another story “Retaking the Islands”

In response to their disaster on Attu, the Japanese had abandoned Kiska. Americans had even intercepted and decrypted the evacuation order, but one man on the ground didn’t believe it; and that man, Admiral Kincaid, was the boss.

So, on August 15, 1943, thirty thousand Americans, including Mike Gay’s dad, and five thousand Canadians plowed through the pounding North Pacific surf onto Kiska.

In the confusion on the beach, some of the Allied troops took friendly fire. And the departing Japanese had booby trapped everything in sight. Initial reports from the island, especially casualty reports, looked to Kincaid exactly like the tough battle he expected.

Mike Gay’s dad “served with the First Special Service Force.” Half Americans and half Canadians, these soldiers had “trained in Montana at mountain climbing, snow skiing, hand to hand combat, tactics, parachute jumping and demolition. They trained outdoors all week long, with no tents and extremely low temperatures.

The First Special Service Force went ashore on Kiska at night in rubber boats. “The Japs had pulled out…” But they couldn’t know that. They climbed short cliffs and moved inland over cold wet rocks through heavy fog. In the confusion they took fire that killed and wounded some of them. But that turned out to be friendly fire.

Eventually the Allied soldiers sorted things out and the firing stopped. But they remained on the empty, miserable island for several days, short of rations. They resorted to untwisted segments of rope, bent safety pins (from ammo bandoliers) as fishing gear; baited the hooks with the red strips from cigarette packs; and caught small trout from tiny streams.

Kiska while the Japanese were there

Defending Alaska

Defending Alaska? In the runup to WWII some senior officers in the United States Army thought a lot about that potential problem. Most did not. In August1941 they called the Alaska National Guard to active duty and moved most of it out of Alaska. Territorial Governor Earnest Gruening had seen that coming and he urged the formation of a new guard organization for Alaska.

Link to Another Story “Retaking the Islands”

Pearl Harbor changed everything. And events in Alaska indicated possible Japanese designs on the remote territory. A Japanese ship reconnoitered the Alaska coastline. Japanese crewmen actually came ashore and questioned the natives.

And then, of course, the Japanese bombed Dutch Harbor and occupied Kiska and Attu. Defending Alaska instantly became a much bigger deal.

Responding to my story about retaking Attu Monday evening, Pete J. Peter suggested I investigate the story of the “Alaska Territorial Guard.” So I did.

At the request of Territorial Governor Earnest Gruening the Army assigned Major Marvin Marston to assemble the Unit. Marston spent months, travelling by dog sled through Alaska and assembled a force of over 6,000 Native Americans from virtually every ethnic group in Alaska. His command included 27 women and a few soldiers as young as 12 and as old as 80.

The US Army wouldn’t allow Native Americans in the Army. The “Alaska Scouts” didn’t even get paid. But by any rational measure the Scouts served as soldiers—damned good soldiers. Accustomed to the unique weather and terrain, accomplished hunters and trackers, both the men and the women knew how to handle a rifle. They set about defending Alaska.

They patrolled thousands of miles of frigid coastline, set up cashes of supplies along isolated transportation routes and along the coast. They spotted and shot down incendiary balloon bombs that the Japanese launched to follow the jet stream. They guarded and secured the airfields used to fly lend lease airplanes over the top of the world to the Russians. They built fake cannons out of rocks and logs to confuse Japanese pilots flying overhead.

And they guarded the tiny town of Platinum—the only source of that precious metal in the Western Hemisphere.

The United States Congress finally granted the members of the “Alaska Territorial Guard” veteran status in the year 2000

Retaking the Islands

Retaking Kiska and Attu presented a daunting challenge, but America couldn’t leave the islands to the Japanese. In May 1943 the US Army’s 17^th Infantry, sailed north from California, and on May 11, supported by Castner’s Cutthroats, Canadian recon units and the Canadian Air Force, they stormed ashore into a frigid hell. The Japanese had concentrated inland on high ground. The 17^th confronted them from the beach.

Link to Another Story “Castner’s Cutthroats”

After two days of bloody stalemate, the Cutthroats and Canadian recon units attacked up the mountain as a diversion so the soldiers of the 7^th could advance through the valley. The scouts crawled, under heavy machine gun and artillery fire, to the top of the ridge then rained death on the Japanese.

The soldiers of the 17^th stormed up the valley past them and by the end of May they had pushed the remaining Japanese defenders into a small hillside area. Dug deep in caves in the mountainside, cut off from supplies, low on ammunition, the starving Japanese had no chance,

The 17^th had won the battle. But they didn’t know it. More important the Japanese didn’t know it.

On May 29 the cutthroats stood on the edge of a cliff overlooking the soldiers of the 17^th in the Chichagof Valley. Quite suddenly the 800 remaining Japanese soldiers launched a hopeless but deadly banzai attack. “Plunging their bayonets into sleeping American soldiers, the Japanese screamed. ‘We die—you die, too’”.

When the attack finally petered out, the surviving Japanese soldiers pulled pins on their grenades, held them under their chins, and gave their bloody last for the Emporer.

The Americans captured but 28 of them alive.