STORIES FROM NORTHERN CANADA AND ALASKA.

Marauding Japanese Forces

Marauding Japanese hatched a plan that would do precisely what the men who ordered the Alaska Highway feared. They would attack North America through the Aleutians and Alaska.

The simultaneous battle at Midway

They dispatched two battle groups. Planes from the carrier group would assault the American naval base at Dutch Harbor. Soldiers from the transports of the other group would invade and occupy the islands of Kiska and Attu.

The Americans knew the Japanese plan because they had broken their code. But they couldn’t spare much for the defense of the Aleutians.

Bull Halsey sent Admiral “Fuzzy” Theobald north with the ships he could spare and orders to stop the Japanese. Theobald deployed his few ships in an arc across the water to face them, but the arc covered way too many miles of water. The Japanese would almost certainly slip through.

Link to another story “Few Americans Worried about the Aleutians”

He reached out for the pilots and planes of the Eleventh Air Force at Elmendorf Field in Anchorage. Half of them moved to the air field at Cold Bay, 180 miles east of Dutch Harbor. The other half moved to the island of Unmak 40 miles west.

At 2:43 on the morning of June 3, 1942 the Japanese carriers launched warplanes. Some had to turn back, lost in the icy Aleutian fog, but fifteen planes made it to Dutch Harbor.

At 5:40 the Americans spotted them. Air raid sirens howled. The six ships in the harbor started their engines and went to battle stations. Telegraph wires to Umnak and Cold Bay hummed, urgently summoning Dutch Harbor’s air defense.

Unfortunately, the wires to nearby Umnak hummed in vain, the pilots there didn’t get the message. Pilots at Cold Bay scrambled their P-40’s, but they scrambled 180 miles from Dutch Harbor. The marauding Japanese would be long gone before they could get there.

At about 5:50, the eye of the storm passed over Dutch Harbor and cleared the rain and fog just as the Japanese pilots descended to attack. They had a clear view of the base and harbor that they hammered for the next twenty minutes.

American batteries launched puffs of flak into the sky. Machine gun tracers arced up from the ground, seeking the range. Two lumbering PBY’s, seaplanes, moored in the harbor managed to get into the air. Japanese pilots shot the first PBY down immediately, but the second managed to down one of them, the only Japanese casualty of the attack.

Chickens on the Highway

Chickens. How do you get fresh chicken to men building a highway through subarctic wilderness? Leo Perra’s dad found a way.

Leo reads my blog and one night he commented that his dad delivered food to workers on the Alaska Highway. I asked if he had information to share, and he certainly did. Here is the result.

Link to another story “Swarming Road Builders Need Food and Supplies”

Very young at the time, Leo didn’t remember a lot of details. He didn’t know, for example, how far up the Highway his dad delivered. But he clearly remembered that when dad delivered he was gone for 17 days.

“From memory, Leo wrote, “I recall a photo of a truck with chickens or rabbits in cages when I was a child. These were destined for the Alaska Highway crews. “I think, Leo wrote “that food was sent live as refrigeration etc. was not that common in carriers.”

Leo’s family lived in Spirit River Alberta, some 60 miles east of Dawson Creek. The Northern Alberta Railroad spur line from Grande Prairie terminated there. To get to Dawson Creek and the beginning of the Highway one had to ride around through Grande Prairie.

Clearly Leo’s dad made that trip a lot.

“I have” Leo wrote, “an old picture of my dad with a truckload of chickens. These don’t look very alive as they seemed to have simply been loaded into the truck.” Leo attached a copy of the photo and identified his father as the man with glasses. I have to agree the chickens don’t look like live specimens.

Referring to our book, We Fought the Road, Leo recalled a story about turkey’s being available for a Thanksgiving dinner in 1942 and that made him wonder if turkeys may have been trucked in the same way.

Actually things haven’t changed much. This truck is going down the interstate.

How to move chickens today

Mild-mannered Hero

Mild-mannered hero, Staff Sergeant Charles Davis, turned up in a story in the Pittsburgh Courier in early 1944. The reporter actually described him as a “slight and mild-mannered” black soldier and then went on to relate not one, but two incredible stories about mild mannered Sergeant Davis.

Link to another story “Rough Draft of a Highway”

In November 1942, the Corps of Engineers had ‘finished’ a rough and thoroughly dangerous land route to Alaska. Civilian contractors from Canada and the United States swung in behind them, laboring to improve it. But the Army needed it right away; couldn’t wait for improvements. The soldiers who drove it took dire risks.

On January 29, 1944 The Pittsburgh Courier told the first mild-mannered hero story.

On a day when the thermometer registered minus 60 a truck carrying Sgt Davis and two other men broke down 56 miles from their destination. Their base station did not expect them back. Their destination station did not know they were coming. Help was not on the way. They had rations for one day and no tool to cut wood.

Davis ordered his two companions to break branches in shifts to keep a fire going while he worked on the truck, thawing his hands every few minutes. Getting the truck running again took five days.

If you’re stuck there’s no source of help

But the three men survived.

On January 29 the Courier came back with this sequel.

“Old Betsy”, the regimental shop truck, carrying Sgt Davis and three of his men “smashed up”; seriously injured all three of Davis’ men. Davis pulled them from the truck. But the temperature at 30 below, posed a bigger threat than their injuries. Davis built a roaring fire then stripped to his coveralls and wrapped the most seriously injured man in his own winter gear. Then he proceeded to walk 12 miles back to camp for help!

For this exploit, Davis received The Soldier’s Medal—the Army’s highest award for heroism not involving actual conflict with an enemy.

Big Devil Swamp Ate a Dozer

Big Devil Swamp swallowed a Company B bulldozer whole in June 1942 and immortalized the Company’s commander, Captain Pollock. Commanding General Hoge had assigned the Black soldiers of the 93^rd Engineers to create a path from Carcross to the Teslin River. The white soldiers of the 340^th Engineers would use it to get to their starting point at Teslin.

Racing to make that path, the soldiers of the 93^rd, including Captain Pollock’s Company B had passed Summit Lake and plunged through Big Devil Swamp—left a barely passable trail. Then, once the soldiers of the 340^th had worked through and around, got to the Teslin and moved on, Captain Pollock’s Company B turned back to make the road through the swamp more permanent.

Link to a story on “Lunging Dozers”

Days of heavy rain beset the whole regiment. One young officer wrote to his girlfriend, “It has rained here for three days and man you never saw such mud in your life. Seemed like it was miles thick.” The rain primed the swamp for Company B’s arrival and set its soldiers up for an event immortal in the history of the 93^rd Engineers.

Long stretches of road turned to the consistency of wet concrete. Entire sections simply slid away. One by one the swamp immobilized Company B’s trucks, stranding them on the side of the road.

Finally, one of the Company’s precious bulldozers, growling through the muck, eased over into a muskeg bog. The operator threw his machine into reverse and accelerated, trying desperately to back away from the sucking mud. The great treads spun and slung mud defiantly toward the bog—to no avail. Capt. Pollock hurriedly dispatched another dozer to pull it out–too late. Big Devil’s Swamp swallowed the D8 whole. Prodding deep into the mud with a ten-foot pole, a soldier tried to locate the machine by feel—no luck. The North Country swamp holds its giant mechanical meal to this day.

This man actually likes Yukon Mud

On an old Army map of the area, one spot in the middle of Big Devil Swamp is labelled, “Pollock’s Graveyard”.

Motor Pool

D8 delivered,, checked out and ready to go

Motor Pool–the soldiers of the 93^rd Engineers needed one desperately. And locating one and getting heavy equipment to it presented a problem.

In May 1942 the black soldiers of the 93^rd Engineers plunged through Yukon’s forbidding wilderness working with a couple of borrowed bulldozers and hand tools. But Ships carrying their heavy equipment steamed out of the Pacific and up the Lynn Canal making their way to the Skagway dock.

Link to another story “The 18th Comes to Skagway”

The trick would be getting it off the ships, onto rail cars, up to Carcross and then over the twisting muddy road still very much under construction out to the lead companies. And somewhere out there the regiment needed a motor pool, a place close to the road builders where the dozers, jeeps, and trucks could be assembled, checked out and from where they could distribute it.

When Regimental Commander Colonel Johnson picked Jake’s Corner for his motor pool, the lead road building company, Company A, had not even got there yet. Company A ferried across the Tagish River on May 29 and 30. Company B crossed on June 1. Six days and ten miles on, Company A put the road through Jake’s Corner and kept going.

Behind them drivers and men of the future motor pool headed up the WP&YR into Carcross and then struggled over the rough road determined to catch up with the road builders at Jake’s Corner.

Jake’s Corner Today

Yukon Territory fought the equipment invasion with heavy rains and thick mud, but the engineers, sweating and cursing, prevailed. With a brutal schedule hanging over their heads, Hoge and his commanders needed the equipment in place and working. Their soldiers made it happen.

Motor pool after the equipment went to the road builders

Cairns along the Highway

Max is clearly visible along the highway

Cairns near Nisutlin Bay mark the final resting places for two men who came to the Highway and never left.

Link to another story “Bonner and Bess and the Memorial Cairns”

James Miller, who drove a tractor trailer truck up and down the Alaska Highway back when it was still dirt and gravel commented on one of my stories one night. “Somewhere along the Alaska Highway a soldier died and was buried along the road and every time I drove by that [cairn] I thought,” what a lonely place to spend eternity.

Mr. Miller wondered whether I knew anything about the soldier the cairn memorializes and what had happened to him.

Good friends in the Teslin Historical Society have maintained that Cairn for nearly eighty years. They told us it marked the final resting place of Max Richardson of the 340^th Engineers. Max died in a wrecked truck right at that spot.

But they also told us of a second cairn not far from there. Since it doesn’t stand at the edge of the Highway not many people know it’s there, but the historical society maintains that one too, and one of their members told us how to find it.

A few miles south and east of the Bay Bridge, one turns left on a brushy two-track road into the woods. Rocking and bouncing over the two-track for a couple of miles brings you to a tiny lake and on its shore stands the second cairn. This one memorializes William Whitfield of the 340^th.

A 340^th Regiment morning report notes William’s death and the location, but it gives no details. For her book Pioneer Road, though, Donna Blasor-Bernardt interviewed Sgt James Barrett who told her the story for her book Pioneer Road.

Doing inventory in the supply room, Whitfield, the supply sergeant for the H&S Company, and a young Lieutenant, came across a sub-machine gun. The lieutenant showed Whitfield how to field strip the weapon and reassemble it. For reasons unknown he also loaded it. A few minutes later it discharged accidentally. The bullet entered Whitfield’s chest and he died instantly.

You tube on the Thompson

Christmas 1942

Christmas 1942 found the black soldiers and the white officers of the 93^rd Engineers deep in Yukon. In our book, We Fought the Road, we shared two memories from that day. For December 25, 2020 my Christmas present to all of you is to share those memories here.

Link to another story “Dear Pop”

For an interviewer many years later, Anthony Mouton, a young soldier in Company A remembered beef hash for Christmas dinner—and loneliness. Mouton and another soldier, John Lockott, spent the day in their tent listening to one cracked record, played over and over. Serenade In Blue by Paul Whiteman and Helen Forrest reminded them of home.

The evening before, on December 24, young white Lt. Turner Timberlake penned a letter to “Dearest Mother and Folks.”

Tonight, he wrote, is Christmas Eve. Tonight is the night that years ago I waited eleven months and 23 days for. Tonight is the night that sort of ties a rope around the families of America so we can say that we are bonded together. Best of all, tonight is the night that mother and dad will do their darnndest to make those kids dash down the steps at six in the morning with joy and glee that somehow just bespeaks the nature of our family.

I wish I could be home, folks, but tonight I’ll just sit here and have a Christmas smoke dream, dreaming of those times of joy that each year would, without fail, drown our home in a mist of greeting and good cheer for all. Golly and how Pop used to just lie in bed waiting for those rascals to get up and with joy he would be pulled from his covers and carried downstairs just like he was a kid of old.

But tonight somehow, folks, Christmas is different. All the fellows are gathered around talking of the times they had and the wonderful things they received, but tonight we are all gathered here just waiting for either a chance to make America have more seasons of joy or a chance to say, “Well, we tried.”

But really, Folks, we aren’t down hearted. We are just thinking of you all back home. And what more in this world could a man want than the right to think of home and what his home meant to him. It’s wonderful, Folks.

…I hope and pray with all my heart that this Christmas makes you proud and gives you the right to say, “Well our boys are doing their part.”

Vivid Memories and Christmas on the Highway

This is what the actual work looked like

Vivid memories of his time as a civilian surveyor on the Alaska Highway stayed with Joseph Hutlas for the rest of his life. Dances and a Christmas Eve service may have been the most vivid of all.

Link to another story “Burwash Bounce”

He told his stories to Donna Blazor Bernhardt and she included some of them in her book Pioneer Road.

Civilian Hutlas accepted a job and came to Yukon. “On arrival to this no man’s land, I thought I had made a drastic mistake.” Joseph certainly had no problem remembering the cold (having to saw a loaf of bread too frozen to slice), the snow, the ferocious summertime mosquitoes… But by the time he left for home, he had got used to all that. The country grew on him, and he almost felt bad leaving for home. “Working on the Alaska Highway was an experience I will treasure for a long time.”

The dances came almost by accident. His employer constructed a laundry to serve their workers—and brought in 75 young ladies from different parts of Canada to operate it. The workers set to and built a rough timber dance hall next to the laundry. On Saturday nights the ratio of 200 men to 75 women seemed about right to the women. And it made the men happy.

Joseph’s most vivid memory came in December. After 6 months in British Columbia, Joseph and 10 other men began to think about Christmas; decided to ask a missionary to come up from Ft. Nelson to hold a Christmas Eve service.

North Pole News

The missionary and his assistant “arrived by dogsled late on Christmas Eve in brutal weather.” They somehow managed to bring a small organ on the sled.

A piece of canvas strung up between “snow laden pine trees”, served as a church, and during the service as they sang “Silent Night”, snow began to fall “in huge flurries.” This addition to the scene, “made all of us aware that Christmas was upon us.”

Joseph remembered that Christmas Eve mass with great emotion. “We all had it, kneeling on the snow-covered ground, tears in our eyes.” Memories of home, loved ones they hadn’t seen in months amplified their loneliness. But “Knowing the presence of God,” made everybody feel better.

Every Christmas after that Joseph remembered that one; wondered about the men who had shared it. Did they think about it too?

All Hell Broke Loose

All hell broke loose when the US Army invaded little Skagway, Alaska in the spring of 1942. Endless ships of every description came up the Lynn Canal, tied up in Skagway’s harbor and disgorged soldiers—thousands of soldiers—then turned and went back for more. For old timers the sudden arrival of the Corps brought memories of Gold Rush days to vivid life. The last time all hell broke loose in Skagway.

Link to another story “The 18th Comes to Skagway”

The first soldiers to arrive didn’t stay long. The WP&YR railroad carried them up into Canada. But soldiers kept coming, coming much faster than one little narrow gauge railroad could haul them away. Swarms of soldiers lived in pup tents in a swelling ‘tent city’ on the Airfield. The Army’s trucks and jeeps and endlessly pounding boots packed the dirt streets hard.

In normal times Marshall Louis Rapuzzi had an easy job. The swarming soldiers, young men, not angels, changed that. For the first time in his career, Rapuzzi holstered a weapon and the City turned the McCabe College into a makeshift ‘justice center’ with a courtroom, an office for Marshall Rapuzzi and, most important, a jail.

The modern Rappuzi

For Father Gallant, his seven teachers and his eighteen students at the native mission school, routines changed dramatically. The streets swarmed with soldiers and, for safety, the children marched to and from school in a group. White students at the brand-new territorial school had a much better time. Some of them even got to ride to school in Army jeeps.

Two regiments shared the grass of the air strip. Each featured mess tents with stoves up and cooking, a medical hospital tent open for business and, perhaps most important, latrines dug and ‘open for business’.

To the west, the swollen Skagway River roared. Winds churned the water of the Lynn Canal into whitecaps. Nighttime brought below zero temperatures. Fully clothed, wrapped with comforters and wool blankets and snuggled in sleeping bags, soldiers still slept in fits and shivers. No matter. Up in Whitehorse, General Hoge, the commander of the Alcan Project, had no intention of leaving the soldiers settled in Skagway.

Lunging Dozers

Link to another story “Dumb Going Up There”

Lunging dozers tried hard to solve a big problem for the soldiers of the 35^th Engineers at Muncho Lake, four hundred sixty miles out from Dawson Creek. The Lunging dozers failed. But one very creative and damned courageous soldier, Lt. Miletech, succeeded.

Tall mountain cliffs bordered Muncho Lake but along most of the shore the mountain kindly provided a rock ledge that the soldiers could build a road on. About halfway along the shore, though, the Mountain ceased to cooperate. The ledge disappeared and the vertical rock cliff simply disappeared into the lake.

At first the soldiers did not see a problem. They didn’t need much of a ledge, so they would just build one. They worked dozers around and up the backside of the mountain drew up to the edge of the cliff and commenced pushing dirt, rocks, trees over the edge to splash into the water far below. Sooner or later the debris would pile up from the bottom to form a ridge along the cliff. For days, the water at the edge of the cliff swallowed debris and finally the lunging dozers gave up. They had failed to reckon with Muncho’s depth.

Video from Muncho Lake Today

Enter Lt. Miletich.

Colonel Ingalls the regimental commander personally recorded the Lieutenant’s incredible solution to the problem.

Fastening a long rope to a projecting rock up on the cliff, stripping to his skivvies and tying himself to the rope, Miletich dove into the frigid lake; located a hole in the cliff wall.

Shivering back on shore, he removed from a box of dynamite, one stick and laid it aside. The rest of the box of dynamite sticks he placed under his arm and swam it down to push it into the cliffside hole. On shore again, he inserted a blasting cap into the stick of dynamite he had laid aside, attached a waterproof fuse, lit the fuse, put the dynamite with its sputtering fuse between his teeth and swam back down to insert it in the hole next to the box. Swimming clear, he watched with the others as the dynamite detonated, blowing a geyser of rock and water up and out of the cliff.

Repeating this incredible maneuver several times, Miletich provided the 35th enough roadbed to get around the cliff and on up the road.