STORIES FROM NORTHERN CANADA AND ALASKA.

Most Horrific

Most horrific event in recorded history, World War II has no real competition for that title. But horrific events challenge those who face them and epic challenge inspires epic response. The construction of the Alaska Highway offers a perfect example.

The words, “World War II”, familiar, prosaic, have long since lost the power to convey the cataclysmic nature of the event.

Historical forces whose roots lay centuries in the past, worked their way to the surface in the early years of the 20^th century. The specific consequences differed from country to country, region to region. But a series of unprecedented events, each more dramatic than the last, occurred everywhere.

Link to another story “The War Demanded the Alaska Highway”

When the world exploded into war between 1935 and 1945, the explosion was, indeed, a World War. And war, of course, meant death and destruction on an unprecedented scale. But millions of ordinary people responded to the challenge with heroism and war also led to epic achievement. In their combined response those ordinary people built the new world that emerged after 1945

The story of the epic struggle to build the Alaska Highway through some of the toughest geography and climate on earth—1600 miles in just eight months—stands on its own. But, from genesis to conclusion, it perfectly exemplifies the confused, chaotic process by which the violent upheaval of war inspired epic achievement.

Another epic achievement–the Normandy Invasion

The drama of the Alcan in 1942 arose from the interaction of individuals—thousands of them. The young soldiers who came to build the road came from the United States, but some of them were white and some were black and that fact made important parts of their experience very different.

And the people who lived there in the vastness of Northern Canada and Alaska, played as big a role in the project as the soldiers who came to it.

In 1941 all these ordinary people were living their lives in worlds they perceived as normal and immutable. In 1942 the war wrenched them all into a totally new world, threw them together, changed their lives forever, mixed them like ingredients in a cocktail shaker and poured them out onto a primordial path through British Columbia, Yukon and Alaska. Together they created the great Alcan Highway.

The National World War II Museum

Edmonton and Wiley Post

Wiley’s Winnie May in Edmonton–almost home.

Edmonton Canada began the home stretch of one-eyed aviator Wiley Post’s record setting round the world flight in 1931. And the Edmonton stop nearly put an end to it.

Link to another story “Bush Pilots in Canada”

He and his navigator had crossed England, Russia, Siberia, and Alaska. Edmonton, number 12 of 14 stops, seven days into the 8 day trip, represented a return to civilization.

Hope Morritt’s dad loved to tell the dramatic story of the pilots’ takeoff from Edmonton and she shared it in her book Land of the Fireweed.

The day before “Winnie May”, Post’s Lockheed Vega, arrived in Edmonton, heavy rain soaked the only runway at the airport into gumbo muck. Post could land on it, but “a takeoff was impossible.”

First they had to get Winnie out of the mud.

The airport manager picked one of the few paved streets in Edmonton and talked the power company into dropping the electric lines that lined it. They even dropped the wires of a trolley line.

“The Post landing and takeoff put Edmonton in world news.”

Like almost everybody else in Edmonton, Hope’s dad stood on the sidewalk along the avenue at dawn on July 1. It is no wonder the memory stayed vividly with him for the rest of his life.

“The big white plane roared down the street.” Its wingtips all but grazing the light poles, straddling the streetcar tracks. “Its propeller spinning faster, faster until…” the plane lifted into a wide arc and flew toward the sun.

Winnie May lifted off the street and arced toward the sun.

That night the radio reported that the “Winnie May” had arrived back where she started eight days earlier at Roosevelt Field in New York.

Post returned to Edmonton in 1935 taking his friend Will Rogers north. Landing and takeoff presented no problems in 1935, but sadly Edmonton proved the last civilization the men would ever see. They crashed near Point Barrow, Alaska the next day, and both men died.

Entertainment

This would definitely be going a bit too far

Entertainment did not come easy to young men stuck in camp in the deep woods along the Alaska Highway. Edward “Whiskers” Frankenberg and his fellows found that getting bears to eat out of their hands definitely provided entertainment. Whiskers told Donna Blasor-Bernhardt about it for her book, Pioneer Road.

Link to another story “The Rude Bear”

If a camp stayed in one place for a week or more, garbage tended to accumulate. They buried it, but that didn’t fool the bears who gathered to dig it up. The men carefully avoided “alarming them” and the bears “didn’t seem afraid of us.”

Could they get the bears to eat out of their hands? “Young and foolishly brave”, they coated their hands with honey or syrup. And, sure enough, the bears would happily lick it off.

On one occasion Whiskers got himself in an awkward stance and had to lean in extra close to the bear to keep his balance. “Talk about hot bear breath! That bear could have slapped me silly…” The older Whiskers, telling Blasor-Bernhardt about it shook his head. “I sure wouldn’t feed wild bears like that now.”

The bears not only cheerfully cleaned the men’s syrupy fingers, they also developed some behavior issues among themselves. They became jealous, selfish. “If another bear came too close, the bear you were feeding would drop down and whirl around…” Sometimes they would actually fight.

Ultimately, the men took bear relations entertainment a step further. They treed a cub then cut the tree down. “The cub jumped off and ran to another tree.” They caught him after the third tree and put him in a cage, but “he looked so sad that three days later…” they turned him loose.

“By that time, he was used to us feeding him and he didn’t really care to go.”

Feeding Bears is not encouraged today

Perpetual Motion in Dawson City

Perpetual motion obsessed Jan Welzl. Most people came to Dawson City to look for gold. Jan came to build a perpetual motion machine. He filled his three cabins with pipe and fittings, axles, counterweights, and even beer bottles. Whirling drive belts ran from the window of one cabin to the door of the next.

His neighbors thought the rotund, perpetually smiling man with a heavy Czech accent a harmless eccentric, especially since his perpetual appetite for junk tended to keep the town clean.

Link to another story “Yukon People”

Jan Welzl had lived an amazingly adventurous life, and a few of his adventures may have actually happened. In Europe in the mid-twenties, Jan eked out a living giving lectures about his travels in and around the Arctic. Kangaroos he asserted would make better sled animals than dogs. He told of a race of pygmy Eskimos who had ridden a meteor from Mars.

You get the idea.

In addition to lecturing he wrote articles for local publications, but in sad truth Jan couldn’t write a readable sentence, let alone an entire article.

A pair of local writers found his stories fascinating. They interviewed him, took notes, plied him with rum (his stories got better after dose of rum). They paid him the equivalent of $100 for his rights in the book and he went on with his life.

The book, Thirty Years in the Golden North, didn’t sell very well until an American Publisher released it and it became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Sales took off, but by that time Jan had made his way to Dawson City and perpetual motion.

In 1933 Welzl heard about his best seller, read his own stories but also found several stories he’d never heard, let alone told. He couldn’t decide whether to disown the book altogether or fight for a share of the royalties. Since he’d signed a contract with the authors when he accepted their $100, he didn’t really have a choice.

Jan died in 1948. But a few years later in Communist Czechoslovakia “Eskimo Welzl” emerged as a symbol of the individualism suppressed by the regime. Czech’s made pilgrimages to Dawson City to decorate his tombstone, or at least the stone with his name on it.

Nobody actually knows the location of his grave.

Disaster Loomed

The Camp at Big Gerstle, Headquarters lives a bit higher on the hog.

Disaster loomed in the back of a 2 ½ ton truck parked at the Headquarters Company camp at Big Gerstle, Alaska. A young lieutenant proposed to haul ten soldiers, Sgt James Heard and his squad, 130 miles in the back of the unheated truck. The day’s extremely low temperature, combined with the wind chill effect created by a moving truck, would surely maim and injure them.

Link to Part 1 of the story “Mutiny?”

Sgt. Heard and his men had understood since childhood that black men did not argue with white men. But the Army had also trained Sgt Heard to take care of his men and protect them from disaster. He nervously requested and received permission to speak to the company commander, Lt. Howell.

Heard didn’t get to speak much. Instead he got to listen while Howell curtly ordered him to get back outside and get his men on the truck. Hearing their voices as they milled about outside his orderly room, Howell stalked to the door, yanked it open. Officious to a turn, he lined them up and asked each man individually whether he intended to obey orders and get on the truck. Some of the men said they would, most, including Sgt Heard, answered that they would board the truck if the others would.

Back outside, the scared soldiers huddled near the truck, and Howell ordered them into formation and played his trump card. He would, he said, issue a clear order, any man who did not obey would commit mutiny. The Army executes mutineers.

He raised his arm, fixed his gaze on his watch and gave them ten seconds to move to the truck. The men moved, if slowly, but, eyes fixed on his watch, the Lieutenant didn’t notice. He cancelled the trip, ordered the men under arrest in quarters, determined to charge them with mutiny.

Some of you are veterans. You know about arrogant young lieutenants. What is supposed to happen is that a wiser, older head prevails. Mutiny? Really? if, in the name of maintaining discipline, you need to punish them, make them peel potatoes.

Not this time.

Four days later the Army charged all ten men with mutiny. The mills of military justice ground solemnly toward a Whitehorse courtroom in June. The general court martial convicted nine of the ten; ordered them confined at hard labor for terms ranging from three to 18 years.

Captain Parsons former commander of Company F and council for the defense

We can’t make this stuff up.

We write non-fiction.

More on the Way Military Justice Used to Work

Mutiny?

Link to another story “Send Food or Send Coffins”

Mutiny, the Army’s most serious crime, visited the 97^th at Big Gerstle, Alaska in March 1943.

Or did it? The answer depends on your perspective and how you define mutiny.

In March at Big Gerstle, Headquarters Company commander Lt. Dewitt Howell received a routine order to establish a regimental supply office 130 miles up the road in Fairbanks. To do that he needed soldiers and he arranged to borrow Sgt. James Heard’s ten-man squad from Company F.

He turned the men over to his assistant, Lt. Lyons, who put them to work hauling and stacking supplies. And Lyons managed to scrounge up four beat up Studebaker trucks.

On the morning of March 29 Sgt. Heard and his squad reluctantly emerged from the barracks into a temperature of 36 below. Neither Lyons nor anyone else had found it necessary to share the details of the planned move with Sergeant Heard and his men. In Colonel Mitchim’s regiment, white officers planned; black enlisted men followed instructions. But Heard and his men knew the ropes; understood that the young lieutenant planned to move them and the piles of supplies somewhere.

Through the morning the squad loaded supplies into the three uncovered trucks. And they nervously eyeballed the fourth truck, the one with the ragged canvas cover. They knew from experience that moving that unheated truck down the road would create a wind chill far colder than 36 below.

If young Lt. Lyon didn’t know the danger, they sure did. They didn’t think about mutiny, they’d never heard of it. But they nervously wondered how far the young lieutenant planned to haul them.

With the three trucks loaded and ready to go, they broke for lunch, and Sgt. Heard finally learned their destination. The damned Lt, he informed his squad, intended to haul them 130 miles to Fairbanks. Riding that far in that frigid truck would certainly cost them fingers and toes and God knew what else.

In the United States Army in 1943, black soldiers knew not to argue with a white officer. But the Army had also trained Heard to take responsibility for the welfare of his me. He had to do something.

Youngest Alaska Highway Trucker

Youngest Alaska Highway Trucker? Without any doubt, Owen Ose holds that title. When three-year-old Owen piloted his truck on the Highway, the Corps of Engineers hadn’t even finished it. Owen, when he shared this claim with me a couple of years ago, hastened to add that the truck the youngest driver drove had “Tonka” printed on the doors.

Whew!

Owen’s dad worked as a manager for a civilian road building company in Minnesota, and in 1942 the Army borrowed his services from that company. They brought him north as a consultant to the Corps of Engineers. When the Corps completed the first draft of the Highway at the end of 1942, Dad gratefully returned to the relative warmth of Minnesota.

LInk to a story “Civilians on the Alaska Highway Project”

In 1943, though, the Public Roads Administration contracted with his company to send a whole crew north to do finishing work on the road. Dad returned to supervise that crew through the summer of 1943. And this time he brought his wife and two sons with him.

They lived through that summer adjacent to an Army camp, a camp that housed segregated black soldiers. Owen’s three-year-old memory didn’t know which unit the soldiers belonged to. For that matter he didn’t remember what portion of the road they worked on. But he remembered the soldiers.

Owen’s seven-year-old brother got to spend his days at the camp—with the cooks in the mess tent. Mom thought three-year-old Owen too young for that, so he spent his days piloting his Tonka on the Highway.

Finding Civilians who worked on the Highway

“My father and mother respected those men and we as a family had a good relationship with them.”

Wyatt Earp

Earp’s pride–the saloon in Nome that made him rich

Wyatt Earp. The name brings to mind Tombstone, Arizona and the gunfight at the OK Corral. In 1881, Wyatt, two of his brothers and Doc Holliday permanently ended the careers of five outlaws there. Few people know that Wyatt Earp had as much impact on Nome, Alaska as he did on Tombstone.

Link to another story “Sled Dogs Rescued Nome”

In 1897 Earp and his wife headed north to the Klondike, and stopped to winter in Wrangell, Alaska. The couple got by. Wyatt even served as town marshall, if only for 10 days.

In the spring they took to the river again, headed for Dawson and the Klondike. Unfortunately, Yukon River ice froze their steamer in at Rampart. They spent the winter there and, in the end, never made it to the Klondike. Wyatt’s friend Tex Ricard convinced him that Nome offered a better future.

At first blush, Nome didn’t appear to offer anything. The town didn’t even have docks. Small boats met steamers and brought passengers within 30 feet of the shore. From there men waded, carrying their wives on their backs into a scruffy little town two blocks wide and five miles long.

But rumors of gold made their way south, and people began to make their way north. Wyatt and a partner built Nome’s first two story building, and their luxurious Dexter Saloon made Nome a center for entertainment (the second floor housed a discreet brothel).

In Seattle, for a time, Nome became a popular summer destination. The population swelled to 20,000. And any noteworthy visitors, including future president Herbert Hoover, and writer Jack London, landed sooner or later at the Dexter.

The reputation of the famous gunfighter and lawman didn’t survive his time in Nome. One reporter described Earp showing off one evening and being subdued by US Marshall Lowe who slapped his face and took his gun. But when he sold his share of the Dexter and left Alaska in Nov. 1899, he took with him $80,000 (more than 2 million in today’s dollars)

Bishop Coudert’s Frozen Dinner

Bishop Coudert grabbed a plate of hot food in the kitchen tent. By the time he got it to the mess tent, 120 feet away, it had frozen solid. William Griggs spilled gasoline on his clothing, it evaporated so fast that when he hurriedly peeled it off, skin came with it. No mere thermometer can convey the reality of subarctic cold the way men’s memories can.

Link to another story “William Griggs, A Most Unusual Soldier”

Captain Neuberger cracked an egg and found it full of ice crystals. Potatoes developed ribbed strips that reminded him of Italian marble. And On several mornings Bishop Coudert found ice crystals in his shaving lotion.

Neuberger described intense cold this way. “Outdoors at almost 100 degrees below the freezing point, your face feels as if it were being branded with a hot iron. Knees encased in woolen underwear quaver involuntarily. Feet tingle painfully and then become numb. One yearns for warmth…”

Clifton Monk’s breath turned to ice inside his blankets at night. And he remembered learning the hard way that, “If you touched anything metal with your bare hands, you couldn’t tear your skin loose.”

Jesse Balthazar had a unique technique for measuring the temperature. He counted the number of eyelets he could lace in his boots before his fingers could no longer hold the laces.

On December 18 Captain Parsons wrote his wife Abbie that the officers in Company F had abandoned their tent and moved into the root cellar, “a log structure 16’ X 24’ which is down in an 8-foot hole with 2 feet of dirt and rock over it.”

Fighting an implacable enemy, the regiment inevitably took casualties. In January 1943 Joseph S. Smith and K. V. Nelson headed “home” to Clearwater creek from a routine mission. About thirty miles out, their truck broke through a layer of ice and stuck fast. They had no choice but to walk.

Several miles along Nelson started falling, and finally he just couldn’t get up. Smith went on as fast as he could. When he stumbled into Clearwater Creek at 2;00 am, four soldiers set out immediately to find Nelson.

At 8:00 am they found his frozen corpse.

Subarctic Climate

Uniforms

This is what it looked like for the soldiers

Uniforms presented the soldiers of the 97^th their single worst problem during the awful Alaska winter of 1942/43. Senior commanders, the men ultimately responsible for providing adequate clothing and equipment apparently had other things on their minds—until the Washburn Report landed on their desks and the desks of their superior officers back in Washington.

H. Bradford Washington, climber of arctic mountains and expert on cold weather gear worked with the Quartermaster General Corps to do cold weather clothing experiments. In December 1942 they asked him to travel to Alaska and inspect the uniforms and equipment provided to the soldiers of the 97^th Engineers. What Bradford found in Alaska horrified him.

“A thorough survey was made of clothing and equipment of the97th Engineers between Fairbanks and Northway. Temps to sixty-three degrees below zero were encountered in the field, and clothing of this unit was found to be in abominable condition, so much so that specimens of it were brought to Washington, DC to illustrate the extremes under which American troops are operating in the field when their supply has been neglected.”

Washburn summed it up this way. “The pathetically ill-equipped 97th Engineering Regiment on the northern quarter of the Alcan Highway is doing little else but hibernating at present.”

Mary Hanson and her husband, Bert. Ran a roadhouse at Big Delta, and over that winter a hundred young black soldiers from the 97th wintered nearby. An old double cabin served the unit as a field kitchen, but the men lived in frigid tents.

Link to another story “Legendary Alaskan, Mary Hanson”

At Christmas, Bert made up a package—a comb, cigarettes, a candy bar, soap—for each man. Mary went with him to deliver the packages, and the tattered condition of their uniforms horrified her as much as it had horrified the Army’s clothing expert, Washburn.

This is what it looked like on the rare good weather day.

Bad enough that the men lived in tents through an Alaska winter, infinitely worse that they worked outside in uniforms so ragged that she could see their skin.