Keeping clean isn’t easy when you live and work deep in the wilderness of the far north. Soldiers building the Alaska Highway tried keeping clean. They did not always (more accurately, they did not often) succeed. ‘Big John’ Erklouts of the 340th 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 341st took a simpler approach. He 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. When they washed their clothes at least some of the soldiers forced themselves to plunge into the cold river to wash themselves.
In his history of the 18th Engineers, Fred Rust explained that a bivouac for a full company tended to stay in place for a relatively long time. In those camps the soldiers built showers. They lashed together a wooden tower, set two or three empty gasoline drums on it and filled them with water. A homemade stove under the tower heated the water—sort of. Gravity carried it to shower nozzles in a shower tent.
Field improvised shower
In the more usual smaller camps, the men took what Rust called “Pail-Baths.” He reported that they “eventually developed skillful, acrobatic bathing techniques.”
And they tried occasionally to wash their clothes in the same pails.
Kluane Lake presented the soldiers of the 18th with a bridge problem that ingenuity alone would not solve. Fifty miles of their road to Alaska would run along the shore of Kluane Lake. Not a problem. But they had to get themselves and their equipment around the end of Kluane Lake before they could start building road up its far shore.
Slims River flowed down from the Kaskawulsh Glacier and into the southern end of Kluane. Glacial rivers bring debris down the face of the glacier and spread it in a great fan. Over centuries miles of mud, quicksand and unstable debris had accumulated around the end of the lake—between it and the glacier. The soldiers had to bridge Slims River itself, but before they could do that, they had to get a road over those miles.
The flats around Slims River and the end of Kluane Lake
Through most of July everything going to the other side of Kluane had to go across the lake on a raft. Rules decreed that soldiers couldn’t ride on the raft with the equipment. They rode in the tow launch. But carrying a twenty-three-ton bulldozer, a pontoon raft had little freeboard, rode extremely low in the water, and pulled the stern of the tow launch almost as deep. Given the slightest turbulence, water flooded into both vessels.
Today eight miles of road carries vehicles along the southern shore of Kluane Lake to the Slims River. The 18th struggled throughout July to build that eight miles of road and the 1044-foot-long Slims River Bridge over permafrost and mud. Even in July the bottom of Slims River consists of frozen gravel and dirt. To drive piles into the frozen river bottom, the engineers pressurized water and blasted the bottom to thaw and soften it.
As they worked in the frigid water, it flowed past them at six miles an hour. And its depth changed constantly, ten inches on an average day, eighteen inches on a particularly difficult day.
Stockton Bridge awaited the 18th at the Aishihik River about 80 miles north of Whitehorse. A conventional timber bridge, Stockton spanned a deep gorge and water fairly boiled through the deep channel between its solid rock walls.
The surging water hadn’t bothered the original builders. Given solid rock walls they didn’t have to raise support columns out of the water to support horizontal timbers and decking. They had simply laid their horizontal timbers across from one rock wall to the other, installed their decking and the old Stockton bridge had done yeoman duty for years.
Unfortunately, timbers with no support columns wouldn’t come near supporting the weight of a D8 Caterpillar Bulldozer. And in the narrow rock gorge with its flood of water, the soldiers of the 18th could not install support columns either.
The soldiers got creative.
First they carefully drove a small truck with a winch across to the far side then they demolished the old bridge.
The innards
If they couldn’t place support columns under their timbers, they would set two large timber A-frames and hang their spanning timbers from them with cable. In effect they would build a suspension bridge over a little river in the wilds of Yukon Territory.
The bases of the A-frames had to sit in pockets in the rock right at the edge of the river. That meant somebody had to jack hammer the pockets out of the rock at the level of the surging water.
No problem. They ran temporary stringers across from wall to wall then lowered ropes with platforms to hold the jack hammerers.
With four pockets in place, they set the base of a large timber in each one then raised the timbers to join at the top of two A’s. Each top got a metal cap with an eye bolt. And from the eye bolts they hung the steel cables that would support the frame and decking that crossed the river.
A more distant view
Their design became famous in the Corps of Engineers for its ingenuity.
Trestle on the Rails that carried them to Whitehorse
A thousand pair of Army boots had tromped across a railway platform into northern Canada in March at Dawson Creek, British Columbia. The second set of a thousand pair to tromp into northern Canada warmed—sort of—the feet of the 18th Engineers at the depot in Whitehorse, Yukon.
When FDR and his cabinet assigned the Corps of Engineers the all but impossible task of building 1800 miles of road through subarctic northern Canada and into Alaska, the Corps had just two Combat Engineering Regiments equipped and ready to go. While senior officers raced to create five more regiments, they dispatched those two immediately. The 35th left Fort Ord, California and arrived in Dawson Creek in early March.
Getting a thousand pair of boots to the platform in Whitehorse, Yukon proved a bit more complex than just putting the soldiers on a train. The 18th left Vancouver Barracks on ships in April. The ships carried them up through the North Pacific then between the glaciers up the inside passage to the tiny port of Skagway, Alaska. From Skagway the cars of the White Pass and Yukon Territory Railroad carried them through a Yukon ‘spring’ straight up into the Canadian Coastal Range through tiny Carcross and on to Whitehorse. The second regiment in place in Canada and ready to go.
The Camp on the Landing Strip
The men of the 18th set up an icy bivouac at the airstrip—on a bluff overlooking the little town. Fred Rust in his history of the 18th on the Highway put it this way, “The ten toughest minutes of the entire movement were spent climbing the perpendicular hill to the base camp out of Whitehorse.”
The men of the 18th gave the people of Skagway, Carcross and Whitehorse just a tiny taste of the human and steel tsunami headed their way. And, like their colleagues far to the south in Dawson Creek, the soldiers got a hefty taste of tough Yukon reality.
Reinstalling a tread back onto its drive sprocket, relatively routine on flat ground, became something very different when doing it on a 23-ton machine that was teetering on the edge of a crumbling slope of glacial debris. That called for great skill and calm nerves. In a better world, the catskinners of the 97th wouldn’t have had to learn that skill.
Senior commanders, forced to use a segregated regiment to build the northernmost portion of the Alaska Highway, planned the construction of that portion around racist assumptions. And their plan made a difficult job infinitely more difficult.
The Alaska Highway would connect the railhead at Dawson Creek, British Columbia with a little Alaska community on the existing Richardson Highway known as Big Delta. At the northern end of the great Highway the soldiers of the 97th would build east through Alaska to the Canadian border where they would meet the soldiers of the 18th building west through Yukon.
The Richardson Highway passed through Big Delta on its way to Fairbanks, so the soldiers of the 97th could come in country at Valdez, move themselves and their equipment up the Richardson Highway to Big Delta and start building road east.
The generals, determined to keep the black soldiers away from white and native Alaskans, sent civilian contractors to build the road east from Big Delta. The soldiers of the 97th would leave the Richardson well south of Big Delta on a spur road that served the Kennicott Copper Mine. From the end of that spur, at Slana, the soldiers of the 97th would build 70 miles of road to get themselves and their equipment to a spot on the route of the real Highway safely distant from Alaskans. There they would take over from the civilians and build on east to the Canadian border.
The Kennecott Mine near Slana
The 70 miles of road passed through sand hills, glacial moraine, and crossed the Continental Divide at the infamous Mentasta Pass. While working on the precipitous terminal moraine through the Pass, the lead bulldozers repeatedly slipped off the narrow trail and ‘threw a track.’”.
The road out of Mentasta
Eventually the 97th’s inexperienced operators became masters reinstalling them.
The heat, of course, thawed the dirt floor into slimy mud. Soldiers festooned their tents with strings, ropes and rigging from which hung clothing, rifles, photos–anything the soldier did not want on the ground. Less valuable gear they jammed under the cots. Boots got the most precious storage spot in the tent–tucked into sleeping bags to keep warm and flexible for the morning.
Initially the army supplied kerosene heaters, but a chronic shortage of kerosene inspired creativity. Most soldiers pulled out the kerosene heater and threw it away but kept the top half of the stove with its fittings for stovepipe. From an empty fifty-five-gallon fuel drum they fashioned a replacement for the bottom half and in the converted drum they burned wood.
Plumes of smoke rose from every tent
A typical company on the project created a permanent three-man firewood detail, rotating the duty weekly between platoons. The detail wielded crosscut saws, axes and machetes to make stove wood out of the detritus of the road, stacking it next to or inside each tent. Incidentally, the firewood detail supplied other services to the bivouac—the soldiers felt free to air their stale bedding, knowing that, in the event of rain, the firewood detail would stuff it back into their tents.
Camp at Kluane Lake
To vent smoke from the stoves, the soldiers penetrated the canvas with stovepipe, installing a spark arrester on top of the ‘chimney’. Live coals, though, escaped the arrester all too easily, smoldering on flammable canvas and eventually igniting it. B Company of the 97th lost over half their tents in one spark fire.
A single image makes the danger clear
The most important guard duty on the highway was the fire guard mounted at every bivouac.
Heavy Equipment took the trip to a whole new level
Essential soldiers in a stream of trucks arrived at the Slana sand hills. And now equally essential heavy equipment, especially bulldozers began unloading at the Valdez dock. Before the soldiers could start building road, that equipment had to get to Slana. To men operating bulldozers, the trip from Valdez out to Slana presented a whole new set of problems.
A heavy bulldozer, sometimes towing a grader, rumbled over the still muddy Richardson at a stately four miles an hour, past the quickly emptying 13-mile camp, past Wortman’s and into Keystone Canyon. And, entering Keystone, its young black “catskinner” found himself in a different world.
The Canyon–a whole new world
Towering rock cliffs punctuated at intervals by cascading waterfalls, Bridal Veil and Horsetail, closed in on him from both sides. 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, a precipitous drop that went from hundreds of feet to thousands of feet. Periodic ruts and washouts narrowed the road to barely more than the width of his dozer and his right-side tracks ground over crumbling dirt right at the edge of the cliff.
At the top of his climb the tractor rumbled through Thompson pass. The civilians of the Alaska Road Commission and the soldiers of Company E had cleared a path through the pass, but snow still towered four stories high on both sides of the road. Occasionally a piece of the snowbank would collapse into the path, blocking it for a few hours while soldiers and civilians scrambled to clear it.
Beyond the pass the road descended past the Worthington Glacier and the glacier’s surging melt water had washed out some of the old timber bridges. The Alaska Road Commission rushed to replace them. But even intact bridges couldn’t support the most essential 23-ton bulldozers. With the heaviest loads, the soldiers had to bypass the bridges and ford the rushing water.
Glacial melt swelled the streams, filled them to their banks and sometimes over their banks. The rushing water, sometimes shallow, sometimes deep, changing depth abruptly, always frigid, rolled through a streambed with enormous power.
The road didn’t get easier beyond the Pass
A catskinner would carefully work his roaring dozer down the bank and out into the water, aiming upstream at an angle, knowing the current would push him downstream. Sometimes he made it to the other bank. Other times the dozer sank into the muddy bottom or simply “drowned” and went silent when the water reached the engine. Then the catskinner sat, trapped, on his steel seat in mid-stream while his buddies figured out how to tow him out. The troops got creative with tow cables, trees and other dozers.
Slana, Alaska lay 190 miles up the Richardson Highway from where the soldiers of the 97th jammed into their tent cities near Valdez. Assigned to start building road at Slana, they first had to get there. The trucks that would haul the soldiers to Slana began to make their way through Seattle, onto a motley collection of vessels and up the inside passage to Valdez. But the trucks jammed up at the tent cities right alongside the soldiers because of the biggest problem of all.
Just six miles out from the 13-mile camp, at the old Wortmann’s Roadhouse, the Richardson Highway climbs 3,000 feet through Keystone Canyon to Thompson Pass. Snow still filled the pass and kept it closed. A hundred sixty soldiers moved up to Wortman’s to help with the frantic effort to clear the pass.
Wortman’s at the entrance to the canyon
When the Pass opened on May 20, the soldiers of Company D piled into the back of trucks and headed out immediately. They rocked and bounced on their wooden benches as the trucks moved slowly up Keystone Canyon, seeing the treacherous canyon and the remaining mountains of snow at the Pass through the arched opening in the back of a canvas truck cover.
Trucks were there
Beyond the Pass the trucks forded streams, slewed through slick mud, and rumbled 190 miles, averaging barely thirteen miles an hour. Getting accustomed to the rough ride, some of the soldiers occasionally dozed off—briefly. They talked—about home, about Alaska, about what lay ahead of them…
The Alaska sun still shined high in the sky when the trucks stopped in the evening. It would take the soldiers a lot more time to get used to days without nights. They climbed stiffly down from the trucks, milled around a bit, stretching to shake out the stiffness of the ride. Bellowing sergeants prodded them to unloading equipment, to pitching tents…
Twelve hundred black soldiers jammed the hold as the David Branch pulled into frigid Valdez Harbor on April 29, 1942. The next morning when the ship tied up to the dock and dropped its gangplank, they waited to get off the ship and find somewhere to eat and sleep. To complicate things, strict orders forbade contact between the twelve hundred and the white citizens of Alaska.
Through the long winter, crews had plowed and shoveled snow from streets and sidewalks, piling it in enormous heaps. At the end of April, the streets resembled narrow canyons. Snow from sidewalks on one side and Alaska Avenue on the other piled into a massive wall between them. From the sidewalk, one could hear street traffic but could not see it. And the snowbanks compressed the already narrow avenue to barely one lane.
The snowpile from the sidewalk side
When a company of approximately 160 men, each carrying two barracks bags, slipping and sliding on the unfamiliar and slippery surface, came off the dock, they jammed Alaska Avenue between the snowbanks.
On the morning of April 30, the first company hoisted their barracks bags and filed, one behind the other, through the maze of hatches and companion ways to the deck. In single file they picked their way carefully down to the dock, crowded between the cliffs of snow along Alaska Avenue and made their way out to the airstrip just across the intersection with the Richardson Highway.
The soldiers of Company E assembled behind them in the hold, moved up in their turn and worked their way along Alaska Avenue. But only so many men could sleep at the airstrip, so the soldiers of Company E turned right onto the Richardson and kept going.
In two columns, one on either side of the narrow road, they trudged away from the white Alaskans. Five hours later, thirteen miles out, they found a relatively flat area that could accommodate a camp. They fell out; began scraping snow out of the way and pitching tents.
It took four days to get twelve hundred men off the ship and most of the soldiers wound up at the “Thirteen Mile Camp”.
Wherever they found to settle during that first week in Alaska, soldiers had to cook and eat and sleep in canvas tents. Arriving soldiers would go to work. Clear snow away, lay out the canvas, drive pegs through loops into dirt to hold it down. But in early April, Alaska dirt is the consistency of a brick. Some soldiers figured out creative, if makeshift, solutions. A man could tie the canvas to something in place of a peg. The tent would sit crooked, but it would sit. Some gouged holes out of the brick earth, inserted the peg, poured water into the hole, and waited for it to freeze.
Gathering in the snow
When time came to eat, the company mess offered little except gray boxes of rations—suspicious concoctions in green cans, cold and coagulated. Fires sprouted, and men figured out how to heat the cans.
Finally came time for exhausted men to go into the tents, climb into their sleeping bags or bedrolls. Sergeant Monk remembered, “I had one blanket. My buddy had one blanket and an army jacket.” The men lay shivering in the dark, trying to sleep and wondering what the hell they had ever done to deserve Alaska.
Winter in Valdez, Alaska lasts well past April. The David Branch carried 1200 unsuspecting young soldiers 1,600 nautical miles north from springtime Seattle into a vastly different world.
Valdez connected the rugged northern interior of Alaska to the oceans of the world. A long wooden dock traversed the mud flats at the edge of Valdez Harbor on enormous timber pilings. A tee across the seaward end of the dock allowed ships to pull alongside, and a warehouse at the tee sheltered incoming and outgoing cargo from Valdez weather.
Men and women travelling from or to the interior, primarily Fairbanks, crossed the dock in both directions. They shared it with incoming freight. One 360-mile road, the primitive and fragile Richardson Highway, connected the Valdez dock to Fairbanks.
Just twenty miles out of Valdez the Richardson Highway suddenly climbs into the Chugach Mountains at Keystone Canyon, climbs 3,000 feet in just a few miles to the infamous Thompson Pass. In a typical year, the snowpack in Thompson Pass accumulates to more than fifty feet—the height of a four-story building. In October each year, the pass closed and traffic on the Richardson came to a halt until the next May.
In May, as the pass opened, melt water from thousands of tons of snow cascaded down from the mountains to the ocean. The Valdez glacier thundered and groaned as ice melted and shifted. Water cascaded out of Thompson pass down through Keystone Canyon. The dirt and gravel Richardson dissolved into muck. And every year at least a few of its rough timber bridges washed away.
In summer travelers and freight jammed Valdez and her citizens scrambled to serve them. In October Valdez became a sleepy little town and Valdezians turned to surviving the winter.
Bush pilots provided limited transport to and from the interior, but Airplanes offered a tenuous connection at best. The difficulties and dangers of flying over Alaska’s frigid mountains kept the number of successful bush pilots to a legendary few.
A pure Alaska product, the subarctic Valdez that lay in wait for the young soldiers resembled no other small town anywhere on earth.
Valdez looked very different from Florida or Seattle
