STORIES FROM NORTHERN CANADA AND ALASKA.

Chappie

Chappie, actually Chaplain William J. Brown, drove as many as two thousand miles a month up and down the Alaska Highway in 1943. He brought spiritual guidance to the men working to straighten and improve the Highway, and they nicknamed him Chappie.

During that first year of its existence, the Alaska Highway offered only a crude path through the wilds of Northern Canada and Alaska. Chappie didn’t drive it for pleasure.

Spiritual Guidance on the Alaska Highway

In December 1943 the chaplain wrote to his wife to describe a day of travel through Yukon Territory from Canyon Creek… To Canyon Creek.

With his aid, the chaplain left at daybreak—11:00 in Yukon in December—and churned ten miles through heavy snow before the truck slid off into a ditch. Leaning out their windows, the two men laboriously scraped snow away from their doors until they could force them open and get out. Snow packed the engine compartment; they dug it out. Ice covered the spark plugs; they melted it and blotted the water.

Back in the truck, Chappie pressed the starter; nothing happened. A battery cable had come loose. He reinstalled it. The sergeant dug snow away from the exhaust pipe, and Chappie fired the engine.

Tires spun, snow chains dug in and, “I just went right down the side of that hill, gave her all she had, and headed her back from the woods on a bias for the road. And by golly, we made it.”

Just seven miles from the next civilian camp, they heard a loud clanging under the hood. A bent fan blade had nicked the belt. A couple of noisy miles on, the fan belt fell away completely. They crossed their fingers and kept going. Even in the bitter cold the engine overheated, but they managed to limp into the camp.

A mechanic helped them rig a fan belt, they ate lunch and they hit the road again—in the only direction the storm allowed them–back to Canyon Creek. “In twenty miles we were our own snowplow. Not a track in the fourteen-inch-deep snow…”

A windshield wiper gave up the ghost. Every few miles they stopped so the sergeant could scrape the snow and ice away.

When they crested the last ridge and headed down the slope to Canyon Creek, the snow “got lesser and wetter… by the time we got here it was raining”.

More on the first year of the Alaska Highway

(Chappie’s letter is quoted in Pioneer Road by Donna Blasor-Bernhardt)

Balto

Balto and his team waited anxiously with driver Gunnar Kaasen to carry the desperately needed serum over the second to last leg of the relay to Nome while Leonhard Seppala, the heroic Toga, and his team arrived on the northern coast of Norton Sound just ahead of the ice breaking up behind them. Seppala handed the precious package to Charlie Olson who took it another 25 miles to Kassen.

Diphtheria in Nome

As Kassen’s team, led by Balto, one of Seppala’s dogs, raced west and north, falling snow created such a thick curtain that Kaasen couldn’t even see Balto out ahead of the sled. Balto unable to see any better than his driver, followed the trail by scent.

Out of nowhere, a sudden 80 mile an hour wind gust flipped the sled and sent the precious serum package flying into a snowbank. Kassen ripped off his gloves and dug it out. And Balto and the team raced on.

At Port Safety, finding the team for the last leg not ready, Kassen and Balto just kept going, and at 5:30 am they raced down Front Street toward Dr. Welch’s hospital.

The relay took five and a half days, set a new speed record for the trail known as the Iditarod Trail. Four dogs died.

Togo died four years later; and, should you find yourself in Wasilla, Alaska, you can drop by Iditarod Headquarters and view his preserved remains.

Balto visited New York City with Kassen in late 1925; watched the erection of a statue of Balto in Central Park. But he went from there to a sideshow where he lived in horrible conditions until a fundraising campaign by the children of Cleveland, Ohio raised enough money to buy his freedom.

Should you visit the Cleveland Museum of Natural History today, you can view Balto’s preserved remains.

Today the famous Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, held annually, commemorates the serum run that rescued Nome.

The Iditarod

(Note: this story used information from history.com and from Wikipedia, 1925 serum run to Nome.)

Getting in Place

The Base camp at Fort Nelson remained a frigid place

Getting in place, for the soldiers of the 35th Engineers, meant getting themselves and their equipment to Fort Nelson before the spring thaw melted their winter road away. The soldiers became the cogs in their commander’s giant conveyor belt.

Getting in place via the conveyor subjected the men to an excruciating experience.

In a memo to General Hoge, Col. Welling described dozer operators along the route next to their parked equipment “crying violently, so great was the cold.” Upon arrival at their destination, soldiers who had made the trip in the back of cargo trucks could hardly climb out or walk. Finally in a tent and near a fire, their “blood warmed and thinned, they would become dizzy and fell asleep.”

Lt. Miletich’s exhausted, hungry and, above all, cold advance party stumbled into Fort Nelson on the afternoon of March 20th.

Sled Dogs Rescued Nome

Dogs, sled dogs, offered the only possible rescue for the dying people of Nome, Alaska. In the winter of 1925, Dr Welch, Nome’s only doctor, fought a diphtheria epidemic that threatened to wipe out everyone in Nome and the surrounding area. Through January he lost a few more patients every day. Without diphtheria antitoxin he would lose them all.

Diphtheria in Nome

The hospital in Anchorage had a batch of the precious medicine and a train could carry it out to Nenana. But a relay of sleds pulled by dogs offered the only possible transportation over the last 700 miles to the dying patients in Nome.

The train carrying the precious fur-wrapped package, pulled into Nenana on the night of January 27, 1925. Wild Bill Shannon tied the package to his sled and headed his nine malamutes out on the first leg of the relay. At 60 below he couldn’t go full speed, dogs breathing too heavily would freeze their lungs. He, in turn, ran instead of riding, trying to keep himself warm. Fifty-two miles later he arrived in Tolovana, suffering from frostbite and hypothermia.

Another dog team and then another, and still others took over, averaging 6 miles an hour, 30 miles per leg, through the permanent night of northernmost Alaska. Only the moon, and sometimes the Northern Lights, lit the trail.

Leonhard Seppala and his team took the 91-mile leg across Norton Sound.

They rushed 170 miles down from Nome to meet the relay and pick up the package. Then they turned back north in the teeth of a raging gale across the heaving, cracking ice of the Sound, booming through the night as it threatened to break up altogether and float them out to sea.

Toga, Seppala’s 12-year-old Husky, made it happen. Struggling for traction on the ice, he led his team into the teeth of the gale, and they made the coast just hours before the ice broke up.

Stay tuned. Three relay legs remained between the coast and Nome.

History.com’s fuller account

(Note: this story used information from history.com; from The San Francisco Examiner, Feb 5, 1925; from the Vancouver Province, Feb 2, 1925;)

Diphtheria in Nome

This was the little city threatened by the disease.

Diphtheria antitoxin expires. In the summer of 1924 Dr. Welch, the only doctor in Nome Alaska, discovered that his batch had done just that, and he immediately ordered more. But anything coming to Nome in 1925 came over oceans; and the Port of Nome, just two degrees shy of the Arctic Circle, closed in November; stayed closed until July.

Nome in WWII

When winter set in, Dr. Welch had only expired diphtheria antitoxin.

In December children with sore throats—tonsillitis, the doctor hoped—began showing up at Dr. Welch’s 25-bed hospital. There was nothing unusual about that. But they kept coming… And Welch worried. In mid-January he diagnosed a three-year-old boy with diphtheria. The child died.

The next day a seven-year-old girl turned up with the same symptoms. Desperate, Welch tried using some of the expired antitoxin. The girl died a few hours later.

This could well have become a ghost town.

He fired off a desperate telegram to the Public Health Service. “An Epidemic of diphtheria is almost inevitable here STOP I am in urgent need of one million units of diphtheria antitoxin STOP Mail is only form of transportation STOP”

By the end of January Welch had treated 20 cases of diphtheria and he judged 50 more people at risk. Just a few years earlier, in 1918 and 1919, Spanish flu had wiped out 50% of the population in the area surrounding Nome.

An infinitely more dangerous disease, diphtheria could wipe out 100%–potentially 10,000 people would die.

Just a few years later, bush pilots would have dealt with this emergency. But in 1925 bush pilots had only begun to ply their unique trade in Alaska. Carl Eielson had flown a De Havilland DH-4 on eight experimental trips, the longest only 260 miles in temperatures down only to ten below zero. The medicine waited much farther than 260 miles from Nome and temperatures hovered much farther than ten below.

Roy Darling volunteered to try the flight with the only plane available—a Standard J biplane. The plane had an open cockpit and unreliable water-cooled engines. And Roy Darling had little experience as a bush pilot. The Board of Health said no.

This is the plane Roy Darling volunteered to fly

In 1925 dog sleds delivered anything that made its way to Nome in winter.

Wikipedia on the Serum Run

Stay tuned…

(Note: this story used information from Wikipedia, “1925 serum run to Nome” and history.com)

A Giant Conveyor

A giant conveyor took the soldiers and equipment of the 35th Engineers from the icy crossing of the Peace River to Fort St. John, 300 miles away.

Precarious River Ice

Resourceful Canadian, E. J. Spinney had worked out the conveyor method for moving material up the rugged winter road. In March 1942 Colonel Ingalls, commander of the 35^th Engineers, took a leaf from Spinney’s book. Ingalls divided the 300 miles between Fort St John and Fort Nelson into 3 one hundred-mile sections, and set up what amounted to a giant conveyor belt.

Each section had a base camp with a roving tow truck; stockpiles of fuel and oil; tents with cots, sleeping bags and stoves; and a 24-hour chow line.

Troops ‘walked’ an unbroken line of bulldozers, graders and loaded 2 ½ ton trucks down the steep and crooked hill to the frozen Peace River. Once across the heaving ice and up the steep bank on the north side, the line negotiated the arduous three hundred miles to Ft. Nelson. At each base camp, relatively rested and fed troops replaced exhausted ones, and the ‘belt’ kept moving. From Fort Nelson, the ‘belt’ returned to Dawson Creek to reload and repeat the trip.

A pilot looking down from the air at the winter march of the 35^th compared it to Fifth Avenue in New York.

Periodically warming temperatures softened the ice and turned the road surface into thick, sticky mud, drastically slowing the great conveyor and threatening to bring it to a halt. Then the temperature would plummet, the ice and the road surface would harden, and the conveyor would return to speed.

Peace River Fort St John Weather Today

Inwood to Skagway

Prime Attraction on the Cliff bordering Skagway Dock

Inwood, Iowa to Skagway, Alaska—Doctor Peter Dahl moved his family to an utterly different, utterly unique world. Wife Vera liked Iowa just fine, but “whither thou goest…” The move struck eleven-year-old Lew, ten-year-old Robert, and even three year old Roger as pure excitement.

Buffalo Soldiers in Skagway

In his memoir, After the Gold Rush, Robert remembered waking up on a train rolling through Montana to see the majestic Rockies on the other side of his window. Inwood seemed a long way away. Sailing from Seattle up the inside passage past Ketchikan, Sitka, Juneau, Wrangell he watched the deck as deep green forests, and gigantic coastal mountains slid by. Inwood memories receded further.

And, finally, the ship tied up to the wooden dock that protruded out from Skagway where the mountains dropped down out of Yukon Territory to a sliver of land at sea level. Dad raced out on the dock to greet them.

A collapsed economy in Iowa in 1926 pushed the Dahl’s away. A little narrow-gauge railroad that ran virtually straight up out of Skagway to Carcross, Yukon Territory reached out for them. The White Pass and Yukon Railroad offered the doctor a salary to come care for its employees and, over Vera’s objections, Doctor Dahl accepted.

The Dahls never looked back.

Four hundred ninety-two people lived in Skagway, half of them white and half First Nations. Mountains hemmed in the town so completely that residents rarely left it. One could reach one neighboring town, Haines, just fifteen miles away—but only by boat.

Skagway’s citizens had little communication with the outside world. In summer ships came to the dock and tourists flooded the little town. For the rest of the year a ship carrying food, supplies, newspapers and mail arrived every two weeks or so.

Some of the Dahl’s new neighbors had come with the Gold Rush at the turn of the century and stayed when everyone else left. A few had drifted north later. Those people had children, some grown up when the Dahl’s arrived.

The Dahls fitted in.

Robert’s Memoir

Teodoro Pena Invaded and Endured Attu

Teodoro Pena came north with the 7^th Infantry Division to wrest Attu back from the Japanese. A very young medic, Teodoro couldn’t possibly have known the horror the Army had sent him into.

In 1942, Teodoro left his job with the CCC and enlisted at Fort Sam Houston in Texas. He trained as a medic. And in 1943 he travelled north—a long way north—to the williwaws and the fog and the bitter cold of the Aleutians.

On May 11 he struggled through the icy surf into one of the nastiest battles of the Pacific War. Pena advanced up the valley with the rest of the 7^th, lived through the bitter Banzai attack that killed so many of his fellows, struggling hand to hand and chest to chest until the Japanese gave up and began blowing themselves up with grenades.

A few days ago I posted a story I called “Castner’s Cutthroats” about the invasion of Attu. Teodoro’s grandson, Jonathan Kiner, responded to tell me about his Grandpa.

Castner’s Cutthroats

From the Aleutians Teodoro returned to Fort Lewis, Washington, scored a two weeks leave and boarded a train home to Texas with some of his buddies. When the train developed mechanical problems and had to stop for a while, a 1^st sergeant gave them permission to visit a nearby town. They ran to town, loaded up on beer and whisky and ran back to the train—just in time.

Teodoro made it home to Robstown, Texas. But three days later he sat in a darkened theatre enjoying a movie with his future wife (and Jonathan’s future grandmother) when the lights came on and the local sheriff came down the aisle to find him. A telegram from Fort Lewis to the sheriff’s office summoned Teodoro to return immediately.

Next stop, Europe.

When Jonathan Kiner enlisted in the Army—he served in Iraq in 2004 and 2005—Grandpa Teodoro attended his graduation from basic training. Teodoro pinned on his grandson’s blue infantry cord, and together Teodoro and Jonathan raised the POW flag.

The Sergeant Major gave a speech about Teodoro and his heroism.

There’s only one possible ending for this story…

Thank you, Teodoro and Johnathan, from the bottom of our hearts, for your service.

The People Who Lived on Attu

Akutan Zero

Akutan lies just a few miles from Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands. In June 1942, flying away from the assault on the American naval base there, Petty Officer Koga’s luck ran out. Ground fire penetrated an oil line in the engine of Koga’s Zero.

The Japanese Bomb Dutch Harbor

Knowing his engine on the verge of seizing, Koga looked desperately for a place to land and found one on Akutan.

As Koga’s zero swooped down and onto the ground, though, the landing gear sank into the mud and the plane flipped upside down. Koga died instantly.

Two Japanese pilots escorted Koga and his crippled plane. They had standing orders to destroy any Zero that crash landed in enemy territory. The Japanese couldn’t allow a Zero to fall into American hands. But, not knowing whether Koga remained alive, his friends couldn’t bring themselves to destroy the plane.

They flew away and left behind, virtually intact, Japan’s single most important weapon of war—a Mitsubishi A6M Zero. Five weeks later American soldiers found the Zero. And that discovery may have changed the course of the war in the Pacific.

American pilots who went up against the fabled Zero knew it to be the best warplane in the sky—a huge advantage to the Japanese. The formidable Zero destroyed American planes and ships and killed American pilots and sailors at a frightening rate.

The Army Air Corps transported the Akutan Zero back to the states where they repaired it. Test pilots flew the Zero; figured out its limits and vulnerabilities. And the Americans devised tactics that allowed American pilots to shoot Zeros out of the sky.

At least one Japanese military historian declared that the value of the Akutan Zero to the Americans rivaled the impact of the American victory at Midway.

Another take

Charlie Lake

Charlie Lake saw the deadly consequences of an enormous gamble. In March General Hoge had ordered Colonel Robert Ingalls to race his 35^th Engineers over the ice road to Fort Nelson. The road thawed to rivers and gumbo right behind them. The General had gambled that Colonel Joe Lane’s 341^stEngineers could build an all-weather road to Fort Nelson before the 35^th’s supplies ran out.

No pressure!

The 341^st arrived in Dawson Creek in early May; pushed a few miles through the gumbo to Fort St John and on to Charlie Lake; pushed much too slowly.

341st, Much Too Slow

But at the Lake Lane spotted an opportunity to bypass 12 miles of muck. He ordered one of his Companies to leave their heavy equipment behind and negotiate the mud on foot to the other end of the lake. Behind them he ordered the 74^th Pontoon Company to build a raft to float their equipment up.

Corporal Robert Wooldridge described the end of the raft’s first voyage in a letter to his sister from his hospital bed.

“At 8 o’clock, I was ordered by Lieut. Nelson to take my radio car down to a lake and load it on a pontoon float … there was a Caterpillar and gas cans [on the pontoon] … it was only eight inches out of the water supported by three flat pontoons … we had to go against the waves all the way … as we rounded the last bend in the lake … the wind was the strongest and we started shipping water faster … we put all hand pumps to use. The Major [Turvey], a Lieutenant [Hargis] and

myself were inside the car keeping warm … trouble started and the Major got out … he ordered us to head into shore. As the pontoon under the Caterpillar started turning broadside of the waves, I could see it would sink … we got out of the car. I just put my feet on the raft when the whole thing went over and over. The command car was tipping towards me so I jumped and swam as fast as I could to keep from being pinned under it …. The Lieutenant couldn’t swim and was yelling “please save me”. A mile upstream was a little cabin and the trapper eating his breakfast had seen us bobbing in the water … so he hopped into his row boat and came after us … he rowed so hard the oar cracked … he made three trips and I was in the second.

The trapper, Gus Hedin explained how he rescued the five, but lost Lt. Hargis. On his second trip, two men hung on the side of his boat. One could not hang on any longer and dropped off. He said that the other men yelled out “That is our Lt. Hargis. Save him if you can. He is the best ever.” Gus went out again but could not find him.

Working with grappling equipment, a crew from the 341st found two more bodies. Wallace Lytle remembered, “We was out searching for the bodies. It’s not a happy thought, but we just, we just went on. That’s the way it was.”

Dynamite brought more bodies to the surface—ghastly, frozen stiff by the icy water. They recovered 11 corpses, but Lt. Hargis remained unaccounted for until June 9.

The Memorial