Oil, pooled deep under Prudhoe Bay, offered the greatest Alaska treasure of all. Men had come to Alaska for furs and fish and for Gold. In 1968 men came for oil, and they found one of the top 20 oil fields ever discovered anywhere in the world.
Prudhoe Bay and its vast pool of oil lay on the Artic Ocean, at the farthest northern edge of Alaska, a very long way from refineries and consumers. Getting the oil to tankers that could carry it out into the North Pacific and on to the world meant getting it across more than 800 rivers and streams and over three of the most rugged mountain ranges in the world.
This is the route the pipeline had to cover
Oil companies had a solution, seven of them would form the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company which would install a massive pipeline, four feet in diameter, from Prudhoe Bay south to the Port of Valdez at the edge of Prince William Sound.
Almost nobody but the oil companies liked the idea.
Men had tried constructing things—trails and roads—through Alaska before. A man named Abercrombie had struggled to build a trail for Gold Rushers through much of this same terrain back at the turn of the century with less than impressive results. A man named Richardson had struggled to improve some of the trail; left a rough highway that required constant repair and maintenance. The United States Army and a horde of civilian contractors had fought to build the Alaska Highway through a portion of it in 1942.
The challenges of the terrain, the vicious weather, the mud and the muskeg were no secret. Now Alyeska proposed to build a four-foot pipeline the entire length of it? Proposed to push not millions, but billions, of barrels of oil through it? The potential for an ecological catastrophe seemed obvious. Any break in that pipeline would inundate a large portion of the pristine top of the world with slimy crude oil.
In 1973 the Arabs changed everything.
In revenge against countries, including the United States, that had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War, the Arabs stopped selling them oil. Prices skyrocketed. All over the United States drivers lined up for gas. Stations ran out. Towns and cities rationed gas. Some stations sold to cars with even numbered plates one day, odd numbered plates the next.
A Typical Scene
Alyeska began constructing the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System in 1975.
Dan Jones’ father served at the Arctic Training Center at Fort Greely Alaska in the 1950’s. Dan commented on one of my stories a few days ago, asked what I knew about the Arctic Test Board. The answer was “nothing”. But I promised to investigate. I hope Dan will share some of his dad’s stories so I can do follow up posts. But for now, investigating led me directly into the fascinating topic of Alaska’s critical role in the Cold War.
The nuclear age began, technically, at Hiroshima… Or maybe it began at Trinity site in the New Mexico badlands. But it really began when the United States and the Soviet Union emerged from WWII squared off against each other. Racing to arm themselves, the two countries built ever more powerful thermonuclear arsenals filled with potentially civilization ending weapons.
As a former governor of Alaska famously pointed out, you can see Russia from Alaska. And, of course, that means you can see Alaska from Russia. The nuclear age put Alaska—and Northern Canada—squarely at ground zero in the arms race.
Defense installations hurriedly constructed for WWII oriented to a threat from the North Pacific; from the south. New installations had to orient north toward a threat coming over the North Pole. Immediately after the war defense planners did an abrupt about face.
First came Aircraft Control and Warning stations, installed across the territory. The Korean War raised the threat level and defense planners hurried replaced those stations with more effective and efficient Distant Early Warning stations. By 1959 twenty-four of these strung across northern Alaska and along the Aleutian chain.
Early Electronic Sentinels
Ladd Air Force Base near Fairbanks and Elmendorf Air Force Base near Anchorage grew apace, acquiring the aircraft that could stop southbound soviet bombers. And Ladd AFB acquired surveillance aircraft that could fly the other way and keep an eye on the Soviets. The Air Force commissioned Eielson Air Force Base south of Fairbanks to handle heavy bombers capable carrying bombs north to The Soviet Union.
In the late 1950’s, Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) made launching bombers and shooting down enemy bombers obsolete concerns. The Air Force in Alaska turned to detecting and tracking missiles.
The Army, also returned to Alaska in the 1950’s, bringing Dan Jones’ dad with them. The old air base near Big Delta became the Army’s Arctic Training Center, and the Army named it Fort Greely in 1953. At Fort Greely the Army tested cold weather equipment, tactics and procedures and it trained soldiers to operate in an arctic climate.
You or someone you love wants a copy of We Fought the Road for Christmas. You follow my Facebook Author page, or you follow me on Instagram or Twitter, and I hope that means you enjoy the stories of Northern Canada and Alaska that I post there. We Fought the Road, written with my intrepid researcher, team leader and wife, Christine, is my best story yet of Northern Canada and Alaska. You can buy it wherever you buy books.
A hell of a place for a courtmartial, but this was Whitehorse HQ
Ten young black men from the hot and humid South, Sgt. Heard and his squad had endured the spring and summer of 1942 building Alaska Highway through the wilds of Alaska. In late fall Company F and the squad had crossed into Yukon Territory to work on south through piling snow and plunging temperatures.
Company F and the ten had returned to Northway to survive the frigid Alaska winter in tents. After their company commander, Captain Walter Parsons had transferred to a new job in Whitehorse, his replacement had sent the ten to Big Gerstle to work for Lt. Howell and the H&S Company, and on March 29 Howell proposed to haul the ten 130 miles through air 36 degrees below zero in the back of an unheated truck.
The ten, knowing very well what bitter cold could do to a man, hesitated to climb aboard, and young Lt. Howell, offended by the challenge to his authority, arrested them; charged them with the vile crime of mutiny.
Officious young officers do these things. When they do, more senior officers take them aside, and point out the error of their ways. A discipline problem isn’t mutiny. If you need to punish the men’s recalcitrance, have them peel potatoes or take an extra turn at guard duty…
Not this time.
The Army transported Sgt. Heard and his squad, under guard, to the stockade at Northwest Service Command in Whitehorse, Yukon and officially preferred Lt. Howell’s charges.
Stunned by the arrival of his former troops at the stockade, Captain Parsons wrote to his wife. “I sometimes wonder if it’s not the officer’s fault when these fellows get off the beam. …I’d bet that only one, maybe two are really bad. I’m going to visit them and see who they are and what’s wrong.”
The men asked Parsons to defend them in the court martial, and, reluctantly, he agreed.
Parsons had no legal experience, but he did his best. His commonsense summation for the defense is the only bit of sanity in the whole court martial transcript. But it did not impress the court. Because neither the young lieutenant or anybody else had noticed that Willie Calhoun hadn’t even been there, he’d been off working on a problem at personnel, the court acquitted him. But they convicted the other nine.
The court sentenced the ‘mutineers’ to dishonorable discharges and imprisonment at hard labor—James Heard for twenty years; Sims Bridges for 18 years; Lee Ratliffe for 12 years; Willie Howell and Robert Rucker for five years; James Hollingsworth, Josh Weaver, Warren Lindsey and Eugene Fulks for three years.
Soldiers at hard labor served in camps like this
Stunned and exhausted, Parsons wrote a letter to his wife late on the night the court adjourned. “Pal I’ve been several days without sending you a letter but if you only knew what I had to do you would understand. My 10 colored boys wanted me to defend them at the trial. If you think defending 10 men in a mutiny trial for which, if found guilty, they could be put to death is not a big job just try it sometime… it made me sick when I heard them read the sentences…”
Thanksgiving in Yukon, at Morley Bay, gave Tim’s best story its punchline. All of Tim’s stories conveyed feelings and meaning wrapped in humor, and the funniest and most meaningful ones we couldn’t hear too many times. His thanksgiving at Morley Bay gave him the best punchline he ever used.
The story didn’t begin in Yukon in 1942. It began in Magnolia Maryland in 1935.
Still in high school, Tim played shortstop for an amateur baseball team, and in 1935 he and his team dominated a ‘white’s only’ league in southern Maryland; ended the season undefeated. But southern Maryland also had a ‘blacks only’ league, and it had another undefeated team.
Not “the” team, unfortunately, but a similar team.
The situation demanded a playoff.
Desperate to play in that game, Tim knew that his father, Pop, descended from Confederate Army veterans and racist to his core, would never allow it. Young Tim turned to a teenager’s solution.
What Pop didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
The middle innings on the appointed Saturday afternoon found the two teams deadlocked. In position in the field, on his toes, waiting for the next pitch, Tim paid no attention to the noisy crowd—until it suddenly hushed. Looking up, he watched in horror as a familiar figure strode onto the field. The game stopped. Pop marched grimly through the hush to the third base line, took his horrified and humiliated son by the left ear and marched him off the field.
Years passed and in November of 1942 First Lieutenant Tim Timberlake, a white officer in the all black 93rd Engineering Regiment, ran the regimental motor pool at Morley Bay. The 93rd had just stood down from its epic labor on the Alcan Highway.
Regimental supply came up with turkeys for Thanksgiving dinner; hauled them to Morley Bay over the ice. And, after eight months of Vienna sausage, Spam and Chili, the men in Tim’s motor pool enjoyed a fantastic Thanksgiving dinner. When someone photographed the soldiers at table, Lt. Timberlake’s white face, to say the least, stood out in a sea of black faces.
A week or so later, back in Maryland, Pop Timberlake received a letter from his son. The envelope held nothing but one of those photos and, on the back, Tim had printed a note.
Departing our world for a better place on November 21, former United States Army Tech 5 Samuel Hargroves, one of the last survivors of a very special group of men, left it a lesser place.
Millions of men stepped up during the catastrophe of World War II to defend their country. But black men like Samuel stepped up to serve in segregated regiments and served under Army regulations that incorporated Jim Crow. Samuel and his fellows endured, accomplished and defended a country that couldn’t bring itself to thank them. As one of the last of these good and brave men to pass, Samuel stands in for all of them.
The 1940 census found Samuel in Varina, Virginia working as a farm hand. In 1941 his draft board found him there too. The Army dispatched him to Camp Livingston, Louisiana and the brand new 93rd Engineers.
In early 1942, he got leave to go home and marry the love of his life—the lovely Mayola Pleasants. But elsewhere, in the near panic that followed Pearl Harbor, FDR and the War Department had ordered the Corps of Engineers to create a land route to Alaska—yesterday! The Corps needed soldiers in Yukon and on April 7, Samuel’s wedding day, the 93rd received orders to prepare for immediate “overseas assignment”.
Samuel and Mayola
Mayola’s honeymoon lasted three hours.
The ship carrying Samuel arrived in Skagway Harbor at the end of winter. On deck he saw an icicle as big as his arm, hanging off a hawser. He’d never seen such a thing.
Samuel rode in a packed railroad car from Skagway up into the rugged mountains of Yukon Territory. Through summer and on to the following December he worked repairing vehicles for Company F and, seventy-five years after the fact, Samuel remembered, more than anything, the bitter cold. Gas lines froze up on the trucks, so they kept them running—all the time. Oil congealed in the trucks’ differentials, so they set cans of burning gasoline under them to warm the oil in the morning.
Samuel didn’t mind food from cans, but it froze in his mess kit.
In December 1942 Samuel traveled with the 93rd to the Aleutians; the regiment spent the rest of the war building and maintaining airfields, helping defend the Aleutians from the Japanese.
Back home in Henrico county, Samuel never discussed his time in Yukon and the Aleutians. His daughter, Shirl, knew nothing about any of this until the family threw him a surprise 90th birthday party at his church. That night he told his friends and family about being a 21-year-old soldier standing guard in dreadful cold.
“We had to go up there and build a road.”
Three years ago, Dr. Shirl Leverette, typed “93rd Engineers and Alaska Highway” into Google’s search bar and found our research website. She hit “contact us” and dispatched an email. “Samuel Hargroves served with the 93rd Engineers with Company F during WWII. He is my father. Dad will be 97 years of age in September.”
Chris contacted Dr. Leverett the next day, and the following Saturday we met Mr. Hargroves; spent the better part of the day with him and his incredible wife Mayola, his lovely daughter and several of his great grandchildren. He taught us a great deal about a black man’s life in Yukon in 1942. More important, he granted us the privilege of being in the presence of one of the unsung heroes of the Highway.
Samuel Hargroves and his Great Grandson
Chris cried when she hugged him; and, truth to tell, so did I.
Samuel wore a sweatshirt with the proud words “U.S. Army” across his chest. Shirl told us about a cap he wears frequently that proclaims him a WW2 veteran. Today when he wears it, “people always stop to thank him for his service; sometimes pay for his coffee…” At Yorktown, VA one afternoon, an Army Colonel knelt, reverently, and spoke with Samuel for 45 minutes.
It’s about damned time.
Just a year before our visit, Shirl had dug an old green canvas bag out of Samuel’s closet. She had never seen it before. If her mother, Mayola, had seen it, it had been a very long time ago. They opened it; found faded photos, letters, an ancient, cracked leather wallet and other things they couldn’t identify.
That old green bag accompanied Samuel from Camp Livingston to the Yukon and beyond. In frigid tents across the North Country, the bag hung from rope to keep it off floors slimy with mud. Samuel Hargroves endured the unendurable and defended his country. He didn’t whine or complain. He just stepped up, day after day after endless day. In the green bag he carried the things behind his stoic exterior, the things of his heart.
The canvas bag
For seventy-four years, a hidden shrine in the back of Samuel’s closet, the little green bag preserved the heart of a hero.
From balmy above zero the temperature plunged to 36 below at Big Gerstle, Alaska on March 29. Sergeant Heard and his nine men spent that morning loading three deuce-and-a-half trucks with supplies for Fairbanks. Ten shivering black men in worn and ragged uniforms lifting and packing, working around the snow in the truck beds, escaping periodically to warm themselves around a fire in the yard yearned for a return to balmy.
The soldiers broke for lunch then reassembled near the trucks and the orderly room—company headquarters. Next to the three loaded trucks stood an empty fourth truck, clearly intended to haul them to Fairbanks.
As they eyeballed its unheated, ice and snow packed cargo area and its ragged canvas cover, the cold that surrounded them took on ominous significance. Moving down the road would generate wind, and wind would take the raw cold to a whole new level. They had learned the hard way just how dangerous Alaska cold could be.
The road that threatened them
The men reluctantly loaded their personal gear, but they hesitated to climb aboard. When Lieutenant Howell asserted his authority, he found that the soldiers feared riding in a dangerously frigid truck more than they feared him. Sergeant Heard and his squad had learned from experience that young white officers make mistakes. And they, not the young white officers, suffered the consequences.
K V Nelson froze to death along the road
Howell called the men into the orderly room one at a time, took their names and serial numbers. When the men, back outside, continued to hesitate, Howell ordered them into a rough formation. He stalked out of the orderly room and, standing between the men and the truck, informed them that refusing to get on the truck constituted mutiny, that the Army punished mutineers by executing them. He ordered them to get on the truck, gave them ten seconds to comply and portentously raised his arm to stare at his watch.
The men moved reluctantly, not fast enough to beat the second hand on the lieutenant’s watch. He stalked back into the orderly room, cancelled the trip and ordered the men arrested and confined to quarters.
Four days later, he preferred charges against all ten men for mutiny.
Great place to winter for young men from the Carolinas and Georgia
Winter, 1942-43, a winter natives and old timers in Alaska and Northern Canada remembered as the worst since 1917, found Sergeant Heard and his men enduring at Northway, near the Canadian border. Temperatures reached 72 degrees below zero and the white officers of Company F abandoned their frigid quarters for days at a time, crowding into a root cellar.
Sergeant Heard and his ten men huddled, like most of the men in the regiment, around stoves in tents, turning like roasts on a spit to warm their cold sides.
Even the trucks of the motor pool wintered in tents
Their threadbare uniforms offered little warmth. Some men had only half of a sleeping bag. Some lacked parkas. They swapped and shared clothes, blankets and sleeping bags, desperately trying to stay warm.
They took turns going outside, cutting frozen tree trunks into firewood. They watched each other carefully, examining faces, noses and ear lobes for tell-tale signs of frost bite.
Heard and his men worked all winter, doing their best to keep the new Alaska Highway clear of snow and ice, especially the huge mounds of “mushroom ice” that grew around the ends of bridges and culverts. But snow and ice piled up and equipment broke down. By mid-January 1943 the regiment had all but exhausted its supplies of food, fuel and spare parts.
Not exactly the cleared Highway the generals wanted
As winter approached its end, the regiment needed a Supply Office up in Fairbanks. At Big Gerstle, 130 miles from Fairbanks, Headquarters and Service Company Commander Lt. Dewitt C. Howell ordered his young assistant, Lt. Robert.W. Lyon, to move some men and material up there and establish one. Lyon would need soldiers and Howell asked Company F to loan him a squad to go with Lyon.
In March, Company F loaned Sergeant Heard and his nine men to Howell. The weather had eased a bit. The temperature had climbed to a balmy twenty degrees. Even at that, the soldiers endured a miserable two-day convoy to Big Gerstle.
In Alaska, of course, winter doesn’t end in March. Heard and his men reported to Howell’s company on March 12—just ahead of another spell of bone crunching cold.
The squad, Sergeant Heard’s ten young soldiers, had, like nearly all the men in the 97th Engineering Regiment, grown to manhood in the hot and humid southern United States. Over the last two years, the Army had hauled them over a bewildering path from Florida, to Alaska, and, finally, to the Big Gerstle River.
Early in 1942, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, America’s leaders had looked north with growing apprehension. The remote territory of Alaska and its Aleutian Island chain offered the Japanese a path to America, and America couldn’t defend itself there. The squad knew nothing of that.
Japan came to Alaska
To get soldiers, weapons and materials of war to Alaska, they needed a land route across Northern Canada and into Alaska. The Army dispatched seven regiments of the Corps of Engineers to build the Alaska Highway, and reluctantly included three regiments of segregated black soldiers. Sergeant Heard and his squad served in one of those segregated regiment—the 97th.
In October 1942 two regiments attacked the last gap in the road. The white 18th Engineers clawed their way north out of Yukon toward the Alaska border, the black 97th clawed their way south out of Alaska to meet them.
The 97th meets the 18th
Snow covered the ground and kept coming. Temperatures ranged from zero to twenty degrees. On the 25th, the lead bulldozers of the two regiments met at Beaver Creek, but the white men of the 18th had bogged down miles to the south, struggling to build a road over permafrost. Colonel Paulis, Northern Sector Commander, ordered the black soldiers of the 97th to plunge on into Canada, building, through falling temperatures and accumulating snow, another twenty miles of road to the White River.
On November 20 about 250 parka clad soldiers, dignitaries and newsmen stomped their feet and shivered through speeches at Soldier’s Summit, celebrating the completion of the Alaska Highway. While the dignitaries shivered, the black soldiers of Company F of the 97th moved back up to Northway to build their own barracks; arrived in snow and a temperature of 10 below zero. In December at 50 below a few moved out of canvas tents and into incomplete and uninsulated barracks. Most stayed in tents.
Cold posed the greatest threat to soldiers on the Alaska Highway Project. And the coldest winter ever recorded across northwest Canada and Alaska commenced in earnest in October 1942. Soldiers working on the Alaska Highway headed into a whole new experience. By December and January, the temperature routinely dropped to sixty below zero—a stupefying cold that none of the troops had ever experienced. Everybody suffered. A few died.
Frozen laundry is hard to wear
Neuberger in his “Yukon Adventure” remembered that they, “opened eggs only to find crystals of ice in the shell. Potatoes were ribbed with frozen strips that looked like Italian marble.” Placed in a pot to boil, iron hard potatoes took longer to thaw than to cook. Returned laundry arrived in a solid chunk that had to rest beside the stove for days before underwear or a sock could be pried loose. Private Francis, of the 93rd, tossed a frozen egg against a tree—only the shell cracked.
Lining up for breakfast
Soldiers in the field wore down filled parkas 24-7. Climbing into his ‘double mummy’ sleeping bag—down filled sleeping bag plus two blankets and a comforter—at night, a soldier wore arctic underwear, gloves, a sweater and socks. Once he brought his body, the only source of heat, to his nest, it took a half an hour or more for it to warm. He slept with his boots to keep them warm and pliable in the morning. And, in the end, none of this really protected him from the bone cracking cold.
Black soldiers, from semi-tropical Louisiana and Mississippi, suffered the most. A crane operator in the 97th remembered, “We wore three pairs of socks with galoshes instead of shoes because leather would freeze.” Those with fur mukluks or fabric galoshes stuffed them with layers of socks. A few used evergreen needles for insulating stuffing. And shoes had to be big because “tight shoes meant frozen feet”.
