STORIES FROM NORTHERN CANADA AND ALASKA.

The Couple Lives Through an Explosion in Dawson Creek

The couple, Lucky Donald Hall and his new wife, Zellma, moved into an apartment in Dawson Creek—a one bedroom, furnished with a bed and a footlocker. The lovebirds lived there very happily until spring. That, of course, means the spring of 1943, so the couple got to endure the great Dawson Creek explosion and fire with their fellow citizens.

Lucky Donald’s luck held, but his memory blurs some of the story so here’s a link to a full and accurate account of the event.

Explosion in Dawson Creek

Going past the drugstore on the corner, Donald and Zellma noticed a red glow over the nearby Co-op store. Curious, they moved to where flames devoured a small storage building. Soldiers with a small tanker hosed the building with water and Donald and Zellma watched with their fellow citizens.

Suddenly a construction truck raced by, its driver yelling at the crowd. “Get back. There’s dynamite in there.”

Donald and Zellma ran, had made it to Wings Café when the storage building erupted in a massive explosion. Donald had a tight grip on Zellma’s coat but the blast blew her half out of it. The concussion blew them both into the space between Wings and the next building. “I still had a hold of the coat, but she wasn’t fully in it.

Flames suddenly engulfed Dawson Creek, the whole downtown. Debris from the blast— “tools, wire, tires, two by fours…”—flew everywhere, wreaking devastation on everything, including people.

We’ve already established Donald’s luck. It held.

Because he and Zellma lay between buildings, they escaped the flying debris.

For a You Tube Video from the South Peace Historical Society

William Booker’s Guest Post from 1945

William Booker served with the segregated 95^th Engineering Regiment on the Alaska Highway in 1942, went on with the regiment to the European Theater. In 1945 he wrote a poem about his service and tonight he is my guest storyteller.

KV Nelson Froze to Death

This photo has nothing to do with KV’s fate–but it conveys the cold

KV Nelson served with the 97^th Engineering Regiment on the Alaska Highway in Alaska—until February 5, 1943. On that day he died.

He and a fellow soldier named Smith, driving a truck on the icy highway back to camp from the little settlement at Station Creek, slid off the road into a ditch. The truck broke through the ice and stuck fast. Thirty miles from salvation the two men had no choice, around 11:00 am they started to walk.

Injured, Sick or Worse on the Highway

Ten miles on they stopped and built a fire so Nelson could warm his feet, but they had to keep moving. After a few more miles, they stopped again. This time they couldn’t build a fire. They had matches but their freezing hands couldn’t grasp and light one.

As they trudged on through the night, cold and fatigue built up for Nelson. He began to fall down, fell several times. Smith managed to get him back on his feet, but it got harder and harder to do.

In the end Smith had to leave him, hoping against hope he could get to camp, get help and get back in time to save his friend.

At 2:00 am Smith stumbled into camp, and four soldiers set out immediately to find Nelson. The brutal cold forced them back to camp after just a few miles. At 8:00 am they tried again and made it back to a frozen corpse. Later that afternoon they got it on a sled and back to camp.

Smith, writing to his company commander, “Mentally I myself am about to crack so get some kind of message to me either giving me hell for making an ass of myself or otherwise. As I look back over it, there are a lot of if’s which if they had been done the thing might not have happened. I don’t know and probably never will know if I did the right thing.”

The incident left Smith with a frost-bitten nose and a permanently useless little finger on his right hand.

The news from Tok today

Will Rogers’ Brush with Alaska

Will Rogers entertained America through the Great Depression—can’t have been easy. He talked on the radio, he wrote newspaper columns, he appeared in movies; and, whatever the venue, he made people laugh. It’s hard to find humor in his brush with Alaska.

More about the Comedian

Almost as famous, Will’s friend Wiley Post didn’t entertain people, he flew airplanes.

In August, 1935, Post flew Rogers to Siberia… Well he didn’t, but he intended to.

They stopped on the way in Fairbanks, Alaska. Rogers “bummed around” Fairbanks and made friends. He clearly liked the place.

More about Fairbanks

The men flew out of Fairbanks, landed about 15 miles from Barrow to ask directions. On takeoff, the engine died, the plane crashed. Both men died.

Will Rogers left his last newspaper column rolled in his typewriter. He wrote of his meeting with dog musher Leonhard Seppala who “is as identified with dogs as Mae West is with buxomness.”

An Exploded Repair

Donald’s wasn’t this bad, but it could have been.

The tank exploded, and that shouldn’t have surprised the man repairing it.

Donald L. Hall drove trucks out of Dawson Creek in 1942. He also fixed trucks. Driving, he brought up the rear of his convoy, piloting a truck full of spare parts and tools. When trucks broke, he fixed them.

For more on mechanics

When the gas tank on a 6 X 6 truck sprung a leak, Donald removed it. Normally he would have filled it with water before working on it, but he had no water. He did have a portable air compressor, so he blew the tank out with air.

And then he tried to solder the leak… The solder refused to flow where he needed it and he broke out a blow torch. Straddling the tank, sitting on the end away from the leak, concentrating, he barely noticed the fellow standing in front of him.

He remembered a “terrific boom” and a blast of flame. He remembered going airborne for a time before he landed on his rump and slid for a few feet.

The man in front of him lost his eyebrows and some hair from his neck. Solder decorated the bill of Donald’s cap and the red bumps on his face looked like a case of measles. The gas tank died. One end blew out completely and the “shape of my legs were on the sides of it.”

The tank went to the dump. And Donald decided in later years that he had been the first astronaut.

Should my gas tank develop a leak, I believe I’ll find someone a bit older and wiser than Donald to fix it.

Swarming Road Builders Need Food and Supplies

Swarming over the mountains and through the woods carving out the Alaska Highway in 1942, thousands of soldiers consumed mountains of rations. They needed underwear, boots, coats, sleeping bags, and toilet paper. Headquarters’ used tables, chairs, filing cabinets, pens, pencils and typewriters. Kitchen’s needed stoves and gas, cookware, seasonings. Medics needed bandages and drugs, dental supplies and tools, surgical tools, intravenous fluids… Swarming soldiers don’t always get everything they need, but they need at least a bare minimum.

Fuel for the Monster Dozers

Supplies got to them by every available means

To make matters more difficult, back in Washington in August the powers that were decided to move civilian contractors in ahead of schedule to swarm all around the soldiers. Thousands of civilian road builders joined them in the deep woods. Demand for fuel, parts and sustenance increased exponentially.

Eventually five management contractors and forty-seven construction contractors—a total of 7,500 civilians–worked on the road. And the civilians had the same logistical and supply problems as the army. The civilians supplied themselves, but they did it over the same routes and through the same bottlenecks.

The contractors found the Corps’ cumbersome supply system intensely frustrating—no surprise, the soldiers in the field felt much the same way. All too often, using the system meant circumventing it; and, if everybody circumvented the system, that made the system even more cumbersome and difficult.

The Rude Bear

We can excuse a rude bear. They don’t, after all, attend finishing school. Roy Lee of the 140^th Quartermaster Truck company would beg to disagree.

WWII killed women too.

WWII killed women, especially nurses, right along with men—an equal opportunity disaster. The War killed Ruth Gardiner.

Ruth entered the world in 1914 in Calgary, Alberta; came with her parents to Eastport, Idaho at age three. The Gardiners wandered a bit through the lower 48—Noyes, Minnesota then Pennsylvania. Twenty-three old Ruth trained as a nurse at Philadelphia General Hospital.

Japan brought war to the United States at Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941, and the Army and Navy found themselves struggling to cope with thousands of injured soldiers and sailors. The Army Nurse Corps stepped up and female recruits rushed to the flag. Ruth rushed among them.

As increasingly gruesome battlefields sprouted all over the Pacific and North Africa, the problems facing the Nurse Corps multiplied. Torn and mutilated bodies littered battlefields and they couldn’t be repaired there. Ships could carry them to hospitals, but only slowly—often too slowly. The Nurse Corps turned to airplanes—and the Flight Nurses. 2^nd Lt. Ruth Gardiner came to the Army and became a flight nurse.

A system quickly developed, almost by itself. Under fire, Corpsmen tended the wounded men as best they could, carried them from the battlefield to Surgeons at Aid Stations. From there corpsmen carried hurriedly patched patients to a primitive field hospital. Inevitably many of the wounded soldiers needed far more treatment.

Evacuation planes flew to a rough, hurriedly constructed airstrip. Corpsmen carried up to eighteen patients into the cavernous planes, delivered them to the care of the Flight Nurses who tended them while the planes took off to fly them hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles to hospitals. Ignoring the danger, flight nurses kept the men alive in the air.

Of the places flight nurses flew, none proved more hazardous than the Aleutians of Alaska. The nurses of the 805 Medical Air Evacuation Service stepped up and Ruth stepped with them. On July 27, 1943, Lt Gardiner’s plane flew to Dutch Harbor on Unmak Island to pick up casualties. A mountain loomed, the pilot pulled up and the plane stalled, “mushed”, and plowed into the ground.

That day, at the northwest end of Bristol Bay, wreckage and cargo piled onto young Lt. Gardiner, pinned her. The plane exploded. And Ruth became the first of these heroes, the lady flight nurses, to die for her country.

The Japanese Bomb Dutch Harbor

Alaska Highway Churns Up Stories.

The main artery of the North, the great Alaska Highway churns up endless stories.

Blogging Far North History

Ron Brooks commented on a post that his father had worked on the highway. I messaged him, and we exchanged emails. Like so many of you, Tom has a treasure trove of information about his dad’s service on the Highway. And I’m delighted to share it with the rest of you.

Ron’s dad, Tom Brooks, had poor vision and the Canadian Armed Forces wouldn’t let him enlist. He worked on a homestead on the Eureka River outside of Hines Creek, AB when he heard about the Highway project and he rushed to help; worked in the Southern Sector as a civilian.

Tom took photos. Ron shared a photo of the camera he used—a Kodak Model B-5 Folding Pocket Camera.

James Miller commented and shared that he drove the Alaska Highway for a living back in the 1970’s; it was still gravel and a very different and more difficult route than it is today. He commented on one of my posts a week or so ago with a story and a couple of questions.

As a follow up, he messaged me a photo of the truck he drove back then.

Beautiful…

Here is the text of his message.

Dennis, this is a company truck owned by Hill and Hill Truck Line of Houston, Texas. Hill & Hill was one of the pioneers in serving the state of Alaska when it became a state. Hill & Hill sold out in the early 80’s and no longer in business.

Alaska Trucking

Tanana Crossing

Crossing the Tanana remained vivid in Lt. Walter Mason’s memory of his time on the Alaska Highway in 1942. Mason’s regiment had built road through the Alaskan wilderness since spring. But they hadn’t been building the Alaska Highway, they had been building a road to get themselves to the Alaska Highway. Once across the Tanana, they would turn south and build the real Highway along the river to the Canadian border.