STORIES FROM NORTHERN CANADA AND ALASKA.

Colonel Whipple’s Problem

Colonel Whipple, commander of the 97^th in early 1942, understood very clearly that his bosses wanted him to keep his black soldiers away from Alaskans. Once he had his men off the Branch, he focused on getting them out of Valdez. Company E had walked through the snow directly off the dock, out to the Richardson Highway and then 13 miles out of town.

Getting off the Ship

On May 3 Company B walked directly from the ship out to join Company E at the 13-mile camp. But four full companies remained at the airstrip. Alaskans would have to put up with black neighbors for a few more days. Companies C and F, including Sergeant Heard and his nine men, left on May 10. Companies A and D finally left town on May 20. Whipple and his staff, his H&S Company, remained at the airstrip.

Wherever they did it during that first week in Alaska, soldiers had to pitch and then sleep and cook and eat in canvas tents. A company arrived at a bivouac, the company commander showed his four platoon leaders where their tents would go, with his first sergeant he would find a central location for his headquarters, his officers, his kitchen and mess tent. The platoon leaders and sergeants would disperse, taking their men to their assigned area, directing each squad leader to the location of his squad’s ten-man tent.

And the soldiers would go to work. Clear snow away, lay out the canvas, drive pegs through loops into dirt to hold it down. But in April and May Alaska dirt is the consistency of a brick. Some soldiers, more creative, figured out work arounds. 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.

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. Sgt Monk remembered, “Your breath would turn to ice inside your blankets at night.” And he remembered his bedding. “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.

Colonel Whipple continued accumulating problems. He had managed, by May 10 to get four companies out to the 13-mile camp. But neither they or the companies coming behind could go much further. Just six miles on, at Wortmann’s, the Richardson climbed into Keystone Canyon and then Thompson Pass, 2,805 feet above sea level. Thompson Pass averages 46 feet of snow every year; becomes a dangerous place.

As they did every year, the Alaska Highway Commission had closed the pass for the winter. In May they struggled to get the snow out and open it again. The men of Company E moved up to Wortmann’s and pitched in to help, but the effort took time. The first soldiers of the 97^th to get over the Pass didn’t do it until May 20.

General Hoge had dispatched Whipple and the 97^th to Alaska with a schedule. At the end of May, hopelessly behind, Colonel Whipple didn’t bother to worry about it.

The Demolished Dock

Port of Valdez in 1942

April 30, 1942. The SS David Branch has partially demolished the Valdez Dock; lashed to it anyway; is about to disgorge the black soldiers of the 97^th Engineering Regiment. Anything or anybody coming off the David Branch would come to the narrow wooden dock and the warehouse, would traverse the long dock to where it turned into Alaska Avenue, would follow the Avenue past the Village Morgue Bar and the Merrill Mercantile Company and the other frame buildings of Valdez out to intersect the Richardson Highway.

Three feet of snow covered the ground in Valdez. More, Valdesians had been plowing and shoveling all winter, piling snow from sidewalks on one side and Alaska Avenue on the other into a massive wall between them. Wood smoke and coal soot had stained the crusted snow brown and black. From the sidewalk, one could hear street traffic but couldn’t see it. The snowbanks compressed the already narrow street to barely one lane.

A company of approximately a hundred men, each carrying two barracks bags, trying to negotiate the avenue created an impressive traffic jam. Throw in a few trucks and vehicles and the local population trying to use the avenue and jam turned into gridlock. The men of the 97^th wouldn’t come quickly off the Branch.

The Headquarters and Service Company, Whipple’s staff, came off first. Climbing to the deck, the soldiers of H&S got their first look at snowbound Alaska and the towering glacier. They wormed their way along Alaska Avenue to the airstrip just across the Richardson Highway where they found some room to shovel snow away and began pitching tents.

Company E troops came off next, leaving the rest of the regiment in the hold. The soldiers hoisted their barracks bags and filed through the maze of hatches and companionways to the deck. Still in file, they walked down to the dock and over its planks into Alaska, shivered in the snow as they assembled in platoons then wormed their way through town out to the Richardson Highway.

Company E didn’t stop at the airfield. They marched out on the Richardson between steep banks of plowed snow. In two columns, one on either side of the highway, they trudged away from the Alaskans, their boots sliding on the packed snow under their feet. Occasionally glancing up at the dramatic landscape, they mostly concentrated on the man in front of them and their slipping feet. Five hours later, thirteen miles out, Company E found a relatively flat area that could accommodate a camp. They fell out; began shoveling snow out of the way and pitching tents.

On that first day of unloading, April 30^th, morning turned to noon and then afternoon. Most of the regiment remained in the hold. But Company B, including Sgt Monk would remain aboard for a few days as temporary stevedores and security guards so some of them scrambled topside to begin unchaining trucks. They got their first look at “hell on earth”, winter in Alaska.

Simply getting everybody and everything off the ship took a full four days. One company at a time, the men made their way to the deck then the dock, got their first look at Alaska, and marched to wherever their commanders could find a place. Sgt Monk and Company B came off last on May 3.

For more on the history of the 97th

For more on race in the construction of the highway

One Ramshackle Dock

The SS David Branch, carrying the segregated 97^th Engineering Regiment to the Alaska Highway dropped anchor in Valdez Harbor on April 29, 1942. Valdez offered one ramshackle dock and no harbor pilots. On April 30 her captain, forced to an unassisted docking, managed to ram her bow into and through the end of the dock. The grinding crash brought the citizens of Valdez running. No matter, Pubic Roads Administration (PRA) contractors would rebuild the dock later. The Branch tied up to its remains.

Three feet of snow covered the ground. The citizens had shoveled and plowed all winter, piling snow from sidewalks on one side and streets on the other into a massive wall between them. Wood smoke and coal soot had stained the crusted snow brown and black. From the sidewalk, one could hear street traffic but couldn’t see it.

More about Valdez

From the deck of the David Branch, when a soldier got out of the hold and up to the deck, he saw the crumpled dock, a warehouse with a big sign. “Valdez,” the sign proclaimed. “Terminus of a Great Scenic Road, The Richardson Highway.” From the warehouse the dock stretched across dirty, oiled water to the town, a cluster of frame buildings. The Valdez glacier towered behind the buildings.

Haywood Oubre grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana and brought an utterly unique personal history to the 97^th. He graduated from Dillard University, their first art major. He went on to graduate school in art at Atlanta University, did “creative touches” for a new student union at Tuskeegee Institute. Oubre’s draft board got in touch in April 1941, “they told me I’d be jailed if I didn’t show up in New Orleans the next day.”

When he made it to the deck of the David Branch, looked out across the tiny town of Valdez at the massive Valdez Glacier, Oubre thought this. “When you first behold the beauty and nature in Alaska, you are overwhelmed. It was in April. The snow was on the ground. I had my parka on, and I said, ‘Praise God, I’ve never seen a landscape so beautiful.’”

The frigid temperature and the snow that covered Valdez and the massive glacier impressed most of Oubre’s fellows more than the scenic beauty. Staff Sergeant Clifton Monk grew up in Newton Grove, North Carolina, learned to operate heavy equipment at Eglin Field in Florida. He reacted differently to the snow at Valdez, “It looked like hell on earth.”

Port of Valdez in 1942

Valdez grew a bit between the Gold Rush and 1942, but not much. Robert Kelsey and his Valdez Dock Company had installed a rickety dock mounted on timber pilings across the mud flats at the water’s edge. The town had acquired a Presbyterian Church and a Café.

Gateway to the Richardson Highway

Valdez had acquired a newspaper, and various companies and individuals offered travelers buses and cars for transportation up the Richardson Highway to Fairbanks. Roadhouses, scattered along the Highway at one-day travel intervals, offered rough accommodations and meals.

Valdez Museum Walking Tour Link

A sleepy little town. Not so different, on the face of it, from the towns the young soldiers who would descend on Valdez in 1942 had left behind in the lower 48. But no… Subarctic Valdez resembled no other small town anywhere. Geography, geology and climate defined Valdez, and the Army might as well have sent the young soldiers to a distant planet.

Valdezians conducted their small-town affairs in a hostile and thoroughly dangerous environment. The San Francisco Examiner reported on Nov 13, 1941 “Six men, marooned since last Thursday in a territorial commission relief cabin on the Richardson Highway by heavy snow and gales, were rescued yesterday by Flyer Roy Dieringer.”

From the News Press, Ft. Myers, FL Jan 16, 1942, “You should see Valdez during a black-out on a dark of the moon night. I am a warden and have a certain district to patrol for lights. Honestly I am down more than up, snow is so treacherous in the dark, deep and shallow spots all look alike and trails and roads melt into wide open spaces.”

From the Nanaimo Daily News, November 10, 1941, “Gales of estimated hurricane velocity whistled through the Thompson Pass summit today grounding a rescue plane which yesterday brought Mark Neilsen and Mr. and Mrs. Ward Clay, an expectant mother, from the Territorial Road Commission relief cabin at Mile 35 where they had been marooned with six other persons for five days.”

From the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, April 20, 1942, “The relaxing of winter’s grip on Fourteen Mile Slough, this weekend yielded the body of 71-year-old Jim Mooney, an aged sourdough and Richardson Highway woodchopper.”

Valdezians also conducted their affairs in almost total isolation from the rest of the world. Ships came to the dock and people and goods moved through Valdez—during the summer months.

During most of the year bush pilots provided the only connection to the outside—or to the inside, for that matter. Airplanes offered a tenuous connection at best. The difficulties and dangers of flying over Alaska winnowed the number of bush pilots down to a very few and turned that few into legendary folk heroes.

Valdez Offered a Point of Entry

Valdez offered a point of entry–sort of.

Getting into Alaska and Northern Canada proved, over the years to be the biggest struggle for people who came to Alaska and Northern Canada. They found ways; and, in the finding, created a dramatic and fascinating history. Work on our next book has brought us to one of those histories, the path through Valdez.

The North Pacific, the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean surround the unimaginably vast and forbidding territory of Alaska on three sides. The equally vast and forbidding wilderness of Northern Canada borders it to the east. Alaska offered little to draw outsiders until, late in the 19^th century, a few prospectors began to discover gold in parts of the interior—especially along the Yukon River near the Canadian Border and, at the turn of the 20^th century, most especially across the border in the Klondike.

On one of the very few routes to the Klondike, gold seekers came by ship up the inside passage, climbed off the ship onto the mud flats where the little town of Valdez sprouted, and confronted the towering Chugach Mountains. Directly across the mud flats rose the massive, Valdez Glacier. Its base, folded by time and erosion, climbed abruptly to two enormous peaks separated by a deep cut. The first prospectors loaded themselves and their sleds and pack animals and climbed up the gigantic glacier into the interior, and a lot of them died in the attempt. The glacier featured enormous accumulations of snow, as enormous as any in the world. Deep crevasses and avalanches swallowed and smothered men and women and animals passing through it.

Another Route–Yukon River Route

By hook or by crook miners came to the Klondike, trailing suppliers, gamblers, hookers and thieves. The Royal Canadian Mounties came to keep order. Across the border near Eagle, Alaska the United States Army came to do the same.

Needing a supply route from Valdez, the Army sent a soldier named Abercrombie to create one. From sea level at Valdez, Abercrombie bypassed the glacier, climbed into the towering mountains by way of Keystone Canyon and Thompson Pass. From the pass his rough “goat trail” wound through mountains and across rivers to Eagle on the Yukon.

One of the Easier Parts of Abercrombie’s Trail 1906

Just a few years later, when Major Wilds Richardson came to build an actual road, things had changed. The Klondike Gold Rush had ended, and Fairbanks had become a more important destination than Eagle, so Richardson aimed his road at Fairbanks. He upgraded Abercrombie’s trail as far as Gulkana, and beyond to Slana to service the Nebesna Mines. But he left the road from Gulkana to Slana a branch road. Richardson’s main highway left Abercrombie’s path at Gulkana, went north through Big Delta, across the Tanana River and on to Fairbanks.

By the 1940’s the little town of Valdez billed itself as the “Terminus of the Richardson Highway.”

A Great Site on Roadhouses Along the Abercrombie and the Richardson

Chicken

Chicken, Alaska represents a lot of why Researcher/Team Leader and I love the North Country. Alaska and Northern Canada offer some of the most unique and unusual people and places on earth. Those of you who have made the trek know about the town of Chicken, Alaska.

Chicken beat the Klondike to a gold strike by a country mile. Prospectors found gold on Franklin Creek in 1886. In 1959 gold mining in Chicken went big time when The Fairbanks Exploration Company moved in a dredge. It operated until 1967.

In 2000 17 people lived in Chicken. By 2010 10 remained.

Legend has it that when a local post office came in 1902 the citizens of Chicken wanted to name their town “Ptarmigan” in honor of a prevalent local bird. Nobody knew, though, how to spell it. They settled for “Chicken”.

You can fly to Chicken—land at the Chicken Airport. You can drive to Chicken via the Taylor Highway—if you’re brave and have a really stout vehicle and if it’s between mid-March and mid-October when the Alaska Highway Commission maintains it.

According to Wikipedia, the average high temperature in Chicken in July is 70 degrees. The average low is 40 degrees. The average high in January is 14.4 below zero and the average low is 31 below zero.

On his website, https://quirkytravelguy.com/quirky-town-chicken-alaska/ Scott Shetler lists the important things about Chicken—its population has dropped to seven, its saloon requires you to check your firearms at the door, and if you need to relieve yourself, Chicken offers a really upscale outhouse—three stalls—known as “Chicken Poop”.

Chicken has its own website https://www.chickenalaska.com/

Since Chicken owes its existence to gold miners and gold mines, it is fitting that you can buy gold from Chicken on eBay https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=chicken+alaska+gold&ul_noapp=true/

If you can’t afford to buy it on Ebay, you can drive your RV to the “Chicken Gold Camp & Outpost”, check in and pan or mine your own. The Gold Camp has a website as well… Chicken Gold

June 1942, Yukon

June 1942 in Yukon.

What was going on

The black soldiers of the 93^rd Engineers hit their stride. Moving rapidly east from Tagish, Company A led the three companies of First Battalion on a mad dash through the woods. On June 4 Company A moved to bivouac seven miles east of the Tagish River just three miles short of the peaceful bit of woods that would become Jakes Corner.

Jake’s Corner lay dead center in the 93^rd’s area of operations. On the 4^th, with Company A still three miles short of that spot, the commander’s staff, his Headquarters and Service Company piled themselves and their supplies into trucks at Carcross and negotiated the miles of mud and stumps to Tagish. H&S would live in Tagish for just twelve days–until June 16.

Yukon Territory offered a community at Tagish—just barely. About fifty Tlingit Natives made their homes there—fishing the river they called “Six Mile River”. The Dickson family ran a trading post and a fox and mink farm. Still living on boxed rations, the men of H&S welcomed the fish.

Between June 4 and June 6, the First Battalion ‘train’, led by Company A, raced through Jakes Corner—hell bent for the Teslin River. The rough road in their wake provided access from Carcross through Tagish to the motor pool site—just in time.

Heavy equipment finally appeared at the Skagway docks; came up on the WP&YT to Carcross. Precious trucks and jeeps and D8 dozers moved off the ships, on to rail cars, up the White Pass. The regiment welcomed the equipment, of course, but in the first week of June its arrival took chaos to a new level. The regiment fought to get the precious machines out of Carcross and over the muck and stumps of the primitive road still under construction to the line companies that so desperately needed them.

New Bulldozers on the way to Jakes Corner

Yukon Territory, of course, fought back. It greeted the heavy equipment invasion with heavy rains and thick mud. But the engineers, sweating and cursing, prevailed. With a brutal schedule hanging over their heads, Hoge and his commanders needed the equipment in place and working. Their soldiers made it happen.

At Tagish the 73^rd Pontoon Engineers’ ferry operated eighteen hours a day, hauling equipment and supplies over the river. In the first three weeks of June, they moved 1050 vehicles including D8’s and gas shovels and supplies across the 1200-foot River.

Former Lieutenant Squires, motor officer for the 93^rd, vividly remembered watching a string of new D8’s slew and grumble through Tagish toward Jake’s Corner. “Now they could make headway.”

Seventy Miles of Road

Mid-June 1942, the action in Yukon centered squarely on the seventy miles of road from Carcross to the Teslin River and the men of the 93^rd Engineers who fought to build it. Never recorded, long forgotten, the performance of the men of the 93^rd—especially the men of Company A—during the first two weeks of June 1942 should be the stuff of legend. We’ll do our best to make it so.

For Yukon Context

Colonel Johnson commanded the 93^rd, and his strategy addressed three issues. First, his heavy equipment would land at Carcross in a matter of days and he needed to get it checked out, prepped and distributed to his line companies, especially the ones furthest out in the wilderness. Second, he had to get the supply road built, nothing could slow those lead companies down in their headlong dash to the Teslin. Third, his mission wouldn’t end when he reached the Teslin River and he needed to plan a pivot.

From Carcross out to Jake’s Corner Johnson’s soldiers built a supply road—not part of the Highway (that changed later, but no one knew it yet). From Jakes Corner they would build Alaska Highway in two directions. They would build south along the Teslin, end at Nisutlin Bay, the starting point for the 340^th. And they would build north along Marsh Lake and across the McClintock River to Whitehorse.

On June 1^st two companies, A and C, had already crossed the Tagish River. Company A’s morning report has them three miles east of the river, making road. Company C’s report has them about one and a half miles east of the river, working on culverts. Company B crossed the river that day. In seven miles Company A would reach Jakes Corner.

With mountains of supplies and, finally, heavy equipment about to descend on Carcross, Johnson needed to pull the ‘stuff’ designated for the 93^rd out of the morass and get it somewhere where his people could check it, sort it, and get it out to the line companies. Jake’s Corner offered the perfect location—for distributing the equipment now and for supporting it later. Johnson located his regimental motor pool and a massive supply dump at Jake’s Corner before his road even got that far.

Still pretty much out of the action, Second Battalion and H&S Company remained in camp at Carcross. Company D bivouacked just five miles east, between Lake Jacoby and Crag Lake. These men would get the equipment off the railroad at Carcross and convoy it over the road to Jakes Corner.

The River Route

June brought the War to the North Country—to the Aleutians. Down in Yukon the black men of the 93^rd Engineers battled a less vicious but ultimately much tougher enemy—mother nature. The white soldiers of the 340^th, though, mostly still battled confusion—battled themselves.

General Hoge finally had heavy equipment on the way. It would begin to land in Skagway in a matter of days—first for the 93^rd and then, later in the month, for the 340^th. But that very success brought his plan’s second critical problem front and center. He had assigned Colonel Lyons’ 340^th Engineering Regiment the section of highway from Nisutlin Bay south and east to Lower Post. Before he could start, Lyons had to get over a thousand men; a mountain of supplies; and, when they finally arrived, hundreds of bulldozers, trucks, graders and other heavy equipment from Skagway to that starting point.

Recall that Morley Bay, a few miles east of Nisutlin Bay, would base Lyons’ operations and that Hoge’s plan depended on two routes to there from Skagway. One would use the WP&YT to Whitehorse then boats and barges over the Yukon River system and Teslin Lake. The other, more direct, route would use the WP&YT to Carcross then seventy miles of road to the Teslin River. It would use boats and barges from there over the relatively short stretch of river to Teslin Lake, Nisutlin Bay, and Morley Bay.

The black soldiers of the 93^rd had gotten themselves out in the woods and on their way to the Teslin River. By June 1 Lyons had deployed two companies of his second battalion along his river route, ready to do the heavy lifting.

At Skagway one platoon, would move ‘stuff’ from ships to railroad cars. At Whitehorse another two platoons would move it from railroad cars to river steamers. Another platoon arrived at Morley Bay on June 3 aboard the steamboat Keno. They would unload the material at the end of its journey. The Nisutlin carried another platoon to Morley Bay, and the SS Whitehorse carried still another.

The first platoon to arrive at Morley Bay scrambled to build a rough dock and an access road from it to the regimental base camp.

Colonel Lyons and most of his men waited, champing at the bit.

The Devil’s Brigade

In 1943 the Americans took back Attu, drove the Japanese to suicide. They targeted Kiska next, totally unaware that in response to the Attu assault, the Japanese had abandoned the second island. According to Stan Cohen’s book, The Forgotten War Vol. 2, Americans had intercepted the evacuation order, but Admiral Kincaid didn’t believe it.

On August 15, 1943 thirty thousand Americans and 5,000 Canadians landed on Kiska. Allied troops screwed up, fired on each other, so initial reports from the island sounded like normal casualty reports. The missing Japanese had booby trapped everything in sight—more allied casualties.

When I first posted about the war in the Aleutians, back on November 7 Mike Gay commented on the post on Facebook. “My dad served with the First Special Service Force (The Devil’s Brigade). They invaded the island of Kiska in the Aleutians. The Japs pulled out just ahead of the Force landing at night in rubber boats.”

I replied that I would be posting about the invasion in a few days and invited him to comment with more information. Mike responded with the following:

Dad said that they were carrying over 100 pounds of gear and weapons. They were in rubber boats, that would rise up and down, they began to hear noise that sounded to them like Japanese talking. The thought of a few bullets hitting the boats, sinking rapidly, and drowning in the frigid water caused real fear. They climbed the short cliffs at the shore and moved inland. The island was cold, foggy, wet and occasionally rocky. There were men that were wounded, and I think some were killed by mistaking friendly forces for Japanese. After they found that there were no Japanese left on the island they stayed in the miserable conditions for days with very limited rations. They untwisted segments of rope, used ben safety pins (from ammo bandoliers) as fish hooks, strips of red strips around cigarette packs as lures and caught small trout from the tiny streams.

They trained in Montana at mountain climbing, snow skiing, hand to hand combat, tactics, parachute jumping and demolition. They trained outdoors all week long, no tents and temps as low as

-54 degrees F.

Dad said they had many men drop out of the outfit every day. Half of them were American and half were Canadians. They were the model for the Special Forces.