Problem with no solution? When the soldiers of the 18th found themselves trying to build road over permafrost–a lake of ice covered by a thin layer of decayed vegation—it looked like they had encountered one. But on the Alaska Highway Project in 1942 the Corps of Engineers could not allow a problem with no solution.
In August the soldiers of the 18th figured out that, first and foremost, they could not disturb the thin layer of insulating vegetation. Since bulldozers disturbed it simply by driving over it, they resorted to clearing with hand tools. Their progress slowed to a crawl and the lead company didn’t cross the Donjek River until August 31.
Link to “Kitchen Police Discovered the Problem First”
A floating pontoon bridge got the soldiers across the river and most of the regiment floundered energetically toward the next river—the White. Working with hand tools they averaged less than a mile a day. With the undisturbed vegetation still insulating, the ice remained solid, and when the soldiers of Company E came behind spreading gravel, the road qualified as finished by Alaska Highway standards.
But the dump trucks of Company E had to bring the gravel across the Donjek River and turbulence in its main channel repeatedly took the pontoon bridge out of commission. One Company, a sixth of the regiment’s manpower, had to leave the problem with no solution and spend the whole month of September building a more permanent bridge.
In the race to be first at the international border, the white soldiers of the 18th fell further behind the black soldiers of the 97th with every passing day through September and into October. And on October 12 the soldiers of the 97th crossed the border. The 97th had won the race.
They paused briefly to celebrate their triumph. The soldiers of the 18th, still down in Yukon, grumbled, muttered about whose section of road had been tougher. But grumbling did not change the simple fact—the black soldiers had got there first.
In his book Northwest Epic, Heath Twichell summed it up this way. The white 18th Engineers’ “…record-setting pace over the 150 miles from Whitehorse to Kluane Lake during June and early July had established them as the highway’s undisputed road-building champs.” But now “…the highway’s mileage champs had been beaten in a fair race by the ‘practically useless’ [quoting Commanding General Hoge] black soldiers of the 97th Engineers.”