Problems Pile Up in May

The problems that had emerged to plague the Alaska Highway Project in April piled like dirt in front of a bulldozer blade in May. The hell-bent advance into the wilderness threatened to dissolve in chaos and confusion.  Three entry points, Skagway, Valdez and Dawson Creek, swarmed with confused troops trying desperately to get organized.More on Crowded Skagway

Two problems—getting equipment to theNorth Country and then getting the equipment and the men who would use it through a seemingly endless wilderness to the work site—emerged as potential ‘deal killers’ everywhere along the road, threatening to end the project before it even got started.  In Yukon Territory those two problems emerged in their most virulent form.

In 1942 a road building engineering regiment came equipped with twenty D8 diesel bulldozers, twenty-four D4 gas bulldozers, six pulled road graders, three patrol graders, six rooter plows and six 12-yard carrying scrapers.  To support and supplement these, each regiment had ninety-three 1/2-ton dump trucks, a 6-ton prime mover truck, seven 4-ton cargo trucks and nine 2 1/2-ton cargo trucks, twenty-five jeeps, ten command cars…

More on the History of the Alaska Highway

The list goes on, but you get the idea.

The 35^th had brought its equipment and all but destroyed it getting into position.  The other regiments were waiting for theirs and struggling to get into position.  Those few troops who managed to get to work attacked the road with axes, shovels, picks and wheelbarrows. Their heavy equipment jammed the docks in Seattle and the jam got worse by the day.

General Hoge wouldn’t be building a highway until he broke that jam, and at mid-month he flew to Seattle to see what he could do.

The demands imposed by the war had overloaded the system of ocean transport, driven it into chaos.  Military commanders and civilian managers all over the world confronted pieces of the emergency and they all required resources—men, supplies and equipment—they needed to move over the oceans.  Demand for ships and harbor facilities vastly exceeded supply and everybody’s requirement had an urgent priority.

At Seattle Harbor, Hoge found large scale confusion and disorder. Luckily, he also found E.W. Elliott, a private contractor who had managed to acquire tugs and freighters and had shipped equipment north for the Public Roads Administration.  Elliott agreed to do the same for Hoge.

Elliott’s talents proved equal to the challenge.  He assembled a collection of freighters, tugs, barges, scows and several pleasure yachts and talked the Navy into assigning a gunboat named Charleston and several converted fishing boats to protect his ragtag convoys.  By hook or by crook, he began to move Hoge’s equipment.