Spare parts became precious. The Alaska Highway that spooled out behind the soldiers with their dozers and carryalls and hand tools in 1942 swarmed with smaller vehicles, especially deuce and a half trucks. The equipment plowing through the woods required more than mountains of 55-gallon drums of fuel. Mud pulled hoses loose, tracks and rollers broke. Truck axles broke. Tires wore out and blew out.
Each company assigned ‘mechanics’ as the first line of defense against equipment problems. Relatively few of these men brought training and experience to the job. One of them, John Bollin of Company F of the 93rd Engineers, had never clapped eyes on most of his equipment before he arrived in the North Country. Civilian John had worked for a dry cleaner in Virginia. Years after the fact, he told a PBS interviewer, “He was an asphalt and concrete city boy and didn’t know nothing about this heavy equipment.” He learned fast, on the job and in a hurry. “We were able to overcome what we did not know by trial and error.”
The regimental motor pool backed up the field mechanics with specialized equipment and better trained mechanics. In the 93rd Charlie Mittenbaum, a PRA master mechanic provided training and advice.
In the end, though, regardless of who did maintenance and repair, they couldn’t do it without parts and supplies. The deuce-and-a-half’s crawling the road carried those too—when they could get them.
In the field and in the motor pool, mechanics resorted to cannibalizing broken equipment to get parts for other broken equipment. Long deadlines, cannibalized vehicles waiting for parts, sprouted and grew across the yards at the regimental motor pools. Other broken vehicles littered the roadsides.
Civilian specialists worked alongside the Quartermaster Corps to try to satisfy the urgent need. Parts orders overwhelmed the Caterpillar offices in Whitehorse and Ft. St. John. Orders for tires overwhelmed G.K. Allen who operated tire supply facilities in Ft. St. John and Whitehorse. An order for 1250 tires might result in delivery of 250.