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.
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.
More on the Construction of the Highway