Oil Cans scattered everywhere along the length of the emerging Alaska highway gave it its best nickname. But the Corps, rushing to finish, left more than oil cans. The soldiers didn’t concern themselves much with any kind of cleanup. By spring and early summer, all along the road, every steep hill or canyon featured …
Tag Archives: Alaska Highway in WWII
Danger Followed
Danger followed the soldiers on the Alaska Highway. They drove vehicles with cannibalized parts, sometimes without brakes. They patched broken tools together with wire, tape and ingenuity. They worked brutal hours swinging axes, felling trees, slewing vehicles through mud and along steep mountainsides. Soldiers at war, they got sick, they got wounded and, in the …
Going about Their Business
Going about their business the 130 citizens of Teslin Post heard strange noises in the woods, noises that grew louder, and then soldiers and trucks and bulldozers poured and roared down along the river out of the woods. Little Dolly Porter hid in panic from the massive machines pitching trees in every direction through …
Every Bit of the Alaska Highway
Every bit of the Alaska Highway ran through as rugged a wilderness as exists anywhere. Through the spring and early summer of 1942 over 8,000 soldiers of the Corps of Engineers struggled against overwhelming odds to get themselves and their machines into that wilderness to the path of the Highway. Right behind the soldiers came …
Midnight Sun
Midnight sun meant that by mid-summer machines and vehicles ran nearly 24/7 along the emerging Alaska Highway. They took a serious beating. Truck drivers carried spare parts, scavenged from broken equipment abandoned by other drivers along the road–tires, axles, anything useable. A driver who left a truck unattended might well return to find a stripped …
Rusty Dow
Rusty Dow, the first woman to drive a fully loaded truck the length of the Alaska Highway, did it in 1944. She drove the 1600 miles from Fairbanks to Dawson Creek in seven days, and she astonished every man along the way. Rough Draft of a Highway Rusty had been driving trucks down in …
Kiskatinaw
Kiskatinaw Bridge, one of the true engineering marvels of the Alaska Highway did not get built until the Army had moved on. A river just a few miles out of Dawson Creek, Kiskatinaw may have given the soldiers one of their first clues in 1942 that the north country would fight back. But with the …
Keeping Clean
Keeping clean isn’t easy when you live and work deep in the wilderness of the far north. Soldiers building the Alaska Highway tried keeping clean. They did not always (more accurately, they did not often) succeed. ‘Big John’ Erklouts of the 340th dealt with icy cold rivers and streams by washing half of his body …
Kluane Lake
Kluane Lake presented the soldiers of the 18th with a bridge problem that ingenuity alone would not solve. Fifty miles of their road to Alaska would run along the shore of Kluane Lake. Not a problem. But they had to get themselves and their equipment around the end of Kluane Lake before they could start …
Stockton Bridge
Stockton Bridge awaited the 18th at the Aishihik River about 80 miles north of Whitehorse. A conventional timber bridge, Stockton spanned a deep gorge and water fairly boiled through the deep channel between its solid rock walls. The 18th Comes to Skagway The surging water hadn’t bothered the original builders. Given solid rock walls …