Routine settled in on the Alaska Highway Project in August, but no amount of routine could make it easy. The details of daily living and working—eating; sleeping; recreating (or lack thereof) and, above all, gouging a highway out of the forbidding wilderness, one mile at a time—had fallen into a pattern that applied to all …
Tag Archives: Alaska Highway in WWII
Vaccinating
Vaccinating thousands of young soldiers at a frantic pace before shipping them overseas, the army screwed up. During March 1942, a batch of contaminated yellow fever vaccine made its way into the system. Initially ignorant of the contamination, medics vaccinated several thousand young men from that batch. Two months later, in May, soldiers all around …
Frank Hinkel’s Adventure
Frank Hinkel, T4 bulldozer operator, pushing dirt over the wall of a canyon, got too close to the edge. His dozer followed the dirt over. Hinkel tried to jump but banged his head and sat back down; rode his steel mount down to the floor of the canyon. Luckily, the dozer landed on its tracks. …
Tiny Teslin Post
Tiny Teslin Post never saw it coming. In July 1942, the soldiers of the 93rd Engineers, with their bulldozers and trucks and graders suddenly roared out of the woods beside Teslin Lake. The soldiers bulldozed at and around the tiny village and its 130 citizens, dropping trees in every direction. Link to another post …
Seven Regiments Trashed the New Alaska Highway
Seven regiments powered through the wilds of the North Country in the summer of 1942, gouging the Alaska Highway out of the wilderness. Equipment broke. The regiments chewed through axles, rollers and tracks. One cat broke down, then another, parts from one fixed the other and the cannibalized tractor sat at the side of the …
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Thousands Worked Incredibly Hard
Thousands Worked Incredibly Hard Thousands of men worked incredibly hard in cold and then heat and in incessant rain to build the Alaska Highway. They powered over mountains, through and across streams, through deep woods with bulldozers, trucks, saws, axes… They got injured. A lot. They lived in close quarters, especially when the weather turned …
Menace of Mentasta
Menace confronted the soldiers building the Alaska Highway at every turn. But the black soldiers of the 97th had to conquer the most fearful menace of them all—Mentasta Pass. At the turn of the century the Army had built a pack trail from Valdez to Eagle. Alaskans found the trail dangerous, impossible to maintain and …
Suddenly Climbing
Suddenly climbing into Keystone Canyon, a truck driver found himself working his clutch, hurriedly shifting down through the gears to the lowest one. Driving from the Port of Valdez toward the interior of Alaska he had just covered about 15 miles of rough, muddy, but misleadingly flat road. Now as his truck struggled up into …
Another Naval Base
Another naval base bombed by the Japanese? Hearing the story of Dutch Harbor an unidentified man, his face red with rage, stomped six blocks down dignified Chestnut Street… buying newspapers headlining the Japanese attack…and tearing them into shreds. Police said he was within his rights. The Santa Cruz Sentinel reported that story from Philadelphia on …
Lieutenants
Lieutenants? Where would the army be without them? In June 1942 Lt. Darrel M. Schumacher of the 340th Engineering Regiment cooled his heels in Skagway. He and his men would walk to the Teslin River as soon as the 93rd built them a trail. In the meantime, they waited. Then the Japanese bombed the American …