Researcher Chris found Leonard Larkins and his family in 2016. We’ve travelled to New Orleans to visit and interview Leonard, to apply Leonard’s memory to our research. Leonard Larkins on our Research Site Leonard Larkins and the 93rd Leonard Larkins Memories Leonard talks about pup tents and stoves in cold weather—“had trouble with the stoves …
Tag Archives: Alaska Highway
Meeting Leonard Larkins
Researching and writing our first book, We Fought the Road, our most extraordinary experience came late in the game. I hope you all can live with another trip through an increasingly porous “fourth wall” because I can only tell the story from Chris and my perspective. In late summer, 2016, Leonard Larkins’ son Bert found …
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 …
The Road from Ft Nelson
A few weeks ago, I posted about the dramatic effort of the 35th Engineering Regiment to get to Ft Nelson before the spring thaw. On the first of April, bedraggled, surrounded by their abused and broken machines, the soldiers of the 35th bivouacked there. General Hoge had ordered the 340th and 93rd Engineers into Skagway …
General Hoge’s Problem
General Hoge directed the 1500-mile project from a ramshackle office with a homemade desk and empty packing crates as file cabinets at Headquarters in Whitehorse. The Hoge Highway “the Burma Road of North America” would be a more finished bit of construction if it did not have to be done in a terrific hurry. But …
A Gold Rush Memory
A Gold Rush memory to the summer tourists and outsiders who heard its name, Skagway was home and community to the people who made their lives there. Verne Bookwalter, a renowned bush pilot, lived in Skagway. And in the 1930’s, the town decided to clear an airfield along the river, hoping to attract more pilots—and …
The Skagway They Came To
In April 1942, in a desperate rush to build a land route through Yukon, General Hoge jammed thousands of soldiers into Skagway, Alaska. The Corps hit the little town like a hurricane. A summer visitor to Skagway today can get a sense of the impact the Corps had. Arrive in Skagway in the evening when …
Precarious River Ice
Four separate trains hauled the 43 officers and 1230 enlisted men of the 35th Engineering Regiment to Dawson Creek. The last train arrived in late afternoon on March 16. Everyone confronted the Peace River. The First Soldiers on the Highway Colonel Hoge had flown to Fort St. John and set up temporary headquarters in a …
The First of Hoge’s Soldiers Arrive in Dawson Creek
Hoge’s recon was revealing the breath-taking scale of the problems he and his soldiers were about to take on. Elsewhere, especially in Washington, the Corps of Engineers was convulsing. The chaotic storm of planning and planning again, of organizing and reorganizing intensified accordingly. The telephone lines burned with requests and orders and fingers bounced over …
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Hoge met McCusker in February
In February, tasked to command the Alcan Project, Colonel Hoge raced from Washington to Dawson Creek and found Knox McCusker. As they drove the winter trail up from Fort St John, McCusker made his first major contribution to the project; warned the colonel that the trail he travelled would disappear in the March thaw. Clearly …