Two books, We Fought the Road and A Different Race, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and your local bookstore will appeal to people who enjoy my stories. Christine and I wrote them. An Epic project comparable to the construction of the Panama Canal, the construction of the Alaska Highway left behind a treasure trove …
Tag Archives: Alaska Highway
Luck Led to Romance
Luck led to romance, not what you would expect for a soldier on the Alaska Highway Project in 1942. But some men get way more luck than others. Donald Hall had almost blown himself up applying a torch to a gas tank full of fumes. He survived. That should have told us all we needed …
Relations
Relations between Canada and its tightly coupled neighbor to the South, generally but not always good, influenced the Alaska Highway Project in 1942. Even today, the things we get up to down here don’t always leave Canadians, our oldest and best international friends, with a warm fuzzy feeling. And the things we get up to …
Stuff, Mountains of Stuff
Stuff, simple stuff but mountains of it, caused enormous problems for Alaska Highway builders in 1942. Swarming over the mountains and through the woods carving out the Highway, thousands of soldiers consumed mountains of rations. And thousands of soldiers needed underwear, boots, coats, sleeping bags, and toilet paper and an untold number of other things …
Roy’s Eyes
Roy’s eyes focused and the image of the biggest black bear he had ever seen emerged from the darkness, two feet in front of his face. We can excuse a rude bear. They don’t, after all, attend finishing school. Roy Lee of the 140th Quartermaster Truck company would beg to disagree. Roy had spent a …
New Equipment Gets Old
New equipment came to the Alaska Highway Project in 1942, but the project aged new equipment quickly. Some of it went with the army when the soldiers moved on at the end of the project. A lot of it they just abandoned in place. On one of my stories the other night, Wayne Olstad wrote …
Routine, Not Easy
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 …
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 …