Youngest Alaska Highway Trucker? Without any doubt, Owen Ose holds that title. When three-year-old Owen piloted his truck on the Highway, the Corps of Engineers hadn’t even finished it. Owen, when he shared this claim with me a couple of years ago, hastened to add that the truck the youngest driver drove had “Tonka” printed …
Tag Archives: Alaska Highway
Send Food or Send Coffins
Send food or send coffins. Regimental Supply received that message from Company F’s commander at the beginning of January. A joke? Probably. But the 97th Engineers had endured a truly horrific winter and January threatened to take horrific to a whole new level. In November, thinking they had a brand-new land route to Alaska, Headquarters …
The Press and Beaver Creek
The press, in the person of Harold W. Richardson of the Engineering News-Record, came to the Alaska/Canada border in the nick of time. American and Canadian newspapers had kept their readers focused on the last fifty miles of the Alaska Highway. That meant the Army’s publicity machine focused on the last fifty miles. And that …
Problem with No Solution
Problem with no solution? When the soldiers of the 18th found themselves trying to build road over permafrost–a lake of ice covered by a thin layer of decayed vegation—it looked like they had encountered one. But on the Alaska Highway Project in 1942 the Corps of Engineers could not allow a problem with no …
KP’s (Kitchen Police) Discovered the Problem First
KP’s, soldiers on what the army called Kitchen police duty, discovered the catastrophe looming ahead of the 18th Engineers first. KP’s had to dig garbage pits, and, as the regiment moved north past the Big Duke River and on toward the Donjek River, they found themselves digging in a vastly different kind of ground. They …
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Completely Crazy
Completely crazy, Keith Ingram called the “masters of the air” from my story two days ago. And then he moved on to another group of completely crazy guys, a group he clearly belonged to, truckers on the Alaska Highway. A link to another story “Albert Herda’s Idea” “In the ‘60’s on the highway,” he reported, …
The Last Obstacle–The Tanana River
The last obstacle, the Tanana River. The soldiers of the 97th had to build access road to it and cross it before they could turn south and finally start building Alaska Highway. At the beginning of August 1942, a new commander launched a fired-up regiment into the Tanana valley with sixty miles to go to …
Little Tok River
Little Tok river doesn’t amount to much. But it meant a lot to the soldiers of the 97th Engineers in August 1942. Their assigned portion of the Alaska Highway lay on the north bank of the Tanana River, 266 miles from where they left the ship that brought them to Alaska. Over the last eighty …
Oil Can Highway
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 …
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 …