Private Major Banks, a young black soldier in the 97th Engineering regiment reported for sick call on May 20, 1942. The medics sent him to the little hospital in Valdez, Alaska. Port of Valdez in 1942 Banks grew up in New Canton, Virginia. He didn’t enter the Army until January 1942, so he came late …
Tag Archives: black soldiers
Troopship
The troopship USS David Branch met the young black soldiers of the 97th at the Port of Seattle. They got off their trains at Ft. Lewis and one company moved directly to the port to deliver their few small trucks for loading on the ship. More on Getting to Seattle Through the day on April …
Boyd and his “Grand Canyon”
Work on the culvert at Boyd Grand Canyon began on July 11 when the young black soldiers of Boyd’s Company C crossed the Teslin River and moved three miles south and east to the north wall. More on culverts This canyon needed a very long culvert and a very deep fill. In his memoir, …
Teslin Post
Teslin Post never saw it coming. In July the 93rd Engineers came out of the woods, and the sleepy frontier village with about 130 inhabitants, mostly Tlingit First Nations, found itself dead center in the action. They didn’t know quite what to make of it. Excited by the sudden appearance of a hundreds of …
Mentasta
At Mentasta Pass the black soldiers of the 97th met their toughest, most dangerous problems; met them and solved them. Back in March, Generals Sturdevant and Hoge hurriedly planning their assault on the North Country wilderness, ordered the 97th from Florida to Valdez, Alaska. From Valdez they directed them up the Richardson Highway to Slana, …
The Pass opened on May 20.
Up to the Pass, the soldiers of Company D convoyed between towering cliffs of piled snow, rode benches on either side of a bouncing and sliding canvas covered truck bed, out into the valley beyond the Pass and on 50 miles to Tonsina. Six days later the soldiers of Company C followed them through the …
Young Black Soldiers of the 97th
Young black soldiers from the Carolinas and Georgia who came to Valdez, Alaska with the 97th Engineering Regiment weathered the shock of an Alaska winter. They worked between the snowbanks on Alaska Avenue out to tent cities, bivouacs, thirteen miles out of town on the Richardson Highway and near the crumbling ruins of Wortman’s Roadhouse …
Sikanni Chief Bridge
The Sikanni Chief River, glacial, 300 feet across, pours through a canyon between two mountains and directly across the route of the Alaska Highway north of Fort St. John. The grade down to the river and back up exceeds ten percent. And The Alcan builders needed to bridge it. The segregated 95th Engineers, working north …
A Failed Command
The segregated 95th came to Dawson Creek under command of Colonel David Neuman. I posted a few days ago about their sad reception . Their commander soon made things incomparably worse. More on Racism and the 95th Engineers When, in wartime, soldiers write letters, Army censors review them. And censors noticed a pattern in …
Racism and the Road
The United States Army didn’t create racism in the ‘40’s. The United States had struggled with race for 170 years and, in 1942, thoroughgoing racism and vicious discrimination permeated American society and government. The Army and the Corps merely reflected that sad fact. But its racism stained the story of the Epic Alaska Highway Project …