Motor Pool–the soldiers of the 93rd Engineers needed one desperately. And locating one and getting heavy equipment to it presented a problem. In May 1942 the black soldiers of the 93rd Engineers plunged through Yukon’s forbidding wilderness working with a couple of borrowed bulldozers and hand tools. But Ships carrying their heavy equipment steamed out …
Tag Archives: Bulldozer
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 …
Midnight Sun
Midnight sun meant that by mid-summer machines and vehicles ran nearly 24/7 along the emerging Alaska Highway. They took a serious beating. Truck drivers carried spare parts, scavenged from broken equipment abandoned by other drivers along the road–tires, axles, anything useable. A driver who left a truck unattended might well return to find a stripped …
Essential but Not Enough
Essential soldiers in a stream of trucks arrived at the Slana sand hills. And now equally essential heavy equipment, especially bulldozers began unloading at the Valdez dock. Before the soldiers could start building road, that equipment had to get to Slana. To men operating bulldozers, the trip from Valdez out to Slana presented a whole …
Hinkle and Boyd’s Canyon
Hinkel, a Tech 4 catskinner in Company C, bulldozed dirt down the wall of Boyd’s Canyon. He got too close, and his dozer followed the dirt over the edge. He rode his steel mount all the way down to the bottom; and, luckily, the dozer landed on its tracks. Boyd, his company commander, hurriedly clambered …
Nature Could Beat the Dozers
Nature fought the Alaska Highway builders in 1942—fought them hard. And, for all their awesome power, sometimes even the monster dozers lost a battle. At mid-summer, the soldiers of the 93rd Engineers struggled through Yukon. Nature opened her spigots and endless rain fell day after day. Long stretches of road turned to thick mud with …
Correction about D8 Caterpillar
Correction. The historical accuracy of these stories is extremely imortant to me and I always appreciate a factual correction. Last night I posted about Caterpillar bulldozers on the Alaska Highway Project. At one point I referred to the D8’s air cooled engine. Caterpillar Dozers–the Offending Story Those of you who visit and follow this blog …
Caterpillar Dozers
Caterpillar dozers did jobs on the Alcan project that Caterpillar never imagined. One night a sergeant of the 18th Engineers, working his D8 into and through the trees, acquired a determined grizzly bear guide and companion. He swerved toward the giant bear and it ran away, but as soon as he returned to his work, …
Marl Brown, At the Heart of the Alaska Highway
In 1957 the Canadian Army stationed Marl Brown on the Alaska Highway; put him to work fixing its new vehicles. But Marl fell in love with the old vehicles scattered along the road, rusted hulks with trees growing through them. The waste bothered him, so he devoted his life to rescuing them. Sixty odd …
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Subarctic Cold
Subarctic cold should have stopped the men building the Alaska Highway in 1942 dead in their tracks. To be sure, endless problems confronted them every step along their way and finding solutions and driving on rendered their achievement epic. But none of the endless list of obstacles—mountains, mud, muskeg, permafrost, mosquitoes and all the …