Fuel, the bulldozers plowing through the North Country wilderness in 1942 had an enormous appetite for it. If supporting the men in the woods and their furious labor meant, first and foremost, getting supplies to them, getting fuel to the big dozers posed the single biggest supply challenge. More on getting supplies into the woods …
Tag Archives: Bulldozer
D8 A Bucket of Olive Drab
“A Bucket of Olive Drab,’ the Caterpillar Company called the D8 Bulldozer they shipped to the Army. They also called it the “indispensable, all-purpose weapon of the Engineers”. The big crawlers made the Alaska Highway Project possible in 1942. The Big Machines Could be Delicate Too The D8 weighed in at twenty- three tons. Its …
Lt. Mike Miletich, Forgotten Hero
A true hero of the Alaska Highway Project, Lt. Mike Miletich has managed to fade into anonymity. Not fair. The ‘go to’ guy for the 35th Combat Engineering Regiment, Lt. Miletich turned up at every challenging point in their work on the Highway. He led, for example, the advance party to Dawson Creek in March …
The Humble Culvert
The humble culvert—everywhere in our lives—serves an essential function. It carries water from where we don’t want it to where we do. You drive city streets, you walk city sidewalks… You drive or walk over culverts you don’t even noice. More on the Road Through Yukon Not remotely humble, culverts sprouted everywhere on the Alaska …
Army Trash in the North Country
Trash worried no one. In the summer of 1942 seven regiments powered through the North Country woods. Equipment broke. The regiments chewed through axles, rollers and tracks. One cat broke down, then another, parts from one fixed the other and the cannibalized tractor sat at the side of the road. A truck sunk in the …
Delicate Heavy Equipment
Progress on the Alaska Highway in the summer of 1942 depended not only on the soldiers but also on their heavy equipment. The problem of keeping the big machines running plagued the line companies and put motor pool mechanics at the heart of every regiment’s operations. Heavy Equipment Breaks With the “midnight sun” shining …
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 …
Kluane Lake
Kluane Lake lay in the path of the 18th Engineers, working north from Whitehorse, and when they reached the southern tip of Kluane in July 1942, their relatively easy going came to an abrupt halt. The Slims River brings glacial melt water to feed the lake there, and some men of the 18th stopped to …
Challenge in Series
Challenge one for the epic Alaska Highway Project in 1942 had been to mobilize thousands of men, acquire their equipment and move everybody and everything over vast distances to the Far North. More on Challenge 1 Meeting that challenge had immediately created challenge two. Thousands of men and massive stocks of equipment and supplies jammed …