Deep woods in subarctic Canada and Alaska not only provided a unique place for the Alaska Highway builders to work through 1942. Deep woods also provided a unique place to live. Canvas, humble, vaguely malodorous, supported life in bivouac. Canvas tents provided barracks, mess halls, repair shops and offices. Inside the tents some lucky soldiers …
Tag Archives: Corps of Engineers
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 …
Cairns along the Highway
Cairns near Nisutlin Bay mark the final resting places for two men who came to the Highway and never left. Link to another story “Bonner and Bess and the Memorial Cairns” James Miller, who drove a tractor trailer truck up and down the Alaska Highway back when it was still dirt and gravel commented on …
Equal Opportunity Torture
Equal opportunity torture. The subarctic north offered cold and mud and cliffs to anybody who challenged it. And, as the black soldiers of the Corps would learn when they came in 1942, the mosquitoes and the no see ums landed and feasted on skin, utterly indifferent to whether it was black skin or white. Link …
Two Bulldozers
Two bulldozers parked nose to nose. Two operators reached across between them to shake hands. Their picture went out on the news wires, and the army’s publicity machine launched. Link to another story “The Press and Beaver Creek” Two bulldozers and the photo be damned, a significant piece of the road still did not exist. …
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 …
The Pressure Ratcheted Up a Notch
The pressure on the 97th and the 18th Engineers, working toward each other at the northern end of the Alaska Highway, ratcheted up on September 24. On that day, down in British Columbia, the 35th and the 340th Engineers met at Contact Creek and completed the Alaska Highway from Dawson Creek to Whitehorse. LInk to …
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 …
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 …
Keeping Clean
Keeping clean isn’t easy when you live and work deep in the wilderness of the far north. Soldiers building the Alaska Highway tried keeping clean. They did not always (more accurately, they did not often) succeed. ‘Big John’ Erklouts of the 340th dealt with icy cold rivers and streams by washing half of his body …