Photographing the soldiers of the 97th on the Highway in Alaska, Sgt. William Griggs had a unique mission. A regiment with 12,000 black soldiers naturally included some with unusual backgrounds and skills. The 97th included Griggs. Griggs father made photography a hobby and growing up in Baltimore, Griggs learned to love it too. After high …
Tag Archives: segregated Army
Defending America, Building the Alaska Highway
Defending America. Our two-book series We Fought the Road and A Different Race tell a story you’ll want to read. We Fought the Road on Amazon A Different Race on Amazon In 1942 black and white soldiers built a land route 1600 miles long through the most difficult country on earth in just eight months. The …
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Tuskegee Airmen and Pvt. Thad Bryson
The Tuskegee Airmen, a segregated unit of black pilots, commanded by Major Benjamin O. Davis, one of that rarest of beings in the WWII Army, a black officer, came, early in 1942, to Eglin Field in Florida. More on the Tuskegee Airmen And they came to Private Thad Bryson. Thad had known little beyond his …
Fighting Water, Building Alaska Highway in Alaska
Fighting water came next for the soldiers of the 97th coming out of Valdez to the Alaska Highway. Soldiers driving dozers and trucks negotiated the narrow dirt road and the breathtaking cliffs of Keystone Canyon. Beyond the Canyon they passed through the narrow walls of packed snow that choked Thompson Pass. Link to another story …
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Heavy Equipment Breaks
For the 93rd Engineers in Yukon in June the motor pool’s first frantic mission, getting heavy equipment through and out to the road, rapidly morphed into an equally frantic ongoing mission—supporting the line companies in maintaining and fixing it once they got it. With heavy equipment, especially the big Caterpillar bulldozers, finally in hand, the …
Swimming in the Subarctic North
Swimming? Not a topic you would expect in a story from the Alaska Highway Project, but here it comes… Near the end of June, with the critical task of getting the 340th to the Teslin River behind them, Headquarters moved up to Squanga Lake. One day, when the air temperature climbed to 80 degrees the …
Heat Meant Fire
Heat, on the Alcan Project, came from fire. And God knows, the soldiers needed heat. But the soldiers lived in canvas tents. An escaped live coal smolders on canvas and then ignites it with obvious consequences. Link to another story “Bivouac in the Woods” From a company bivouac, soldiers ‘commuted’ daily to their work …
Making Mistakes in Louisiana
Making mistakes in Louisiana instead of in Europe in the face of a real enemy made a lot of sense to Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall. His Texas-Louisiana Maneuvers in 1941 dispatched nineteen divisions, over 400,000 troops, to engage in mock conflict over 3,400 square miles of Southern Louisiana turf. Marshall fervently …
Do You See It?
“Do you see it?” An exasperated black soldier dropped his pants. A few residents of Skagway, checking the credibility of some white officer, had asked if black soldiers had tails. White residents of Skagway didn’t know quite what to make of the Army’s segregationist policy. They reacted to the black soldiers with curiosity—cautious curiosity. Link …
Turner Timberlake and Our Obsession with the Alcan
Turner “Tim” Timberlake passed away in 2001, devastating his daughter (and my wife) Chris. We missed having him in our lives. Chris came to realize how little she really knew about his life. Daughters know fathers as larger than life figures. The man behind the father? Not so much. Link to another story about Tim …
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