Ten young black men from the hot and humid South, Sgt. Heard and his squad had endured the spring and summer of 1942 building Alaska Highway through the wilds of Alaska. In late fall Company F and the squad had crossed into Yukon Territory to work on south through piling snow and plunging temperatures.
Company F and the ten had returned to Northway to survive the frigid Alaska winter in tents. After their company commander, Captain Walter Parsons had transferred to a new job in Whitehorse, his replacement had sent the ten to Big Gerstle to work for Lt. Howell and the H&S Company, and on March 29 Howell proposed to haul the ten 130 miles through air 36 degrees below zero in the back of an unheated truck.
The ten, knowing very well what bitter cold could do to a man, hesitated to climb aboard, and young Lt. Howell, offended by the challenge to his authority, arrested them; charged them with the vile crime of mutiny.
Officious young officers do these things. When they do, more senior officers take them aside, and point out the error of their ways. A discipline problem isn’t mutiny. If you need to punish the men’s recalcitrance, have them peel potatoes or take an extra turn at guard duty…
Not this time.
The Army transported Sgt. Heard and his squad, under guard, to the stockade at Northwest Service Command in Whitehorse, Yukon and officially preferred Lt. Howell’s charges.
Stunned by the arrival of his former troops at the stockade, Captain Parsons wrote to his wife. “I sometimes wonder if it’s not the officer’s fault when these fellows get off the beam. …I’d bet that only one, maybe two are really bad. I’m going to visit them and see who they are and what’s wrong.”
The men asked Parsons to defend them in the court martial, and, reluctantly, he agreed.
Parsons had no legal experience, but he did his best. His commonsense summation for the defense is the only bit of sanity in the whole court martial transcript. But it did not impress the court. Because neither the young lieutenant or anybody else had noticed that Willie Calhoun hadn’t even been there, he’d been off working on a problem at personnel, the court acquitted him. But they convicted the other nine.
The court sentenced the ‘mutineers’ to dishonorable discharges and imprisonment at hard labor—James Heard for twenty years; Sims Bridges for 18 years; Lee Ratliffe for 12 years; Willie Howell and Robert Rucker for five years; James Hollingsworth, Josh Weaver, Warren Lindsey and Eugene Fulks for three years.
Stunned and exhausted, Parsons wrote a letter to his wife late on the night the court adjourned. “Pal I’ve been several days without sending you a letter but if you only knew what I had to do you would understand. My 10 colored boys wanted me to defend them at the trial. If you think defending 10 men in a mutiny trial for which, if found guilty, they could be put to death is not a big job just try it sometime… it made me sick when I heard them read the sentences…”
A real mutiny and a rational response