The 340th Engineers heavy equipment convulsed the Skagway docks again at mid-June 1942. Vessels bearing heavy equipment jammed in one behind the other. Colonel Lyons and his regiment had reached their starting point at Morley Bay in the nick of time.
Read more about getting to Morley
Lyons’ pre-positioned troops in Skagway, Whitehorse, and Morley Bay swung into action, moving the bulldozers, graders and trucks over the roundabout Yukon/Teslin river route. The First Platoon of Company F sweated alongside Quartermaster Detachment A to get the heavy equipment off the ships at the Skagway dock and onto the cars of the WP&YT. Chaining it to the flatbeds, they sent it off to their fellows in Whitehorse.
At the Whitehorse Depot, the men of 2nd platoon lifted it off the cars and drove or dragged it to the docks. Graders, carryalls, crane shovels, cargo trucks, dump trucks, command cars, jeeps… The floodgates gushed, and the men of the 2nd Platoon sweated and swore, wrestling everything onto steamers and securing it for the laborious river passage to Morley Bay.
At the end of April and through early May, the black soldiers of the 93rd had struggled to get organized and out on the road. Now, in June, finally at their starting point, Colonel Lyons’ soldiers struggled. A thousand men, piles of fuel and supplies, acres of heavy bulldozers, graders and trucks jammed into the woods at the shore of the Bay. Some soldiers worked on an access road from the Bay out to the route of the Highway. Some worked back toward their mile zero at Nisutlin Bay. And a few charged out to start building their road back south and east toward the Continental Divide and the oncoming 35th Engineers.
Not a whole lot of June remained. The 340th managed a meagre twenty miles of road before the end of the month. But they were in place and moving.
The 340th Official History–No Mention of the 93rd
Very awesome read
Thank you, Sir. You have no idea how good that makes me feel.