The Juggernaut, the Corps of Engineers proposed drive into Northern Canada would not “drive” easily. But the ‘very highest authority’ had ordered the Corps to build a highway to Alaska and do it immediately, and the Corps leaped into action. The Corps existed to build things fast under difficult circumstances. They could drive the juggernaut.
In Washington, asked for a plan, General Sturdevant submitted one in two days, knowing as he did so, that it was at best an outline of a plan, and even as he wrote it, he set the machinery of the Corps in motion.
LInk to another story on “Colonel Hoge”
He had already made his most important choice—Colonel (soon to be General) William Hoge would command the effort on the ground. The two men met on 12 February 1942 to consider their urgent task—turning Sturdevant’s outline into a real plan. Both Army Engineers, they understood one thing that a civilian engineer would have considered absurd—they did not have the luxury of time to complete the plan before they started to implement it.
Just a week after that meeting, Colonel Hoge’s boots hit the ground in
Edmonton, and twenty-four hours later in Dawson Creek, British Columbia, he shook hands with Homer Keith, the Canadian assigned to ‘liase’ with him.
Climbing into Keith’s car, Hoge and his contingent headed north over the frozen winter road to Fort Nelson. Hoge got his first look at the challenge his troops would face.
Keith led Hoge to Knox McCusker who educated the American. McCusker warned Hoge that the winter trail he had just travelled—from Fort St. John to Fort Nelson, would disappear in the March thaw—a huge potential problem.
In a 1968 interview, Hoge remembered the trip with Keith.
“I also ran into Knox McCusker… One of the things [I] hadn’t realized was the winter road would become useless in the summertime as it traversed frozen muskeg… I ordered an engineering regiment moved into Fort Nelson over the winter road before the spring breakup…”
Hoge directed Colonel Ingalls, commander of the 35th Engineers, who travelled with him, to return to his regiment at Fort Ord, California, to move them immediately to Dawson Creek by rail and push them on north to Fort Nelson before the thaw.
If Hoge hadn’t yet figured out what the regiment needed to do, he knew where they would have to do it. Hoge and the thousands he summoned to the North Country, plunged on into March—and into the wilderness—putting boots on the ground and making it up as they went along.