Daylight lasted forever in July, and the North Country continuing to fight back, revealed a new arsenal. The wet heat of summer replaced the wet cold of spring. Morley Bay averaged highs of 90 degrees, Whitehorse 82. And it stayed wet. According to WP&YT railroad records total rainfall in the week of July 5 broke a record that had stood for thirty-one years.
For more on keeping them healthy
Officers worked on morale. Some of the enlisted men got promoted. The Army had added new non-commissioned officer slots to the enlisted rank structure, so more men could be NCO’s. Technicians, grades 4 and 5, equated to sergeants and staff sergeants respectively.
The promotions boosted morale, but morale boosting in general proved an uphill struggle in July.
The sun shined twenty-two hours during the spring and summer, and General Hoge in the Northern Sector, Colonel O’Connor in the Southern and all their commanders made full use of all that daylight. Henry Geyer, a truck driver, remembered the reality on the road, “you worked until you dropped”. Chester Russell of the 35th echoed Geyer, “We was working so hard that by the time you got through at night, you rolled your sleeping bag out underneath a tree or in the bushes and you crawled in it and sacked out,”
Pfc Fowler of the 340th remembered, “When we started building the highway, we slept on the ground with two blankets and a mattress cover. All of our extras, clothes, toilet items and writing things were kept in the mattress cover.” When the company awakened in the morning, they rolled their ‘stuff’ into a bedroll and placed it in a pile. At the end of the day, at a new campsite, they found their individual bedrolls in the pile that had accompanied them, unrolled them and promptly fell asleep.
