The Race to the International Border

The international border, the border between Canada and Alaska, had everybody’s attention at the end of the summer of 1942. The soldiers of the 18^th and those of the 97th would meet there and complete the Alaska Highway.

The 18th Combat Engineers–more on the champs

Just as the race to the border heated up, permafrost slowed the 18^th to a crawl. Their lead company crossed the Donjek River on August 31 and the international border seemed a very long way away. Fred Rust remembered that they averaged less than a mile a day, “floundered energetically for six weeks”.

The soldiers of the 18th fell further behind with every passing day through September and into October. The 97^th’s lead cat arrived at the border on October 12 and the black soldiers of the 97^th had won the race.

They paused briefly to celebrate their triumph. Captain Parsons of the 97^th wrote to his wife, Abbie, “We all took the day off yesterday and celebrated our reaching the boundary. It was a long, hard fight to get here, but we made it on schedule. The 18th didn’t make it so now we have to go on until we meet them.”

The soldiers celebrated too. Someone climbed to the top of a tree and hung a sign, “Los Angeles City Limits”. The soldiers of the 18th, still down in Yukon, did not celebrate. They grumbled, muttered about whose section of road had been tougher. But grumbling didn’t change the simple fact the black soldiers had got there first.

In his Northwest Epic, Heath Twichell wrote, “The white 18^th Engineers’record-setting pace over the 150 miles from Whitehorse to Kluane Lake during June and early July had established them as the highway’s undisputed road-building champs.” But now “…the highway’s mileage champs had been beaten in a fair race by the ‘practically useless’ [quoting General Hoge] black soldiers of the 97th Engineers.

Port Alcan, the border today