Big Devil Swamp immortalized Captain Pollock, Company B commander, in June 1942.
Read More about Getting to the Teslin River
Racing to the Teslin River early in the month, the soldiers of the 93rd had passed Summit Lake and plunged through the swamp—left a barely passable trail. The soldiers of the 340th had worked through and around, got to the Teslin, boarded boats and rafts and moved on. Now Captain Pollock’s Company B turned back to deal with the swamp more permanently.
Days of heavy rain beset the 93rd all along the route. One young officer wrote to his girlfriend, “It has rained here for three days and man you never saw such mud in your life. Seemed like it was miles thick.” The rain primed the swamp for Company B’s arrival and set its soldiers up for an event immortal in the history of the 93rd.
Long stretches of road turned to the consistency of wet concrete. Entire sections simply slid away. One by one the swamp immobilized Company B’s trucks, stranding them on the side of the road.
Finally, one of the B Company’s precious bulldozers, growling through the muck, eased over into a muskeg bog. The operator threw his machine into reverse and accelerated, trying desperately to back away from the sucking mud. The great treads spun and slung mud defiantly toward the bog—to no avail. Capt. Pollock hurriedly dispatched another dozer to pull it out–too late. Big Devil’s Swamp swallowed the D8 whole. Prodding deep into the mud with a ten-foot pole, a soldier tried to locate the machine by feel—no luck. The North Country swamp holds its giant mechanical hostage to this day.
In the end Companies B and C ganged up on the stretch through the swamp.
In addition to the D8, it swallowed over 8,000 trees for corduroy. And the men carried these logs on their shoulders lest the swamp swallow more precious trucks and equipment. At one point, they had dumped three feet of gravel and dirt over a layer of corduroy and it seemed solid. In a few days under heavy truck traffic, the roadbed began to undulate. The swamp took a second and a third layer of gravel, each two feet thick over the corduroy, before it could base a suitable road.
On an old Army map of the area, one spot in the middle of Big Devil Swamp is labelled, “Pollock’s Graveyard”.