Twelve hundred black soldiers jammed the hold as the David Branch pulled into frigid Valdez Harbor on April 29, 1942. The next morning when the ship tied up to the dock and dropped its gangplank, they waited to get off the ship and find somewhere to eat and sleep. To complicate things, strict orders forbade contact between the twelve hundred and the white citizens of Alaska.
Through the long winter, crews had plowed and shoveled snow from streets and sidewalks, piling it in enormous heaps. At the end of April, the streets resembled narrow canyons. Snow from sidewalks on one side and Alaska Avenue on the other piled into a massive wall between them. From the sidewalk, one could hear street traffic but could not see it. And the snowbanks compressed the already narrow avenue to barely one lane.
When a company of approximately 160 men, each carrying two barracks bags, slipping and sliding on the unfamiliar and slippery surface, came off the dock, they jammed Alaska Avenue between the snowbanks.
On the morning of April 30, the first company hoisted their barracks bags and filed, one behind the other, through the maze of hatches and companion ways to the deck. In single file they picked their way carefully down to the dock, crowded between the cliffs of snow along Alaska Avenue and made their way out to the airstrip just across the intersection with the Richardson Highway.
The soldiers of Company E assembled behind them in the hold, moved up in their turn and worked their way along Alaska Avenue. But only so many men could sleep at the airstrip, so the soldiers of Company E turned right onto the Richardson and kept going.
In two columns, one on either side of the narrow road, they trudged away from the white Alaskans. Five hours later, thirteen miles out, they found a relatively flat area that could accommodate a camp. They fell out; began scraping snow out of the way and pitching tents.
It took four days to get twelve hundred men off the ship and most of the soldiers wound up at the “Thirteen Mile Camp”.
Wherever they found to settle during that first week in Alaska, soldiers had to cook and eat and sleep in canvas tents. Arriving soldiers would go to work. Clear snow away, lay out the canvas, drive pegs through loops into dirt to hold it down. But in early April, Alaska dirt is the consistency of a brick. Some soldiers figured out creative, if makeshift, solutions. A man could tie the canvas to something in place of a peg. The tent would sit crooked, but it would sit. Some gouged holes out of the brick earth, inserted the peg, poured water into the hole, and waited for it to freeze.
When time came to eat, the company mess offered little except gray boxes of rations—suspicious concoctions in green cans, cold and coagulated. Fires sprouted, and men figured out how to heat the cans.
Finally came time for exhausted men to go into the tents, climb into their sleeping bags or bedrolls. Sergeant Monk remembered, “I had one blanket. My buddy had one blanket and an army jacket.” The men lay shivering in the dark, trying to sleep and wondering what the hell they had ever done to deserve Alaska.
Crazy Facts about Snow in Valdez