Getting two bulldozers in the same place, in front of a reporter’s camera, became the overriding goal for commanders on the Alaska Highway project in October 1942. The 97th Engineers working south from Alaska and the 18th Engineers working north through Yukon Territory had to cross 55 miles of permafrost to meet and complete the Alaska Highway.
The Genesis of the publicity machine
Ignore the permafrost, Colonel Paules ordered. He dispatched Major Bridges north into it with no fewer than twelve bulldozers. And he ordered the 97th to push bulldozers south.
On October 25 Private Alfred Jalufka of the 18th piloted a D-8 north through the wood’s near Beaver Creek. Private Refines Sims piloted a dozer just like it for Company A of the 97th. There in the woods they met.
The press, in the person of Harold W. Richardson of the Engineering News-Record, had got to the border in the nick of time. Captain Parsons wrote to his wife, “A Mr. Richardson editor (one of them) for Engineering News-Record was by here yesterday. I took him up the road to meet the 18th (made contact yesterday). He came back and stayed in my camp all night and I took him to HQ in the a.m.”
Parsons reference to the meeting of the dozers is in parentheses, an afterthought. To the soldiers on the ground the meeting of the dozers didn’t mean all that much. They hadn’t completed the Alaska Highway. The dozers had simply found a way to meet in the woods.
Colonel Paules, General O’Conner in Whitehorse, and their bosses in Washington, and, most important, the press in the person of Harold Richardson saw it very differently. After Parsons “took him up the road to meet the 18th” and then “dropped him at [97th] Headquarters the next morning” Richardson posed Jalufka and Sims and their dozers, had them reach across to shake hands, and took the photo that endures as an icon in Alaska Highway history. And he filed the story his editor and the Army brass wanted.
In a murky arctic snowstorm at Beaver Creek… in the wilds of
the Yukon, the climax of building the Alcan Highway was reached
at four p.m. Sunday Oct. 25, when the advance tractor crews from
east and west came together, closing the last gap in the trail route.
After seeing trees fall away from him in weeks of swamping out
the advance cut, Corporal Refines Sims, Jr., negro, ‘catskinner’ of
the crew working down from Alaska, frantically, retreated with his
diesel bulldozer as trees ahead started falling his way, not realizing
the meeting was imminent. In a few moments, the lead bulldozer
of the Yukon crew burst through the last patch of timber and brush,
piloted by Private Alfred Jalufka.
So it was all a dog and pony show to keep the brass happy. Lol what a neat story.
It truly was. I like the story too. In the end, of course, they did pull off a hell of a project. But the brass can never resist a bit of embellishment.