We Fought the Road and now A Different Race tell an important and fascinating story that too many people don’t know.
In early 1942 the rampaging Empire of Japan advanced on America through the Aleutian Islands and Alaska. America couldn’t get enough men and material to Alaska to defend it without a land route from the lower 48.
Eight thousand soldiers struggled, suffered and even died gouging that route out of the vast subarctic wilderness, over mountains through deep forest over muskeg and permafrost, in summer heat and bitter winter cold… Sixteen hundred miles they gouged—in just eight months.
Books and articles and films about the Epic project, offer the generals and colonels, their plans and strategies. Few of them offered the privates and sergeants who fought to implement those plans and strategies and who suffered when they went tragically wrong.
We wrote about the men, not the colonels and generals. We wrote about how it felt to be them in that time and that place. We wrote about their misery, their fear, their patriotism and their triumph. We wanted our readers to live the adventure of these ordinary men who stepped up and built the extraordinary Alaska Highway.
Nearly half of those men served in segregated regiments, black men. The Army determined to keep them in the deep woods away from the civilian population. The black soldiers lived and worked in isolation. The Army expected little of them, but the Army got as expert a crew of determined catskinners and road builders as ever existed.
All the men who worked on the Alcan were heroes, but the black men worked in isolation. Reporters, photographers and newsreel cameras followed the white regiments, the black soldiers became ghosts in history, gave their all for a country that couldn’t bring itself to thank them or even remember them.
These two great books, We Fought The Road and A Different Race, are about a black men who joined a segregated Army, my father Thaddeus Crawford Bryson T/5 being one of these, during a time when black men were still struggling for their basic civil rights…recall the civil rights demonstrations of the 60s. This is a story about men who joined an organization where they were not always welcomed, struggled against the open and not-so-open obstacles in their day to quest to prove their capabilities in carrying out the often difficult tasks given to them. They overcame many of these difficult assignments and proved their worth as soldiers of the United States Army. I enjoyed reading these two great books about black men in a white man’s military and how their dogged determination to prove themselves helped change that culture.
Fred that is wonderful to read. Thank you.
You are very welcome Dennis. Will reach to you this week. In the p.m. at that.