Extreme cold does things to equipment that the soldiers of the 97th and 18th Engineers never imagined. As the last two regiments working on the Alaska Highway, in October and November 1942, working in northernmost Yukon Territory, they became experts on the subject.
Young Black Soldiers of the 97th
Even in extreme cold fast-moving streams resist freezing. Ford them with a vehicle and the brakes get wet. Sit still for even a second and the wet brakes freeze. Try to move the vehicle and at best you can’t. At worst you break an axle. They sledged the brakes free if they could. If that didn’t work, they set gallon cans of burning gas or diesel under them.
Gravel in the back of a truck froze into a solid mass. They needed picks and sledgehammers to unload it. They never turned off a motor. If a motor quit every fluid in the vehicle froze. Even a tiny bit of water in a gas line froze and brought a vehicle to a sputtering stop. They fixed that by taking the gas line loose and blowing it out by mouth.
Fred Rust of the 18th remembered that “Trucks used to snake logs through the woods when cats were not available emerged without bumper, fenders, mufflers or running boards… Trucks with bent frames and beds and distorted springs moved crabwise up the road… Some trucks broke in half.”
If extreme cold beat up jeeps and trucks it hit bulldozers even harder. “As temperatures dropped to 50 and 70 below, diesel fuel solidified ‘like lard’ and drums had to be heated before fueling.” Company B stuck a dozer in ice, sent two dozers to pull it out. No go. The ice claimed them too.
“In the morning a D-8’s tracks would be frozen so the mechanics would pour diesel fuel over them to thaw them out with the flame.”
In late November the 18th received a beer ration, “cartridges of ice in cans… We had to shake the cans to tell whether the beer was thawed and punching them resulted in beer explosions… always good for a laugh.”